Argentine President Javier Milei said something that most American politicians are too careful or too cowardly to say out loud. He told an interviewer: "I thought being on the left was a mental problem. The empirical evidence is so overwhelming that it never worked anywhere, and they refused to accept it. But what I discovered is that being on the left is a disease of the soul. The left is built on envy, hatred, resentment, and unequal treatment under the law. They are very violent, and since they have no way or arguments to answer, they go for physical violence." Milei is a blunt man and blunt men sometimes overstate their case. But look at the last ten years of left-wing political behavior in America and ask yourself whether the evidence argues for softening his assessment or for acknowledging that he identified something real that polite political commentary has been carefully stepping around.

Start With the Empirical Failure Milei Names

Before getting to the soul-disease argument, Milei's first observation deserves its own treatment. He notes that the left's governing philosophy has never worked anywhere it has been tried at full scale, and that its adherents refuse to accept this fact. That observation applies directly to the American left's recent record. The cities that have operated under progressive governance for the longest period — San Francisco, Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle — share a set of outcomes that progressive governance claimed it would solve. Homelessness got worse under progressive housing policy, not better. Crime rose after progressive prosecutors began declining to charge categories of offense. Schools that implemented progressive educational ideology, including the dismantling of merit-based advancement in the name of equity, did not improve outcomes for the children the policy claimed to serve. They often produced worse ones.

The response to this record from the left has not been the honest assessment of failure. It has been to blame the insufficient radicalism of the people implementing the policy, to attribute failures to residual racism or systemic factors outside progressive control, to accuse critics of bad faith and to double down on the framework while changing the language. San Francisco's Proposition 36, which reversed progressive criminal justice policies after years of visible failure, passed with 68 percent of the vote in 2024 — in San Francisco. The voters who lived with the policy ended it. The advocates who designed it called the reversal a right-wing attack on reform. That is what refusing to accept empirical failure looks like in practice.

The Envy and Resentment Architecture

Milei's claim that the left is built on envy, hatred and resentment is the sharpest part of his diagnosis and the part most likely to generate objection. But look at the emotional vocabulary the American left has deployed over the past ten years and ask what feeling it is primarily trying to produce in its audience. The dominant emotion is not hope — that was Obama's language and the left has largely abandoned it. The dominant emotion is not solidarity — that language still appears but it has been progressively subordinated. The dominant emotion is grievance. Specifically, the grievance of one group against another group that has something the first group does not, framed as theft or oppression rather than as difference in circumstance or outcome.

The DEI framework is an architecture of grievance institutionalized. It teaches that the success of one demographic group was obtained at the expense of another, that the institutions producing unequal outcomes are corrupt by design and that the remedy is redistribution of opportunity, authority and recognition by group category. White fragility is a theory of resentment — the claim that any white person's discomfort at being accused of racism is itself evidence of racism. Privilege discourse teaches people to see their own circumstances not through the lens of gratitude, effort or fortune, but through the lens of unfair advantage obtained at others' cost. That is a systematic instruction in envy and resentment, delivered through HR departments, university orientation programs, school curricula and sensitivity training. Milei did not diagnose a pathology that does not exist. He named one that has been running in American institutions for a decade.

The Turn to Violence When Arguments Run Out

This is the part of Milei's observation that the American evidence supports most visibly. The summer of 2020 produced the largest sustained wave of political violence in America since the 1960s. Businesses were burned. Police precincts were seized. Statues were toppled — not just Confederate monuments but Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and Ulysses Grant. Federal buildings were attacked. Dozens of people died in riot-related violence. The damage ran into billions of dollars across dozens of American cities. The political left's institutional response was not to condemn the violence and distinguish it from legitimate protest. Much of it was to defend, explain and in some cases celebrate it. Bail funds for arrested rioters were supported by Democratic politicians, celebrities and corporate donors. Media coverage described burning precincts as "mostly peaceful." The phrase "no justice, no peace" — a direct statement that the absence of satisfying political outcomes justifies the absence of civil order — became a mainstream slogan.

The pattern did not begin in 2020 and it did not end there. Campus speakers who held disfavored views were prevented from speaking, shouted down, assaulted or chased from podiums. A Republican congressional baseball practice was shot up by a man who had worked on Bernie Sanders's campaign. Antifa — a movement that is explicitly and by its own description anti-fascist through violent confrontation — received sympathetic coverage from mainstream media while conducting street violence in Portland, Seattle and elsewhere for years. The shooting of a Republican congressman on a baseball field, the assault of Rand Paul and his wife on their property, the harassment of conservative officials in restaurants and the vandalism of crisis pregnancy centers following the Dobbs decision were all expressions of the same pattern Milei identifies: when the left cannot win the argument, it reaches for physical coercion.

The Hatred That Has Become Respectable

One of the most notable developments of the past decade is how much open contempt for political opponents has become not just acceptable but celebrated on the American left. Calling Trump voters "deplorables" was not a gaffe — it was a campaign statement delivered at a fundraiser and partially defended afterward. The view that Republican voters are not merely wrong but morally contemptible, that they are racists, sexists, homophobes and enemies of democracy deserving of social ostracism, has become the operating assumption of large portions of progressive media, academic culture and corporate America. It is expressed freely in spaces that would not tolerate equivalent contempt directed at any other demographic group. It is institutionalized in HR policies that treat disagreement with progressive orthodoxy as evidence of a hostile work environment.

Sunny Hostin called Republican women cockroaches voting for Raid. Keith Olbermann called for the Supreme Court to be disbanded and its members prosecuted. Robert De Niro's speeches at Democratic events consist primarily of profane attacks on Trump's character and supporters. These are not fringe expressions. They are mainstream. They are delivered on national television and receive applause from audiences of educated, credentialed, professionally successful people who have concluded that their contempt for roughly half the country is not only justified but virtuous. Milei's observation that the left is built on hatred is not a conservative talking point. It is a description of what the left has made visible about itself over the past ten years.

The Unequal Treatment Under Law

The fourth element of Milei's diagnosis — unequal treatment under the law — is perhaps the most verifiable. Progressive prosecutors in major American cities selectively declined to enforce laws against categories of offense that their ideology identified as products of systemic oppression. Petty theft was decriminalized in practice in San Francisco and several other cities, with predictable consequences for retailers and residents. The same legal system that pursued relatively minor January 6 trespassers with years-long prosecutions declined for months to charge people who attacked federal buildings in Portland during 2020. The Dobbs protesters who blocked public access to the Supreme Court building faced minimal consequences. Parents at school board meetings were targeted for federal investigation by the Department of Justice under a directive that identified them as potential domestic terrorists. These are documented cases of law enforcement calibrated by the political identity of the actors rather than the nature of the conduct. That is not a conservative accusation. It is the documented record of how progressive governance deployed legal authority when it had it.

My Bottom Line

Milei's formulation is deliberately provocative. He is a provocateur by temperament and political brand. His framing of left-wing politics as a disease of the soul rather than a mere policy disagreement is not the language of diplomatic discourse. But the things he is describing — the refusal to accept empirical failure, the envy-and-resentment framework, the resort to violence when arguments are exhausted, the institutionalization of hatred toward political opponents and the selective application of law — are not his inventions. They are observable features of the American left's behavior over the past ten years, documented in its own statements, its own institutional choices and the outcomes of its own governance. The reason Milei's observation resonates with so many Americans who lived through that decade is not that he said something new. It is that he said plainly what American political culture has been carefully not saying about something everyone has been watching.

When your movement burns buildings and calls it justice, cancels people and calls it accountability, loses elections and calls it suppression, and responds to every policy failure by blaming the people who noticed it — Milei does not need to diagnose you. You have diagnosed yourself.

Why This Matters

A political culture built on envy, resentment and the delegitimization of its opponents cannot produce the kind of civic discourse a republic needs to function. It produces exactly what America has experienced over the past decade: the inability to disagree without dehumanizing, the substitution of moral accusation for policy argument, the collapse of institutions that require good-faith participation from multiple perspectives and the normalization of political violence as an acceptable tool when persuasion fails. The problem Milei names is not a problem with the left's policies, though those policies have their own record. It is a problem with the left's emotional and moral architecture — with what it teaches its adherents to feel about people who disagree with them and what it authorizes them to do about it. That problem will not be solved by better policies. It requires a different relationship with the people across the political aisle. So far, the evidence that the American left is interested in that different relationship is thin.