Referring to the Donald Trump administration, former US Treasury secretary Larry Summers recently fretted on Twitter, “I worry about the Argentinization of US government.” US public figures have frequently exploited the supposed relationship between Trumpism and Peronism in order to underline the authoritarianism of the controversial real-estate mogul turned president. Since the Cold War, US observers have cast Juan Perón as a symbol of authoritarianism and populism, the antithesis of liberal democratic modernization. Ernesto Semán opens Ambassadors of the Working Class by reflecting on Perón's bad reputation in the United States. If on the one hand Perón is a stand-in for purported Latin American backwardness, on the other he evokes a moment when working-class concerns and struggles took center stage, a moment of mobilized factories, governed by social laws and workers' rights, that liberals believe created so many obstacles to Latin America's modernization.
In this book Semán explores one of...
