It was no coincidence that interest in 19th-century “caudillos” was revived in the 1930’s. Industrialization and mass politics in the U.S. raised the prospect of new forms of collective action, and popular pressure on liberal democracies for a fairer distribution of political power and economic resources increased. But theorists argued that unresolved modernization was the cause of the twentieth century’s dispossessions. For U.S. scholars and policymakers, populist leaders—these modern caudillos—could not possibly be agents of democratization and empowerment; they were only unscrupulous demagogues alluring the desperate, available masses. Organized workers were the new gauchos.
In the decades after World War II, modernization studies proliferated, frantically hunting for caudillos ready to exploit the shortcoming of liberal democracy, from Cárdenas to Andrew Jackson, from Juan Perón to Huey Long. Indeed, a Latin American ally of the U.S. once sought to scare the hell out of his American audience by calling Perón “a Latin Huey Long,” citing “his rousing abilities and fascistic tendencies, without the latter’s saving grace of really having some interest in the common man.” The name Huey Long effectively conveyed the fear of masses deceived by charismatic caudillos; the comparison did the trick. Fear moonwalked from Louisiana to Buenos Aires, and U.S. writers and diplomats saw Perón embodying their fears of mass participation in democracy and the subsequent changes it might bring.
Perhaps as a result, Peronism has enjoyed the privilege of being the only populist movement whose name has been anglicized; from Mexican Cardenismo to Brazilian Varguismo, all the other caudillista movements have remained in their native monstrosity. But Peronism helped to turn caudillo into a warning and an admonition in modern American politics: Barack Obama was called an “American Perón” by conservatives when he tried to legislate DACA above the legislative branch—a caudillo, many times over—while the Washington Post declared Donald Trump “the U.S.’s first Latin American president.” Yet these partisan attacks demonstrate a peculiar ideological agreement, conceiving the threat as an external and untranslatable contamination, a political import that refuses to speak English. In this way, conservatives and liberals agree that the foundations of the United States are strong and good natured; it is only from the shores and from the borders that a foreign contamination arrives to tarnish the strengths of the otherwise benevolent American nature, a stubbornly Latin American menace of irrational masses and abusive leaders.