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Riddled with Communism
Venezuela: The Coup Was an Afterthought
JON CASSIDY THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR August 8, 2017, 12:05 am How democracy was used to destroy it.Those of raised us during the Cold War tend to think of democracy and communism as opposites. They’re not. Democracy tends toward communism until the egalitarian dream proves unworkable, then it collapses into tyranny. In the United States, we’re blind to this. We think that history, which began in 1776, has a direction, or sides, and an ennobling spirit busy with dispensing dignity to the once-taboo. Actually, history will forget these peculiar fixations, except for the Elagabalian footnotes. The democratic dynamic that matters is the same one that’s always mattered: our appetites. We are gorging ourselves on what does not belong to us, and this cannot last. Just look at Venezuela. When the Economist looks at Venezuela, it sees “a textbook example of why democracy matters: people with bad governments should be able to throw the bums out.” Indeed. But the editor who wrote that ought to have taken a closer look at the newspaper’s own reporting, which mentions that the late president Hugo Chavez, who is responsible for the “Bolivarian” system that has collapsed, is still viewed favorably by 53 percent of Venezuelans. (His successor, Nicolas Maduro, has a 23 percent approval rating.) Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, blames socialism, writing, “Any government in a democratic country that failed this spectacularly would have been relegated to the dustbin of history long ago. Maduro is getting around this problem by ending Venezuela’s democracy. “The Chávistas slipped up a year or two by allowing real elections for the country’s National Assembly, which were swept by the opposition.” This is not quite right. Maduro did indeed commit a “self-coup,” putting an end to Venezuela’s democracy with his phony election of a Constitutional Assembly on July 30. This new super-legislative body will serve the same function as Robespierre’s Comité de salut public during the Terror, or the Thirty Tyrants of Athens’ council of 500, or heck, a more murderous version of your local school board’s citizen bond planning committee. That is, it’s meant to create a patina of democratic consensus, but the real power lies elsewhere. In Venezuela’s case, the 545 hand-picked members of the new Constitutional Assembly don’t even fit in their meeting hall, but it’s no matter, because there’s nothing to debate — just applause and voice votes approving whatever the regime proposes. The opposition put the creation of this assembly to a popular vote last month, and it was rejected almost unanimously: of more than 7 million voters, just 0.13 percent approved of Maduro’s plan But the election of this Constitutional Assembly didn’t end “a year or two” of real elections, as Lowry put it; it ended a 59-year run of them. A majority of the Venezuelan people chose this course. A majority of the Venezuelan people cheered on the destruction of property rights and institutional legitimacy. A majority was too foolish to anticipate the consequences of this behavior, and now a large majority no longer wants to tolerate them. Only they’re now discovering that a majority is neither reason nor power. read more |
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