There is a certain, hideous rhythm to the political pendulum in the Americas—a metronome of misery that swings between incompetent populists who promise the moon and deliver breadlines, and the iron-jawed reactionaries who promise order and deliver coffins. Chile, ever the overachiever in the realm of national self-sabotage, has decided to skip the preamble and go straight back to 1973. Jose Antonio Kast, a man whose public persona suggests the warmth of a morgue slab, has announced his cabinet, and it reads like a curated playlist of authoritarian nostalgia. By naming lawyers who spent their careers defending the late, unlamented Augusto Pinochet, Kast isn’t just forming a government; he’s performing an exorcism in reverse. He is inviting the ghosts of the past back into the Moneda Palace and offering them a full dental plan.

Kast’s assertion that these appointments were “not the result of quotas, calculations or pressure” is perhaps the only honest thing to emerge from the Chilean political landscape in a decade. It is the chilling honesty of a man who doesn’t need a calculator to find his ideological kin. When your internal compass is a magnet permanently stuck on the North of state-sponsored repression, you don’t need to crunch numbers to find your ministers. You simply look for the people who were comfortable enough to provide legal cover for a regime that specialized in the “disappearance” of inconvenient opinions. It isn’t a calculation; it is a reflex. It is the political version of muscle memory for the boot and the blindfold.

The logic is impeccable, if you happen to view human rights as a pesky administrative hurdle. Why waste time with fresh faces or modern thinkers when you can hire the very architects who spent the 1990s explaining why the wholesale slaughter of citizens was merely a legal misunderstanding? These lawyers are the legal equivalent of asbestos—toxic, dated, and yet surprisingly persistent in the walls of the state. Their elevation to ministerial status is the final, wheezing breath of the “Never Again” sentiment that once pretended to define the post-dictatorship era. It turns out that “Never Again” actually meant “Until we get bored and the cost of living makes us miss the stability of the graveyard.”

Naturally, the Left is currently engaged in its favorite pastime: performative indignation. They will hold rallies, wear their vintage Guevara shirts, and tweet into the void about the death of democracy. What they won’t do, of course, is acknowledge their own role in this theatrical farce. The Left’s failure in Chile, much like its failure everywhere else, is rooted in its absolute obsession with being the “protagonists of progress” in a movie that the average voter finds unwatchable. They spent so much time debating the intersectionality of their own irrelevance that they left a vacuum the size of the Andes. Kast is simply the dirt that rushed in to fill it. People don’t vote for far-right fossils because they love the 1970s; they vote for them because the modern Left makes the prospect of a military junta look like a predictable, if slightly violent, alternative to endless chaos.

We are witnessing the ultimate punchline of the 21st century. We live in an age of unprecedented information, yet we use that access to Google our way back to the worst ideas of the 20th century. Kast isn’t a pioneer; he is a cover band. And the lawyers he is bringing along are just there to make sure the acoustics for the coming crackdown are legally sound. There is a profound intellectual necrophilia at work here—a desire to dig up the corpses of failed ideologies and dress them in the suits of modern governance. It is a masterclass in cynicism, practiced by a man who knows that a frightened electorate will always choose the familiar lash over the uncertain future.

Ultimately, the tragedy of Chile is not that Kast found Pinochet’s lawyers; it’s that he knew exactly where to look and that half the country helped him find the keys. The meritocracy Kast speaks of is real, in a sense. In his world, merit is measured by one’s ability to remain unbothered by the screams from the basement. These lawyers have merit in spades. They have proven their loyalty to the concept of power above all else, and in the grand, boring cycle of human stupidity, that is the only qualification that ever truly matters. As the world watches another nation voluntarily walk back into the cage, one can only feel a sense of profound, acid-drenched boredom. It’s the same play with a slightly older cast, and we already know how the final act ends. The only thing left to do is wait for the lights to go out.