The caste exists (but not the way you think)

June 22, 2025

Hugo, dur partisan [...] combattit sous l’armure,
Et tint haut sa bannière au milieu du murmure :
Il la maintient encore ; et Vigny, plus secret,
Comme en sa tour d’ivoire, avant midi, rentrait.
— Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve¹

I. Until Javier Milei’s emergence, the word caste was mostly foreign to Argentine political language. It felt exotic, imported—more at home in other latitudes. In Spain, for example, Podemos had used it effectively to target the post-Franco elites. But in Argentina, I don’t recall it being part of everyday discourse. It only took an outsider shouting it from center stage for it to become the signifier that reorders the scene. So, what exactly is the caste? Who does it point to? And why does it work?

II. What Milei calls the caste isn’t a traditional oligarchy. It’s not the landowners, big business, judges, or bankers. Nor is it, strictly speaking, all politicians. The caste—his caste—is something else. It’s a way of naming and delegitimizing everything that, until recently, held some kind of symbolic authority. Intellectuals, scientists, media figures, policy experts, university professors. In short, an enlightened elite that holds knowledge and produces legitimacy.

Within that group, the target isn’t any bearer of knowledge, but rather a specific fraction that might be called the “erudite progressive.” That figure who combines inclusive sensitivity, political correctness, technical rigor, and a certain tone of moral superiority. University-based, state-employed, and yes, woke. The archetype of someone who not only presents themselves as competent, but also (worse) as righteous. Someone who argues from a particular place: a position of virtue.

When such knowledge fails to recognize its own material conditions of production—when it presents itself as neutral, universal, selfless—it turns into unspoken privilege. And that’s when it becomes irritating. It’s perceived as a kind of veiled arrogance. A form of symbolic capital that believes itself inclusive but actually acts as a filter, whose moral authority begins to erode when what is said no longer aligns with what is done. What once inspired admiration starts to provoke rejection.

Alexandra Kohan explains this well, noting that the core dilemma of the “woke” (or progressive) stance is the split between discourse and practice:

"We all have contradictions. No one is good all the time. But to hold onto a discourse and use it to shield yourself so that your own shit doesn’t show… that’s straight-up hypocrisy."

Over two thousand years ago, Cicero said the same thing: virtute enim ipsa non tam multi praediti esse quam videri volunt. For many wish not so much to be, as to seem to be, endowed with real virtue² (yes, the same quote I used in this post about LinkedIn—no coincidence; it’s the caste’s social network, after all).

This gap between public morality and actual practice triggers resentment—not necessarily out of political conviction or party alignment, but out of disillusionment. How many times have we heard passionate defenses of public education, of free universities, of the role of the State, from people who in practice perpetuate deeply precarious labor schemes?

And these aren’t just isolated inconsistencies. They reflect a structural gap between the discourse that is uttered and the conditions that are tolerated—or even sustained: research fellows without labor rights, opaque hiring circuits, unpaid labor keeping spaces afloat, and even presidents who turned feminism into a slogan while privately behaving otherwise; who, during the pandemic, told people to stay home while organizing birthday parties at the presidential estate.

That’s when the progressive performance stops being a promise of change and starts to feel like empty rhetoric—or worse, self-justification. In an increasingly fragile context, that becomes deeply irritating. It’s not knowledge or values per se that provoke backlash, but the way they are presented. As if they were natural, obvious, universal, beyond dispute. As if those who carry them were morally exempt from the rest. That perception of ethical superiority, when combined with relatively stable positions within the system (universities, media, state agencies), becomes a kind of symbolic immunity. A soft but persistent form of moral impunity.

This internal fissure doesn’t explain the caste phenomenon entirely, but it makes the libertarian critique viable. It’s the condition of plausibility. It erodes legitimacy from within while leaving an open flank for external attack.

Although this dynamic plays out intensely in present-day Argentina, it’s not unique to it. In certain conservative and tech circles in the U.S., Curtis Yarvin popularized the idea of “the Cathedral”: a kind of secular Church made up of universities, media, and cultural institutions, which exerts informal, moralizing power from a place of (self-perceived) “superiority.” The thesis sounds bold, but it’s essentially a reactionary, aestheticized version of what critical theory has been saying for decades. Crude summary: Althusser spoke of ideological state apparatuses, Gramsci of cultural hegemony, Foucault of knowledge as power, Bourdieu of symbolic capital. Yarvin doesn’t propose dismantling this web—he wants to capture it. A sort of critical theory for CEOs, useful for justifying the replacement of the old enlightened elite with a new punitive caste.

III. Contempt for the caste, then, arises from a concrete experience of mistrust toward public figures (or those tied to the public sector) who seem to always land on their feet. (The caste isn’t just a libertarian invention.) The couple who work in the judiciary and teach at a university. The former official who now manages NGO projects funded by the “free world.” The regular columnist at a “progressive” magazine financed by international soft power. The expert who’s served in three different governments without ever leaving the halls of the state. It’s not just what they do—it’s the (sometimes accurate, sometimes imagined) perception that they never fall. In cases like CONICET researchers or Garrahan residents—where real precarity exists—what matters is not the data, but the scene. A persistent fantasy that some people are, as Mariano Canal once tweeted, saved forever. And in a context of economic insecurity and runaway inflation, that’s unbearable.

In such a context, as Pierre Bourdieu pointed out,³ the knowledge held by these elites becomes a legitimate form of domination. Cultural capital allows for the organization of hierarchies, filters access, distributes prestige, and structures public life according to criteria presented as neutral—but which are not. That symbolic power is exercised from universities, media, bureaucracies, and think tanks.

Milei’s communicational success wasn’t to “invent” the caste. If anything, it was to name it. So, what do we do with this word? What is being destroyed in the name of that partial truth? And more importantly, what new hierarchy is being built in its place?

IV. What Milei’s project performs, I believe, is a symbolic inversion. It flips the value code. “Merit” becomes suspicious. Speaking in complex sentences, quoting Foucault, or working at CONICET become signs of decadence (yes, I’m being self-referential). Suddenly, that cultural capital turns into stigma. And inversely, what was once marginal, freakish, even unhinged, becomes central.

This move is not just rhetorical—it’s structural and political. The novelty is that Milei doesn’t challenge the dominant class to expand rights. He comes to demolish mediations. To suspend the need for legitimacy—at least that kind. The goal is no longer to build the common good, but to eliminate what makes it murky.

Milei rises to power opposing a caste—a symbolic caste embodying enlightened sensibility. But in the same gesture, he creates a new one. A reversed caste, perhaps more precarious but no less hierarchical, whose authority doesn’t stem from degrees, and whose place in the political field is not based on what it builds—but on what it destroys. This is where Yarvin’s intuition aligns with the libertarian diagnosis: the goal is to replace one elite with another. The caste of hypocrisy gives rise to the aristocracy of resentment.

V. This inversion produces a new kind of hierarchy. Two forms of legitimizing power clash. One based on knowledge, credentials, prestige, and institutional affiliation. The other (perhaps more straightforwardly) on “toughness” and financial success. The first is symbolic and cultural capital; the second, economic and punitive. We’ve gone from income redistribution to the redistribution of contempt. The pleasure now lies in cruelty.

In Laclau’s terms,⁴ caste functions as an empty signifier, capable of articulating antagonism. But in the libertarian case, the antagonism builds punishment instead of hope. Mileism is a non-emancipatory populism. It calls the people into a vengeful catharsis. Its power (subverting Laclau’s proposal) doesn’t lie in a shared horizon—but in the shared pleasure of watching the other fall. That’s why its most recognizable expressions are scenes in which what is despised is not necessarily the content—but the way it is delivered. The aesthetics of knowledge. An implicit morality. An irritating distance.

So, the question is no longer whether the caste exists. It’s: what kind of caste was challenged, with what effectiveness, and why couldn’t it defend itself? What forms of legitimation were so closed, so self-referential, so contradictory and blind, that they ended up enabling their own destruction?

VI. All of this, of course, doesn’t exhaust the phenomenon. This is not a totalizing analysis, nor does it aim to be. There are other dimensions to Mileism (economic, social, institutional, even affective) that go beyond the scope of this text (which isn’t a paper). For example, the attack on retirees is hard to explain solely through this symbolic-inversion lens. But it can be read as part of a broader project that punishes those who represent “burden,” “waste,” or “acquired rights.” Even if they’re not part of the enlightened caste, they embody—through the libertarian gaze—an undeserved privilege. A leftover from the old social contract, now framed as unacceptable. Cutting pensions becomes fiscal catharsis, a present sacrifice for a fantasized future. Or a purge. And all of it operates through a rationale grounded more in action than in argument. This angle, at least, helps explain how part of the libertarian project legitimizes itself—and what kind of hierarchy it seeks to replace.

VII. To abolish the noblesse d’État, as Bourdieu might have put it, isn’t the answer (and it wouldn’t be possible anyway). But ignoring it isn’t either. Of course, there’s no university without hierarchy, nor State without symbolic capital. What is possible (and what once existed in Argentina) is a project in which knowledge works as a lever for social mobility rather than (or not only) as a privilege. A State where education, science, and knowledge serve social justice and national development. That was, in part, the heart of the Peronist project. Universities open to workers’ children, science directed at national industry, and professionals committed to the organized community. It was knowledge with historical direction. Without pretensions of neutrality or detachment.

So, the issue isn’t the existence of an enlightened elite per se—but when that elite loses its bond with society, retreats into its world (its tour d’ivoire, as the epigraph says), and mistakes its own interests for the common good. When it administers knowledge as if it were private property rather than a public good. Because if knowledge doesn’t reconnect with the national body—if it stops speaking from and to its urgencies—then no one will defend it.

And so, here we are. A government that defunds universities, pushes out researchers, dismantles institutions, hands over sovereignty—and does it all with the applause of those who should be defending them. Not “class traitors,” not “ignorant”—they’re not “enemies” of education. They just stopped feeling part of it. Or maybe, they never were.

Rebuilding, then, will begin with restoring knowledge to its place in a national project. With reanchoring it in the community—not out of an abstract defense of knowledge itself. By refusing (through intention or omission) to dismantle privilege from within, others have come to destroy it from without. And it may turn out worse.

— E.

#argentina #bourdieu #canal #caste #cicero #critical theory #kohan #laclau #mileism #peronism #politics #populism #progressivism #sainte-beuve #yarvin