On the evening of Friday, July 11, 2025, the second floor of Fundación Faro, in Buenos Aires, was packed. One hundred and five men and twenty-five women, most of them young, were gathered to attend a Masterclass on La batalla cultural and Globalismo, the two most recent books by Agustín Laje. For four hours, the Argentine political scientist—now widely regarded as President Javier Milei’s favorite intellectual—walked the audience through the central concepts of his work, answered questions, and engaged with an activist public that listened, took notes, and intervened with personal anecdotes and examples. At the end, the line for photos and book signings stretched for over an hour.
The scene captures a trajectory worth analyzing: that of an intellectual who built his place from the margins of Argentine political culture and has since become part of the mainstream. He publishes with HarperCollins, directs the main think tank of Javier Milei’s government, and has established himself as the most recognized figure of the radical right in Latin America. His case raises questions that go beyond his individual story: How does a radical right intellectual get made in Argentina? What international reach can such a figure achieve? What conditions enable that circulation, and what tensions does it generate once power is reached?
From Cultural Activism to Power
Laje’s trajectory does not begin in major publishing houses or international forums. It starts in youth activism linked to memoria completa—the central topic of the Argentine right before Milei’s rise: the dispute over how to interpret the crimes of the last military dictatorship (1976–1983). Alongside Nicolás Márquez, his intellectual mentor, Laje began his career publishing self-edited books and participating in a circuit of right-wing sociability composed of small organizations, militants, a vernacular publishing network, and print and digital media.
Laje’s trajectory does not begin in major publishing houses or international forums. It starts in youth activism linked to memoria completa
The turning point came in 2016 with El libro negro de la nueva izquierda, a systematic attack on feminism and “gender ideology” that became an organic best seller: it circulated without the backing of major publishers, was taken up by religious and conservative organizations across Latin America, and above all was read, appropriated, and amplified by thousands of young people who found in it a vocabulary to articulate what they felt but did not know how to express. “Laje says what I felt about feminism but didn’t know how to say” is a recurring phrase among his readers. That book also opened connections with Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Uruguay, and other Latin American countries, as well as with Spain, where it found an unexpectedly broad reception.
His editorial consecration came in 2022, when HarperCollins published La batalla cultural, followed by Generación idiota (2023) and Globalismo (2024). The alliance with a major publishing group gave him regional distribution, legitimacy as an “author brand,” and access to markets that had previously been out of reach. His expansion in digital environments accompanied and complemented his authorial standing, alongside the production of audiovisual content and the creation of his own streaming channel. Today, Laje serves as Executive Director of Fundación Faro, the government-aligned think tank that trains cadres, offers courses, and designs public policies.
Beyond Latin America: A Hispanophone Network and Its Reach
Laje is not only an Argentine phenomenon. Before becoming the organic intellectual of Milei’s government, he had already built a presence that transcends national borders: he is the most recognized figure of the radical right in Latin America, an unparalleled position in the region that constitutes in itself a significant international projection.
Before becoming the organic intellectual of Milei’s government, [Laje] had already built a presence that transcends national borders: he is the most recognized figure of the radical right in Latin America, an unparalleled position in the region that constitutes in itself a significant international projection.
The connection with Spain is a solid bridge toward a broader international network. In 2018, HazteOír, the Spanish conservative organization, invited Laje and Márquez to Spain with El libro negro de la nueva izquierda, inaugurating an exchange circuit that consolidated in the years that followed. In addition to publishing with HarperCollins at the regional level, Laje publishes his titles in Spain through Marcial Pons. There he completed his Master’s degree in Philosophy at the University of Navarra, where he is also pursuing his doctorate. He has participated in major festivals of the European right such as Europa Viva 2024 and the Vox summit in 2025, through his relationship with Santiago Abascal. His presence at these events is not that of an exotic guest but of an ally in the construction of a Hispanophone conservative international—a recurring aspiration of the Spanish right-wing party.
This network extends beyond the Hispanophone world. Laje has met and publicly interviewed Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s former prime minister, and maintains ties with his political and cultural ecosystem; he participated in the 2025 CPAC summit in Hungary, as well as in the 2024 Argentina and 2024 Mexico editions—all events that connect the radical right across its different nodes. Fundación Faro aspires to play a relevant role in that global network. Milei’s rise was decisive in this process: far from Latin America being a merely receptive territory for reactionary ideas, Laje and Milei export their own concepts, ideas, and practices. Laje and his colleagues call for and promote the batalla cultural (cultural battle) which is both an interpretive framework and a fusionist political practice. It is a native term that Laje draws from a particular reading of the Gramscian argument about the power of culture with original contributions that circulate with growing reach across different spaces. Laje’s audience is primarily Latin American and, to a lesser extent, Spanish—which reflects less a limitation than a specificity: in other countries there are other radical right intellectuals with their own national audiences. Within the Hispanophone world, Laje occupies a position of leadership.
The Intellectual Model: Distance and Proximity, Academia, and Radicalization
Laje’s case is analytically relevant for thinking about how radical right movements produce their intellectuals and build cultural legitimacy. His model has points of contact with figures like Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro: intellectuals who construct authority in close dialogue with their audiences while operating outside conventional academic circuits, combining book publishing with social media and political sociability events.
He spends hours signing books, engages with his followers on social media, and builds an origin narrative as an ordinary young man who rebelled against the “imposition” of the educational system.
A first element is the articulation of distance and proximity with his audience. Laje constructs himself as an ideological reference with a prolific and dense authorial career: he publishes books with extensive critical apparatus, references to Weber, Gramsci, and Hayek, and hundreds of footnotes. “He studied a lot,” “he’s very smart, and he’s only thirty,” say his young readers. That intellectual distance coexists with a deliberate closeness: he spends hours signing books, engages with his followers on social media, and builds an origin narrative as an ordinary young man who rebelled against the “imposition” of the educational system. This ambivalence allows him to be simultaneously the intellectual with the authority to “translate” complex authors and the generational peer who speaks the same language as his audience.
A second element is his relationship with academia, built on imitation and distance. Laje studied Political Science at the Universidad Católica de Córdoba, completed his Master’s degree at the University of Navarra, and is pursuing his doctorate there; he regularly participates as a guest at universities in several countries. He does not, however, publish in specialized journals or academic presses, and he questions the institutional logic of the academic field on the grounds that it is ideologically biased. “I didn’t want to enter that formal academic field because I think it would make me lose effectiveness: spending half a year writing a twenty-page paper that might not even get published is not worth it,” he told me in an interview in 2025. This tension between the imitation of academic symbolic capital and its institutional rejection is constitutive of his role: he builds his own spaces of legitimation—academies, think tanks, training courses—that replicate the form of academic institutions without submitting to their scrutiny.
Laje does not direct an infrastructure from above but participates in a decentralized cultural dynamic that produces him as a figure as much as he feeds it. Without readers who underline his books and bring them to events, without editors who bet on his titles, without mediators who amplify his presence on social media, there would be no Laje. Political adhesion is not explained by the strategy of a single actor but by the capillary practices of those who consume, discuss, and identify with that production. The batalla cultural functions as the name of that dynamic: a struggle for common sense waged through books, events, social networks, and everyday conversations.
Political adhesion is not explained by the strategy of a single actor but by the capillary practices of those who consume, discuss, and identify with that production.
A third element is discursive radicalization as a novelty of the post-Milei period. Throughout his trajectory, Laje’s discourse was combative, but its virulence moderated somewhat during his phase of editorial mainstreaming. With access to power, that register has intensified markedly. In June 2025 he posted on X: “Why do we keep pretending it’s possible to coexist with the left? They are not fellow citizens: they are enemies.” The language of annihilation of the adversary, far from softening from a position of power, has intensified. This epic of resistance that grows more strident once one is already in government raises questions about the modes of intellectual intervention when a political project becomes institutionalized, and about the costs of that process for those who do not align completely.
Cultural battle for the right-wing fusionism
Laje’s case illuminates how a radical right intellectual space is built from Latin America: with what resources, what tensions, and what reach. Spain is a real bridge, and the Vox events, CPAC, and the network with the Hungarian ecosystem are spaces of mutual recognition within a conservative international with its own dynamics. Latin America is not merely a destination for the export of reactionary ideas: it also produces, adapts, and innovates them. The batalla cultural is one such contribution with growing projection.
At the same time, his case raises a tension that the field of illiberalism studies should take into account. Laje does not speak of “illiberalism” but of the “Nueva Derecha” and the batalla cultural as a framework through which he aspires to combine the different traditions of the Latin American right, with its own characteristics and topics that distinguish it from European or North American right-wing movements. This aspiration for a “right of our own” that articulates radicalized “patriots,” “liberals,” and “conservatives” offers productive ground for thinking about the tensions with formal democracy from this part of the map.
Ezequiel Saferstein is Researcher at School of Interdisciplinary Advanced Social Studies (Escuela IDAES), National University of San Martin in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he leads the Program of Studies on the Contemporary Political Book. In 2021 he has published the book Cómo se fabrica un best seller politico? (Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI), and in 2026 he will publish his new book about the material culture of the cultural battle, in which he analyzes the role of producers, intellectuals, mediators, and supporters of Argentina’s New Right.
Image made by John Chrobak using “Agustín Laje – 23.02.2018” by HazteOir.org licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0; “Europe” by MapChart.net licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; “The Americas” by MapChart.net licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
