I have been somewhat impatient with the past hagiography, but this article is partially unfair. It is not the president's job to inspire a way of life in his country's citizens. With that said, while anti-materialism makes perfect sense as a personal philosophy, it makes very little sense as national policy.

And it is in the nature of progressives to be perpetually disappointed anyway.

Because actual experience tends to reveal the limits of candidates’ power, we’re also drawn to heroes with less and less experience, blank slates onto which we can project our fantasies for change. When Mujica was elected president, he wasn’t very tested as a politician. He’d gained fame as a parliamentarian partly for riding to the chambers on a workingman’s scooter. His lack of experience was exactly his appeal—as it was for Obama and de Blasio, as it is for Elizabeth Warren. But the instant the election is over, these same leaders are judged according to different standards. Mujica ran for and won the Uruguayan presidency essentially as a persuasive bar philosopher. But when I asked Graciela Bianchi, a school-reform activist and former Mujica supporter turned critic and opposition parliamentarian, what had led her to turn against him, she sniffed, “He’s a bar philosopher.”

Good point among many.