Despite the changes implemented under the “Pinochet modernization”, Chilean conservatism does not respond to a contiguity with the premises that inspired the program headed by the “Chicagos Boys” (1976). Nor is there an obvious relationship between conservative thinking and right-wing parties. Otherwise, there is also libidinal, centrist or left-wing conservatism. The colossal crisis of nineteenth-century liberalism in the 20s – among other factors – prevents a “stable communion” between both traditions in terms of their borders of meaning. At last it is not possible to speak of a “unitary ontology” in the liberal-conservative framework. Carlos Ruiz and Renato Cristi have devoted some analyses to the “singular ideological transition” of Jaime Guzmán (Conservative thinking in Chile, 1992). Such a knot extends from Jaime Eyzaguirre (a devout Hispanist), Osvaldo Lira (Hispanic Thomist), Encina (anti-Espanism), Michael Novak (the American theology of the Middle Way), to Hayek himself (acceleration of markets). Of course, the prevalent theses of Mario Góngora (global planning), who granted the vote to Salvador Allende, are excluded. de facto of the modernizing itinerary. The “conservative moment” is not a generic, invariant universal, or a crystallized identity as is usually held in the field of the left, and its cognitive lag, but a braided concept that enjoys “porosities”, pollution effects and unstable trajectories. The “family” tree as a mixed concept, beyond the subject of faith, endows the term with a systematicity, losing univocality in its political hermeneutics. And so, discursive heterogeneity increases, demography oscillates under a field of forces that will invoke various faces and accents. Although the gravitational core of “the conservative” – as a root or even discursive formation – is usually opposed to reformism, progressivism, Marxism and democracy, such a question was captured by the factual-discursive force of the Chilean Dictatorship. But this does not exhaust their possibilities of meanings. To the point of assimilating the critical fractures that assist all tradition, where the gimmicky discursiveness of Hugo Eduardo Herrera normalizes the discussion from a homogeneous rationality when he advertises the Chicago-hacendal world as a monolithic block (without fissures, nor disputes of meaning) where the economization of the “political field” becomes recursive -reiterative- Beyond the insurmountable ideological differences, it is not that Jaime Guzmán can be reduced simply to the most moral economic binomial. Perhaps the ideologue of Pinochetism carried out the most intense “conservative revolution” with a liberalizing libido in consumption and services.
This allows us to identify conservatism as a belief system that – to paraphrase Alberto Edwards – appeals to the figure of a sovereign and impersonal state (which the historian himself recognized in the figure of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo). Such a passage was hostile to those utilitarian positions that are at the base of the paradigm applied in the 80’s (privatizations of the anti-fiscal shock). The latter comprises the interrupted inheritance of the “state in form” as a colonial succession to the monarchy and the absence of a bourgeois-democratic revolution. In short, the reigning validity of the Portalian myth as a monarch figure (Homus nationalis).
It should be added that the managerial paradigm -as a neoliberal policy- expelled any ethical-normative ballast coming from the “militant epics”. Any significance that seeks to overwhelm the new “economic asepsis” must be eradicated from Facto, because the emerging economic-social plan of the late 70’s, is due to order Qua order. So, the obligatory turn of relational/agonistic conservatism – a term that against everything cultivates equivocation – is something later than the aforementioned adjustments (at least a five-year period) and consists in its need to adapt to the Factum of the deregulations already activated since the second half of the 70’s by the Chicago hawks. And coming from the same trunk, liberals and conservatives were challenged by an anti-statist vocation and embraced the “principle of subsidiarity” inaugurating another “conservative moment”, which is post-state modernization.
Against common sense, a cConservative economic policy was “partially” excluded in the early years of Pinochet modernization (1976-1981). In that context, the infallible laws of scientific monetarism were appealed, to a “non- ideological” conduct of the social process that for years more hijacked the political imagination of the left. Then, given the historical circumstances, a “feasibility judgment” and a technification of the social process are assumed. A set of technical procedures based on the expertise that would avoid – according to this paradigm – the populist regression (“collective decision”) to the national-developmentalist period that Latin America experienced.
The conservative discourse has other conceptual implications with respect to the economic-social plan promoted by Economists and engineers in Chicago. This is an uncomfortable distinction, but a very necessary one, since a constitutive distance is evident with the assumptions of Adam Smith and the typical mechanisms of self-regulation of the market, namely the well-known invisible hand and its preponderance under the period of free competition – periclitated in the 30s. In this sense, classical conservatism seeks to defend power and order against the market and not with the market. Essentially from its univocality in value matters associated with a religious ontology. In a world freed to babelization, the story conservative it has earned a demonology in the political language of progressivism. Moral communion tries to compensate for the disunity created by mercantile materialism and the pathologies of Western liberalism, whose whereabouts were the Black Thursday of 1929. Despite this tremendous historical lesson, at the beginning of the 80’s, the work of Mario Góngora denounced the crises of civic traditions in his famous “Historical essay on the notion of State in Chile” (1981). However, the public implications of his work were unable to stop the neo-conservative journey that Guzmán had already begun.
So far, we can see a conceptual difference that forces us to discern between conservative rationality and its conception of authority, tradition and state – exposed in the well-known work of Mario Góngora, regarding the premises of the managerial paradigm. While it is possible to draw a first “friction” between the Chicago theses and the conservative discourse, it is also appropriate to advance an explanation around the subsequent hegemony of modernization.
Although the decade of the 70’s marks a colossal inflection in the grammar of the conservative world, since modernization has a binding character with a set of tecnopols, this comes to represent a potential “identitarian” and “programmatic” risk, since the right-wing parties are captured under the liberal shift towards the subsidiary paradigm. Perhaps this moment of conservatism, coming from more genuine ramifications, was connected with the darker utilitarian-atomistic aspects of modernization itself – starkly represented in the figure of the “Chicagos Boys”.
From the above, the neoconservative discourse was devoted to “knotting” two ontological fields that lead to antagonistic positions merged by the way of post-state modernization, contributing to reduce the margin of actions that was previously managed from the state authority (monarch ideology). In this way, we cannot ignore this “peculiar” mutation between plot mixtures that obey various systems of meaning and that gave rise to the liberal-conservative trunk and its current schism.
We can risk a tentative explanation to address this paradox that accompanies the so-called liberal-conservative axis. There is an abundant literature that demonstrates with unquestionable rigor that the beginning of the policies of outsourcing, privatization, deindustrialization and transformation of the Chilean State, take place from 1976 under an anti-fiscal file that sought to leave behind the inflationary overflows of the populist period. We have the impression that the obligatory turn of conservatism is something later than the aforementioned adjustments (at least a five-year period) and consists in its need to shield the Factum of the transformations already activated since the second half of the 70’s by the Chicago school; this time liberals and conservatives feel challenged by an anti-statist vocation and subscribe to the principle of subsidiarity.
This mutation to procedures, axioms and definitionIn the technical analysis, it shows a pragmatism that explains some of the conjunctural tensions that currently take place between conservatives and liberals within the Independent Democratic Union and Republicans itself. But we must be clear. Despite his initial impulse, Guzmán turned to liberalizing recipes and should be remembered as the architect of the most casual (and efficient) fusion of “fundamentalist neoliberalism.” Fusion that years later revealed the revolutionary obstinacy of conservative thought: nationalize globalization and globalize Chile.
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