What you`'d suggest? 1. Deleting the whole thing upon deletion of starting comment? - There are quite a few of those. Some may contain useful content. And the experienced reader is quick to skip. / 2. Puting the first reaction to a now-deleted comment in first place would be much worse/confsuing/irritating. 3. No idea. - What I miss is a fast scroll down option in the archive, SSC-like.
This essay suffers from some cognitive noise emitted by the word "dictator." The problem with Chavez was that his policies incredibly sucked, not the extent to which he was (or was not?) a "dictator." Those policies would have been deeply ruinous even if they had been (were?) backed in a fully democratic manner.
2. I think part of the point of democracy (more technically "liberalism") is making it hard to enact bad policies. If there had been a flourishing opposition media, a strong court system, and good separation of powers, Chavez probably couldn't have done half of what he did. So part of the story of him doing bad things is the story of him crushing opposition media, the courts, and separation of powers, which at least loosely can be called dictatorship.
Is there a way to make it harder to enact bad policies without also making it harder to enact good ones? Or is that too much to ask?
Opposition media, judicial review, and separation of powers are all generally good things, but they also all make it harder to accomplish anything. (And perhaps that's the point?)
If it takes ten minutes to get anything done, ideas that only sound good for the first five minutes will be abandoned before they have the chance to cause damage.
That might work in some cases, but it requires people to spend more than five minutes figuring out whether a proposal is actually good.
In the US, I suspect most of our representatives rarely do that before taking sides on a bill. And if they do spend time deliberating, it's just as likely to be over whether a policy is popular rather than whether it's good.
I think the presumption is that this works asymmetrically in favor of good policymaking if only because it's so much easier to draft and enact bad policy than to draft and enact good ones. This is what tends to bias many people into being "directional libertarians," although I think that the burden of proof placed on rebutting the laissez faire presumption is a key distinction between neoliberals and doctrinaire capital-l Libertarians here.
As to enacting good policy at all, I guess the hope is that some combination of popularity and intrinsic genuine value gets over the frictions implicit in naive factionalism, but admittedly that probably seemed like it worked a lot better in the 1990s than in today's environment of reflexive partisanism and anti-the-other-side politics
I suspect the root of that reflexive partisanism is energy scarcity, so it'll clear up once there's enough cheap solar power for hardware R&D to have better return-on-investment than ideological purity-testing or raiding rival factions.
> In the US, I suspect most of our representatives rarely do that before taking sides on a bill.
All the same arguments for not thinking about your vote (as a member of the public) also apply -- in fact, apply more strongly -- to American representatives.
They are subject to serious social penalties for voting the wrong way, and in general their vote won't make a difference one way or the other.
Imperial China had an explicit zero-party system: factionalism was a serious crime. The English tradition is somewhat different.
I'll grant that the social penalties are much higher for members of Congress. But the argument that one vote won't make a difference is a lot weaker in a crowd of a hundred than in a crowd of a hundred million.
In particular, Joe Manchin has been a critical swing vote in the Senate on many different issues. As I understand it, he basically got to pick what would pass from Biden's "Build Back Better" agenda.
Ideas that sound very bad to the pubic but very good to specific interests with deep pockets and long memories tend to not be abandoned but rather brought back again and again regardless of the damage they do:
When it comes to things like a preparation standard for food it tends to be pretty harmless, or even a positive for an inclusive society. When it comes to things like foreign policy, a large gap between policy set through pressure and rewards at the level of representatives and public opinion can be destabilizing to representative government, civil rights, etc.
If the special interest group's second or third draft of some plan eventually passes judicial review with 10% less benefit to them in exchange for 80% less gratuitous collateral damage, that's still a comparative win for checks-and-balances, relative to some dictator implementing their first draft without asking any such questions.
Judicial review is itself downstream from partisan politics and much of policy is beyond its reach, either by convention or by law.
I would be curious if there's any concrete example of judicial review where the benefit is slightly reduced in exchange for less "collateral damage" inflicted on the public rather than the interests of a specific lobby.
Without some tangible cases, abstract ideals and hypotheticals can be used to defend any status quo without actually addressing the real past and present policy outcomes which are more predictive of the future than the purely theoretical.
The article is about things that don't cause harm to the majority but make a difference to a (potentially tiny) minority. Foreign policy is not in that category. If you get it wrong, people suffer.
In theory foreign policy decisions decisions should be made by trying to balance the short and long term national interest while representing public sentiment. In practice, these decisions are just as susceptible to influence by specialized lobbies who are well organized, have a clear idea of their interests, and are intolerant of any individual and organization who does not align with their interests.
This isn't limited to the Israel lobby by any means, but it's a particularly high visibility outlier where nearly all elected officials regardless of party express similar policy views which do not represent the views of their constituents and in some cases appear to contain material falsifications or strong assertions of fact made without evidence or with evidence which is presented then retracted without explanation.
Well, if you're living in a 1st world nation getting foreign policy wrong mostly means that *other* people suffer, not voters, and though local (in the sense of within the nation's borders) economic impacts form poor foreign policy are real they tend to be more long term and hard to tie to any one policy decision
You can also do set-ups like proportional representation and parliamentary systems, which tends to push towards more centrist and stable policymaking because the folks in the legislature have to form governing coalitions among diverse parties.
Proportional representation does not push towards more centrist policies. What it does is ensure that the party with the smallest representation that still can form a majority within a coalition has enormously outsized power.
This only doesn't happen if that party is such that they cannot form a coalition, e.g. the Rhino Party, which tends to have Groucho Marx's policy.
Hardly. What we see in European PR systems is that it yields bizarre and very unstable coalitions as every non-conservative party tries to keep conservatives out of power. The result is long periods where there's no democratic representation in government at all with "caretaker" governments that are actually just the party that lost power, frequent collapses, and obviously stupid coalitions of people who can't agree on anything except the importance of not being the conservatives. Meanwhile the large parts of the population that votes for the conservative party or parties simply get frozen out of power entirely even when they're the biggest voting bloc.
I once supported PR and thought it sounded like good sense. But it's been tried and the results are worse. FPTP forces a small number of parties to generate internally coherent coalitions _before_ going to the voters, which works better.
Talking about Germany specifically this is blatantly wrong.
Scanning governing parties over at Wikipedia I get the following result:
Conservative: 35 years of governing (CDU + FDP)
Centrist: 15 years of governing (CDU + SPD)
Center-left: 20 years of governing (SPD + FDP + optional Green Party)
Left: 10 years of governing (SPD + Green Party)
Seems like to claim that conservatives have been frozen out of power you'd first need to argue that CDU is not conservative. It is largest German party and has provided the chancellor for the majority of Germany's history. People can argue how right vs how centrist they are exactly but I don't know anyone who doesn't think they're a conservative party.
Germany's relatively unusual for a PR country, in that it still broadly has a two-party system. This may be a result of having a mixed member system as opposed to a party list one, but may also be cultural (Austria has a party list system, but also has a two-party system).
The freezing out conservatives point is wrong unless you use the word "conservative" idiosyncratically; most European countries have a cordon sanitaire (agreement not to form a coalition) against the nationalist right, but these generally aren't the old mainstream conservative parties.
Germany is the country in which the current political and media classes are openly talking about banning the AfD. It has recently been governed by the so-called rainbow coalition (incoherently). It's a textbook example of this problem.
As for the CDU being conservative, er, maybe once. Not for a long time, hence the rise of a new conservative party. There was nothing even slightly conservative about Merkel's decisions about mass immigration or nuclear power.
Even if "keeping conservatives out of power" actually means right-wing populists/nationalists, this is false. Finland, a PR country, currently has right-wing populists as a governing party while Sweden, also a PR country has them as a supporting party with a lot of influence. They've also been in similar status in PR-using Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Austria and many, many other countries during the years. If you just mean Germany, you should say Germany - though, as the comment below states, postwar Germany's political system has been *remarkably* stable for an European political system.
Historically, the supposed instability of PR systems has been at least as much related to keeping *Communists* out of power rather than the far right, at least in Italy and Finland. The size of the Communist party also created instability in FPTP-using France, however.
We're talking about the Finland where in 2017 the left split the True Finns down the middle after Halla-aho won a massive lead in a vote over who should be the leader, and the other parties said they would never enter a coalition with them if the result was respected? Then the TF members who had been given cabinet positions under the previous leader all immediately defected to a brand new party nobody had voted for (Blue Reform) and the TF, who had done very well in the election, was once again suddenly frozen out of government.
It took the voters evicting ALL the defectors from government in the next election, destroying Blue Reform entirely, and then awarding the TF an even bigger vote share to actually get them into a coalition.
And that happened in .... April 2023. Finland isn't a counter-example, it's a good example of the problem. PR should have resulted in the [True] Finns voters being listened to a long time before these events, but instead the voters were repeatedly stabbed in the back and their MPs were corrupted by the other parties insisting they'd prefer no government at all than one with the right wing. It is a farce of a system.
> Sweden, also a PR country has them as a supporting party with a lot of influence.
Sweden Democrats were also frozen out of power for almost all of their existence by other parties refusing to work with them, weren't they? Why do you keep citing cases where what I'm talking about has happened? It required them to grow to become the second biggest party overall before the other parties gave up and did what PR suggested they should have been doing all along.
Remember, this is the system in which small parties supposedly have excessive influence. Wrong. It's a system in which small left wing parties have excessive influence because the left is so extreme they'd rather team up with literally anyone other than conservatives.
They got ~44% of the popular vote which is more than any other party by a long way. By majority do you mean 50%? If so, how would that work in a system with more than two parties, in which it's normal that no party gets to 50%?
There are one-rep-per-electorate systems that aren't FPTP, and they're basically strictly better, btw. Ranked Choice aka. Single Transferable Vote is the simplest of those in the sense of most similar to FPTP, and it makes a huge difference in allowing minor parties to exist and apply policy pressure, because now you can 'vote' for a single issue party without wasting your vote in the decision of which major party gets the government (and then the winning government can see that eg. Legalise Cannabis Now was popular with both the electorate in general and specifically with their own voters, even if it didn't actually win any seats in Parliament)
The Weimar Republic had a clause that allowed the President to effectively rule by decree in an emergency, in which they could declare the emergency. It was already being used even before Hitler came to power.
One modification that does need to be made to PR systems, though, is a minimum party threshold - usually 5% is good to get seats. That makes it easier for parties to form working coalitions while still making it relatively easy to form new political parties that can win representation (especially if you have a federalized system that lets them win representation at lower levels of government first, where they'd need fewer votes than at the national level).
The inescapable flaw of proportional representation is that it explicitly centers parties. Partisanship is a bad thing, and removing the opportunity to vote for a candidate as a person rather than as a member of their party supercharges it.
Even if they do uniquely have that effect (and I don't see why they would), it's far from obvious that it's a good thing, and certainly not enough to outweigh all of the problems of partisanship.
Futarchy. But more relevant to the present, I imagine having competent civil servants and influential civil society (like think tanks) that can lobby for / against things and affect how policies actually materialize.
2. is where we disagree. I don't believe that liberal institutions preferentially impede bad policies, even when they succeed at enforcing adherence to their procedures. The reason is that those procedures are orthogonal to the good or bad quality of (many) policies.
If you believe that it's easier to break things than improve them any force which limits radical change preferentially impede bad policies -- even if they can't tell good and bad reforms apart.
That evaluation assumes that one is starting from a relatively good point within possibility space, so that any change is likely to be in a bad direction. I don't believe that assumption holds for contemporary Western regimes.
Really? As compared with the vast majority of political and economic systems through the history of the world if sure seems like western regimes are better places to live and work.
I mean if you don't believe this than shouldn't you be happy to move to a random country in the world rather than living in the west?
> ... shouldn't you be happy to move to a random country in the world ...
That is not logically the correct test for what I said. You made a strong claim about the gradient of any change likely being bad. That has to be assessed in regard to the proximate possibility space, not by looking at contemporary Third World countries, as if the latter were a good proxy for the former.
Related to point 2 there is something very important I notice that is missing from the post is the assembly elections of 2005. Chavez was already well on his way destroy the independence of the institutions, but in 2005 the opposition decided to boycott the elections entirely which gave Chavez 100% control of it pretty much, and one of the things the assembly did was give him the power to rule by decree under a permanent state of exception justified by an "economic war" against Venezuela led by the US. That excuse remains in use even to this day to justify all sort of abuses of power by the executive. Pretty much until his death Chavez was more king than president in a sense. That boycott is the single greatest blunder the opposition here has ever made IMHO, which is saying something since our opposition is pretty much a caste of professional blunderers.
As someone who's followed this story a bit for a long time, using assemblies as an end-run around parliament seems to have been a common tactic for both Chavez and Maduro. If you lose an election you just claim to be "listening to the voice of the people" and establish an alternate seat of power until you get what you want. FWIW this was also something the communists at my university were pretty keen on.
Ehh, no not really. The Constitutional Convention wasn't an assembly which could decide or establish anything on its own. The delegates to it understood that they had neither legal authority nor political standing to do that. Rather, the constitution that they drafted had to be ratified by a supermajority of the states in order to go into effect.
That's very different from the sort of assembly that Chavez used, which simply passes a new law and declares it to be the law of the land.
"If you lose an election you just claim to be "listening to the voice of the people" and establish an alternate seat of power until you get what you want."
Funnily enough, this struck me with regard to the proposal for term limits on the Supreme Court. Same rhetoric about the voice of the people, etc.:
“An organized scheme by right-wing special interests to capture and control the Supreme Court, aided by gobs of billionaire dark money flowing through the confirmation process and judicial lobbying, has resulted in an unaccountable Court out of step with the American people. Term limits and biennial appointments would make the Court more representative of the public and lower the stakes of each justice’s appointment, while preserving constitutional protections for judicial independence,” said Senator Whitehouse, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Courts Subcommittee. “As Congress considers multiple options to restore the integrity of this scandal-plagued Court, our term limits bill should be front and center as a potential solution.”
“The Supreme Court is facing a crisis of legitimacy that is exacerbated by radical decisions at odds with established legal precedent, ethical lapses of sitting justices, and politicization of the confirmation process,” said Senator Booker. “This crisis has eroded faith and confidence in our nation’s highest court. Fundamental reform is necessary to address this crisis and restore trust in the institution. Setting term limits for Supreme Court justices will restore accountability and depoliticize the confirmation process, and term limits are a commonsense change that an overwhelming majority of Americans support. I’m proud to stand with my colleagues to champion this effort.”
“Term limits will help restore credibility and trust to our nation’s highest court. This proposal is simple and fair: each President, elected by the American people, will appoint two Supreme Court justices for each term. Our bill strips out the toxic politics, partisan obstruction, and retirement gamesmanship that have eroded public trust, not just in the Supreme Court, but in our entire system of justice. Detached from the public and more politicized than ever, the Supreme Court will continue to face a crisis of legitimacy without this kind of fundamental reform,” said Senator Blumenthal.
“It shouldn’t be controversial to say that the American people deserve a Supreme Court insulated from politics. But when every confirmation turns into an all-out partisan battle, or when one administration alone can overturn a lifetime of precedent, it’s clear: the Court has lost its way,” said Senator Padilla. “By imposing commonsense term limits, we can lower the temperature on political brinksmanship and start to restore trust in the highest court in our land.”
I mean the *good* argument for term limits on the Supreme Court is just to end the macabre farce of waiting around for them to die at politically opportune or inopportune times, tactically timing their resignations for political reasons rather than their ability to keep doing the job, and the incentives to nominate the youngest candidates you can get away with.
If each justice serves for a single 18-year term and can't be renominated, you avoid all that nonsense while still keeping the same level of independence.
It's not actually a very left-wing idea. I remember a decade ago when the 18-year term limit proposal was being tossed around on right-libertarian blogs, alongside the challenge to Obamacare's mandate.
IMHO, the single greatest issue with the US supreme court is "the politicization of the confirmation process" and it's the root from which every other problem comes from. The fact that the justices are political appointees is absolutely nuts to me. And on that note, the calls for term limits and impeachment of justices is such a transparently political ploy it's not even funny. It's clear the objective is to explicitly take the politicization of the supreme court to it's absolute extreme and make activist judges inevitable. I mean, what justice is going to remain impartial when they known that their job depends on staying on the good graces of the current administration and congress?
Term limits are not, in themselves, a bad idea; staying on the Court even when you are so ill you are not capable of concentrating or suffering some cognitive decline (come on, sending decisions from your hospital bed?) and until you die is not good for anyone. "Yes, Justice Brown's family may be ordering the coffin and choosing a grave plot, but he's perfectly capable of complex legal thought even though he is literally on his death bed on full life support!"
Making a call for avoiding such scenarios and term limits so judges can serve for [twenty, thirty, pick a number] years but not indefinitely, and getting around the worst of the acrimony on confirmation hearings by giving every President two picks, no arguments about 'is it start, middle or end of administration?' isn't bad.
Couching the call in the language of shadowy billionaires and the will of the people and out of line with what (we like and want) the Spirit of the Age feels, that is the same kind of dictatorship language whether it comes from the right or the left, and it's what the Democratic senators sounded like.
>The fact that the justices are political appointees is absolutely nuts to me.
Do you have an alternate election procedure in mind? Direct election (as is the case for many state-level judges) would make the process more political rather than less. And if they're to be appointed through some non-political mechanism, then that raises the question of who should be trusted with that appointment power.
I think the Chavez story raises serious doubts about the ability of the standard liberal system to function in a society that lacks a broad base of wealth and an educated populace.
A country with a large impoverished population (esp when it has oil wealth or the like) will reverse the usual conservative pressure provided by the voters. That makes sense when it feels like you have a lot to lose...when your comparative poverty makes it feel like you have little to lose (however incorrectly) and lots to gain I fear the voters will act to overcome any institutions that try and limit popular sovereignty. An educated populace has a similar effect. Even if it doesn't help you avoid bad choices it's a force for stability.
As such I fear that, since breaking things is much easier than fixing them, trying to impose liberal institutions prior to economic growth may actually do more harm than good (but it's just a fear not a conclusion).
The party that promises to expand suffrage (either through expanded voting rights or mass migration or so on) is always going to have a statistical advantage in the polls, so this seems like an inherent kind of feature creep in democratic politics.
It doesn't happen instantly and i's a very slow creep. It's not hard to see why. Expanded suffrage doesn't benefit every party equally. The party that represents landowners has no incentive to expand suffrage to non landowners. The party of non landowners would benefit from expanded suffrage, but it has to get into power in a system that s biased against them.. By that logic , it shouldn't happen at all, but there are factors still, like the threat of revolution, and elites adopting left/liberal ideologies.
They don't need to think things are going well for them -- only be very aware of how much worse things could be.
During the great depression things were going pretty bad for many Americans but they still realized that they were doing better than many other countries so choose somewhat more radical incremental change rather than blowing everything up.
Pretty much, or at least your deeply poor voters have to be scarce enough that they don't form a decisive voting bloc (you can also throw in reforms designed to make it harder to explicitly link patronage to voting, like secret ballots and so forth).
Yeah, I think there's a lot of mistaking the indicators of success for the prerequisites.
The US is not above such mistakes. The biggest boneheaded mistake you've recently done was to think that people would become middle class if they owned a house, so you made buying a house really easy. Owning a house is a marker of success, not a prerequisite. So you ended up with a lot of people not making the mortgage payments, and you're *still* working through the results.
I wouldn't care as much if your boneheaded mistake didn't cause problems in the rest of the world.
My apologies (and sympathies) if you're not actually American.
I share the fear. Kuwait - oil rich, poor in education/other bases of wealth - had to look more democratic after its liberation by the US (Bush sr.). They installed a parliament, that voted eg to cancel all credit card debts of Kuwaitis. Fun read from when it was still a movement https://kuwaittimes.com/indebted-kuwaitis-call-on-amir-to-cancel-their-loans/ (I recall, the amir refused. Probably did some nice thing to keep his "suffering" people happy.)
But Venezuela had one of the highest per-capita GDPs in the world. It was the richest country in the Hispanosphere. Poverty was worse almost everywhere else on Earth before that idiot Chavez turned his home into Haiti.
> part of the point of democracy (more technically "liberalism") is making it hard to enact bad policies
The point of democracy is to ensure the demos controls the government. Nothing in it has anything to do with good or bad policy. This framing makes me think you're heading in the same direction as the NYT set, where policies they personally like being forced on people against their will is "democracy" and policies they dislike being democratically implemented is "populism".
There is no way to stop a democratic government implementing bad policy. The entire COVID story was nothing but horrifically bad, economy-destroying totalitarian madness for years on end. If that were true then opposition media, strong courts and good separation of powers would have popped up to try and stop COVID policy, but of course they all immediately decided these were the best things ever and promptly steamrollered the citizens, media and few politicians who were expressing doubts (since vindicated).
Fundamentally the best you can do is wait for people to learn important lessons. The failure of pure socialist economics has mostly been learned by now, albeit it keeps resurfacing under different guises where it pretends to be something else. The new lessons we're learning are about the incompetence, bias and rank corruption of the supposedly neutral and independent technocratic classes, that in prior decades were being delegated a lot of power due to disillusionment with politicians. The new swing is going to to a mix of more empowered politicians and / or more referendums.
> The entire COVID story was nothing but horrifically bad, economy-destroying totalitarian madness for years on end.
Two and a half months of lockdown and a six month squabble over vaccines where both sides approached the issue like morons is now "years on end". We have been at war with Eastasia for years on end.
Not sure where you lived in 2020, but around here the lockdown lasted a whole lot longer than two and a half months. And the school closures, which while they don't add up to Full Lockdown on their own were probably the most damaging manifestation of lockdownism, lasted a lot longer than two and a half months pretty much everywhere.
I think you did a good job explaining how this was at best the weakest dictatorship on the list and at worst not a dictatorship. It's valuable to the long term project to establish a lower bound, and I think you did, with the bonus of finding it *more* scary for the United States.
I propose "Tyrant Book Club" as a possible revision, referencing both the Classical meaning (a ruler who gained power illegitimately or who governs unconstrained by law and tradition) and the modern meaning (a particularly brutal or oppressive ruler).
There's still some hyperbole involved in many cases, but "tyrant" seems like a somewhat better fit than "dictator" for a leader like Chavez or Orban whose governance is much more in the nature of "torturing democratic institutions until they'll confess to anything" than overthrowing those institutions and replacing them with an explicitly autocratic and authoritarian regime (like any number of 20th century dictators did) or even hollowing out the democratic institutions and wearing their carcass as a skin suit (like Putin).
Furthermore, "tyrant" has almost identical connotations to "dictator", and at least to my ears "Tyrant Book Club" has as good a ring as "Dictator Book Club".
I was also going to argue that Classical Greek political terms were objectively classier than their Latin counterparts, but when I tried to formulate a case for that, I immediately thought of several counterexamples where the Latinate term is clearly classier: "Republic" vs "Democracy", "Civil" vs "Political", and "Imperial" vs "Autocratic". So I withdraw that point at least.
Well...it has been known from Plato's days that democracy does not necessary lead to good outcomes.
While at it: What is puzzling about politics in the US is why it for so long has been different from politics in Latin America. Structurally speaking, the US ought to be similar to Brazil and Argentina, which similarly are large, mainly immigrant American countries. (Venezuela is arguably a pimped up version of Argentina.) Trump is a very recognizable political figure in Latin American political culture. So perhaps the US is finally "coming home" after a very long sort-of European detour (from the sane part of Europe).
For thirty years now, I have been peddling a theory about "the gradual Latin-Americanization of US political culture". If Trump wins again next year, that will be another win for the theory.
Probably related to the reason that the UK has been more functionally governed than Spain for most of the last few centuries; Not sure precisely what that reason *is*, but settler colonies taking after their founders shouldn't be surprising
As I Venezuelan I can tell you, the single reason Chavez didn't become a full blown dictator was because he died young. I shudder just imagining the mere idea of Chavez handling the economic collapse of 2015-2020.
The word "dictator" etymologically derives from word-as-law. And Chavez was making law simply by declaring things on TV. It is true that in the US our presidents can make laws via executive order, which means we're not quite as far from Venezuela as we like to think.
"President Obama has a new phrase he's been using a lot lately: "I've got a pen, and I've got a phone."
He's talking about the tools a president can use if Congress isn't giving him what he wants: executive actions and calling people together. It's another avenue the president is using to pursue his economic agenda.
Since the start of the year, the president has announced three new economic "promise zones," a college affordability initiative and a manufacturing research hub. These are all part of what the White House is calling a "Year of Action." And they're all things that didn't require Congress to do anything — something the president makes a point of saying.
"I am going to be working with Congress where I can to accomplish this, but I am also going to act on my own if Congress is deadlocked," he said at an education event at the White House on Thursday. "I've got a pen to take executive actions where Congress won't, and I've got a telephone to rally folks around the country on this mission."
Does anybody know how the "economic promise zones" worked out? If they succeeded, I'd really like to know about that.
In practice, "dictator" (on the English net, at least) is used to describe any ruler disapproved of by Harvard, US Dept. of State, NYT, etc (C. Yarvin's "Cathedral" organs) -- regardless of precisely how said ruler came to power.
Interesting read - I lived in Caracas when Chavez came to power. He was very charismatic and I was amazed at how he could speak for hours on end. It was heartbreaking to see the collapse of their society.
There was a lot of hope that social ills would be righted and that the poor would have a hand up. I remember being swayed by some of his speeches, as he seemed to really have a heart for the poor. There was also fear for many, particularly the middle class, of losing what they had. The economic slide downhill began with firing people who knew how to do their jobs, particularly at the state money making machine PDVSA (oil) and replacing them with political appointees, and with taking away basic freedoms such as the right to vote according to one’s conscience, by firing government workers who did not vote for the Chavez regime. The money was still flowing to those in power but just a different group. And the people suffered. There was an excellent blog following all the changes called The Devil’s Excrement. Good to look up if you have an interest.
I really like this series. It's a great idea, and the individual reviews are good. I hope that you write something synthetic at some point: tie all the strands together and give us your coherent picture about dictatorship.
One point that was perhaps not discussed in the book was how well rewarded folks who stood by Chavez were (those actively and publicly supporting him during and after the 2003 strikes). PDVSA mid level workers and low level government employees that were militant to the cause in those days are incredibly wealthy today. They likely moved to Miami or Dominican Republic around 2013 and have likely returned post dollarization.
Chavez' government also overpaid for key private assets, buying the silence and strongly encouraging the emigration of many in the economonic elite.
If you want to further your readings of Venezuela in the post Chavez era, there is a fun quasi-fiction book that explains the plundering of the state post Chavez death. Not sure if it has been translated to english.
I vaguely recall a quip from your old, old blog about being such a sympathetic reader that if you ever started reading about dictators, you’d become an authoritarian…is this whole series an inside joke?
The general idea was he figured out he was too easily convinced. I'll leave it to you to re-read the implications of that realization, and the moral of the essay.
You should do some on benevolent or arguably-benevolent dictators, like LKY, Ataturk, or Park Chung-Hee. I'd like to see what makes them different from the worse model, whether there's some legible-from-the-outside difference or whether it's just the luck of the draw.
So far I've been concentrating on modern (ie past ~20 years) dictators, especially ones who took previously semi-democratic polities and made them worse. I might eventually have to branch out from there, but I think they're the most informative and want to exhaust the supply before going into anything deeper.
I might be running low on dictators like that though, does anyone have any suggestions for other modern ones famous enough to get books about them?
Lee Kuan Yew only resigned from the Cabinet in 2011, and his reign is widely praised as the best-case scenario for a dictatorship. I'd be interested to learn whether a similar success could be achieved in a more democratic state.
If so, Paul Kagame is one who I think you'd find very interesting. He is responsible for ending a genocide and rebuilding a country after unimaginable horror and strife. A genuine 20th century hero, when Western countries and the UN failed. He has also abolished term limits (for himself only), banned opposition parties, arrested critical journalists, and there have been stories of extra judicial killings.
For me a lot of discussion about dictators resolves too easily with the conclusion "wouldn't it be nice if they'd been a bit more like us". But in Rwanda from 1994 to...maybe now, you have a situation where it's almost impossible to imagine democratic norms functioning. What if a 'benevolent dictator' is the better choice?
However, given that his story has not resolved yet, I'm not sure if there are any great biographies which offer an impartial view on offer at the moment.
If you're looking for "overthrew democracy", the answer is Ortega in Nicaragua, much more clearly than Chavez. (The twist is that he was already dictator once, in 1979-1990, then got forced into stepping aside, spent 16 years in opposition, then won in 2006 and became dictator again. The moral is you can't really have a democracy if there's a two-party system and one of the parties will cancel the democracy the minute they win.)
Many of the post-Soviet ones are interesting; Niyazov is particularly authoritarian, so it might be interesting to review how one builds a North Korea-style thing. Lukashenko is another clear example of how democratic systems can be vulnerable to someone openly running on "this democracy thing isn't working out, let's go back to the old dictatorship"; that's how he won in 1994. Applications to the US may not exist.
A possible sub-theme might be "dictatorships that kind of make sense in context"? Kagame in Rwanda is a brutal dictator, but he actually ended the genocide and won a series of apocalyptic wars. The Aliyev family in Azerbaijan (Heidar and his son, Ilham) had the good fortune of striking oil and the wisdom of friendship with the US; 'have competent offspring' is an old lesson but many monarchies don't manage it.
LKY was 'Prime Minister emeritus' and had substantial influence in Singapore until his death in 2011; he's an absolutely fascinating man that others have discussed upthread, though the trend here is the opposite (he built a very authoritarian system but it is very very gradually transitioning to democracy in a planned way).
If you're trying to do something which has lessons for the United States, though, maybe a series on transformative leaders in modern democracies might make more sense? Try to learn from what the previous generation of long-serving leaders, like Merkel or Chirac, did right or wrong; they're not in the full light of history yet but some of their decisions are now reviewable.
I wanted to recommend an English-language biography of Finland's ex-president Urho Kekkonen (https://kansallisbiografia.fi/english/person/632) for an example of a politician with clear authoritarian tendencies but who still doesn't properly count as a dictator since he had to operate in a strong democracy, but couldn't actually find any.
Trump. If you believe his detractors, he’s an authoritarian that was held in check by our democracy. No, I don’t believe it. We have an administrative state ruled covertly by bureaucrats. Anyone who talks about democracy has no knowledge of the definition of the word. There’s literally no mechanism for citizens to enforce their choices. Again and again we get policies that most people don’t want. Where’s that democracy again?
No, you get the policies you want, and when they suck, you re-write history to construe them as imposition of some foreign body.
See the Iraq war: the same people all too happy to call anybody questioning it an America-hating terrorist now cry on how "the deep state" sent their kids to die in the desert
There is no mechanism by which the American public gets to consciously choose policy. If you mean a great deal of the polity is brainwashed into supporting the current war, then yes, they get what they asked for. It worked really well in 2003, when there was zero sense in attacking Iraq, unless you were deep state and therefore would profit with money and power. The forever war is what is changing the minds of the formerly rah rah go war for America people. They’re beginning to realize they’ve been had.
Historically, absolutely! the classic Athenian (and other Greek city-state) democracies represented well the wishes of the citizens, and managed this by having a very small fraction of their population actually be citizens.
In modern times, there are countries like Switzerland that do a *lot* of their governance via referendum and thus policy is relatively reliably that which the majority of voter prefer, though I am not Swiss and don't have a firm grasp of the details. (and also, "majority prefers" doesn't preclude "40% absolutely detests")
It might be interesting to examine why Silvio Berlusconi *didn't* become a dictator, despite controlling most Italian media and entering politics in a power vacuum after a corruption scandal forced all the existing political parties to dissolve. The circumstances seem similar to other dictators you've discussed, but Berlusconi never quite consolidated his power and his reign ended when he lost a de facto confidence vote in the wake of the financial crisis.
I'll second this. There was a lot of panic and rhetoric by his opponents, but then nothing particularly horrible seemed to happen, and I never dug enough into the context around him to figure out what was actually going on.
Trump didn’t become a dictator either despite panic and unending rhetoric. The second term might be different but our oligarchy won’t allow it. It seems more likely to me that we get a leftist dictator, who like Chavez, will talk about helping the poor while consolidating power. Does Newsom have the balls to go all in?
I think the only reason Jan 6th didn't turn out worse is that the vast majority of the crowd (99.9%) was truly just there for a protest. If there were hundreds or thousands, instead of merely tens, who had bad intentions, it could have turned out very differently. Julius Caesar reportedly refused a crown three times, but I don't think Trump has the ability to refuse extra-constitutional power even once. (To be fair, neither did Caesar, and I'd put a small amount of money on Trump refusing a literal crown at least once.)
"Tens"? So far 160 participants have pleaded guilty, and another 122 have been convicted at trial, of violent felonies committed at the capitol that day. Assaulting or injuring a police officer, using a deadly weapon, etc. If we restrict the definition of "bad intentions" to those sorts of acts it's in the low hundreds at least.
Personally I would also include as "bad intentions" trying to stop Congress from certifying the electoral college ballots. That definition covers another couple hundred 1/6/21 participants who've pled guilty to or been convicted of that without any conviction for specific violent acts.
Then there are several hundred individual trials still to come, and a few dozen more participants (identified via security camera footage) who the FBI is still searching for.
Well, it could've caused a much bigger crisis, but I doubt that there was any scenario in which Trump ended up with a crown. That probably required a civil war, and no powerful ostensibly pro-Trump faction really wanted it.
They needed the feds to create a riot. As for refusing the crown, that’s a matter of opinion. I think you’re wrong about Caesar. It was a power struggle all right, but those murderers weren’t trying to save democracy either.
On one hand, he could extract pretty much everything one could extract from a democracy plus some ("some" being the mob).
On the other, the Italian constitution is so strong that the only way to seize more than that would have been literal blackshirts in the Constitutional Court.
So the keen businessman obviously was going to prefer to milk the cow forever, every legislature a bit more, over some gamble that would see him allied with unreliable fanatics to rule over ruins
I strongly recommend reading LKY's From Third World to First. It's his perspective on his tenure as Prime Minister of Singapore from 1959 to 1990, and more broadly the history of the country he was so instrumental in. It's an excellent read, and he is very passionate that his actions that you will consider dictatorial were justified and necessary, and explains his reasoning at length
I know next to nothing about Singaporean history but my very rough impression is that Raffles is also considered to have been something of an exceptionally competent governor in Singapore's early history and development -- is this roughly accurate? Did Singapore effectively benefit from not one but two people effectively filling the role of benevolent dictator?
The page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_backsliding lists (apart from the ones you've already covered) Ethiopia, El Salvador, Israel, Peru, Poland, Romania, Serbia. Some of those might be stretching things unreasonably far to include in a Dictators Book Club, but others, not.
"the 10 countries with the highest degree of autocratizing from 2009 to 2019 were Hungary, Turkey, Poland, Serbia, Brazil, Bangladesh, Mali, Thailand, Nicaragua, and Zambia."
Thailand and Peru would seem like interesting cases - is Peru ever _not_ a mess?
Dukanovic in Montenegro (he's gone now after losing an election earlier this year, but was in power for 30 years) is a good case study in soft dictatorship. Lukashenko's also an option, but broadly boils down to democracy being unpopular in the 90s so people voted against it.
Otherwise, going non-recent, FDR is probably the most interesting in a US context (he ruled for life, funnelled public money into his own political machine and threatened the Supreme Court into submission).
Nazarbayev may be an interesting example of soft dictatorship. Unlike neighboring Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tadjikustan, people enjoyed much more freedom under his rule, yet his grip on power was stronger than in Russia. It's not an example of a subversion of a democracy, but of a situation when there was a hope for democracy, but people, including middle class educated ones, were happy to accept a dictatorship instead.
In the post-Soviet world, it seems that many (most?) people understand that "democracy" is simply a code word for: marionette rule by Washington/London, organized mass impoverishment, oligarchs cutting apart and cashing in what might have remained of industry, demographic collapse, NATO bases hosting nukes, etc.
Because that is what happened in many cases when "democracy" was tried, much to the surprise of those swallowing the official Western mythology that "democracy" is the panacea to all their problems. This mythology isn't all empty propaganda, but can be easily portrayed that way by counter-propaganda taking advantage of acute disillusionment.
Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda. I enjoyed the book Do Not Disturb by Michaela Wrong. It covers the rise and rule of the Rwandan Patriotic Front that currently holds power.
African politics in general deserves a lot more attention than it gets, and Kagame in particular is an incredibly impactful figure in the history of multiple countries.
> especially ones who took previously semi-democratic polities and made them worse. I might eventually have to branch out from there, but I think they're the most informative
Why is it more informative to look exclusively at bad retrospective outcomes?
- the slightly earlier prototype for modern populist-authoritarians, Slobodan Milosevic
As an offshoot of this theme, you would probably also really enjoy some comparative books on 21st-century authoritarianism. In particular, I strongly suggest:
- The Revenge of Power by Moises Naím. I list this first because Naím combines the perspectives of an economist, a journalist, and a Venezuelan former government official who witnessed Castro's rise to power from the inside. He draws connections and parallels through not only the usual suspects, but also some you might not think to connect, like Berlusconi in Italy. I found this book riveting.
- This Is Propaganda by Peter Pomarantsev. Pomarantsev was born in Soviet Ukraine, fled with his family to Western Europe as a child, and grew up in the UK; that story is the prologue to the book itself, which is a whirlwind tour of modern authoritarian propaganda operations from the Philippines to Serbia to Mexico.
You'd probably also appreciate Anne Applebaum's Twilight of Democracy, although you'd have to overlook your grudge against NYT columnists. I do think it's really illuminating, though, because it's the story of a Reagan Republican, the wife of a conservative Polish politician, witnessing this sort of populist-authoritarian takeover from the inside - from "her" side - first in Poland and then in the US, and the personal fallout from the resulting schisms.
The interesting thing about LKY is that the second generation seems to have succumbed to the same old political incentives. I was reading up about a family fight between the siblings and it seems the eldest son has succeeded to the position on what, to me, seems primarily nepotism and is trying to build up a cult of personality around his late father (and by extension, the family mystique and mythos) to advantage himself - something like the Kims in North Korea.
His father seemingly didn't want anything like that, his sister and brother are rowing with him over that, and there's a lot of not very clear 'so the brother and his son(s) went overseas with a large chunk of family wealth and are fighting political battles back home in Singapore' and again, it seems to be a dynastic struggle in the making as to who will succeed the current PM - one of his sons or one of his nephews?
The obvious lesson to take from this is that Latin American socialism is bad.
Here's my question about this. Evo Morales got elected in Bolivia in 2006 on basically the same platform as Chavez, i.e. nationalise energy, oppose US imperialism and generally implement full socialism. The result of this was that GDP doubled and the poverty rate was cut in half. Bolivia is pretty chaotic and the MAS leadership are still throwing bricks at each other, but it seems like on the whole the Morales government was a good period for the country.
Chavez and Morales believe the exact same things and are each other's closest ally. How come Chavez completely destroyed Venezuela, but Morales seems to have improved Bolivia? What's going on there?
The economic boom you're referring to started before Morales. It was largely the result of the resolution of the Gas War which saw voters drop opposition to the exploitation of gas in exchange for a system where the state got more control and took a bigger share of the pie. This more stable environment encouraged investment which Morales then unilaterally changed the terms of, basically getting a bunch of gas companies to agree to build infrastructure then changing the terms of the deal after it was built. However, unlike Chavez he continued to allow them to operate the companies.
Morales then continued to expand various forms of natural resource exploitation to fund welfare while not directly running industries. Unfortunately he couldn't get much foreign investment due to his previous actions. But there were industries, like logging, which could be done without much advanced tools. This type of thing (and in fact mainly gas) accounts for most of the quadrupling of GDP. Which, to be clear, went from $1,000 per capita to $4,000. And like many petrostates follows oil prices.
> Soap operas, films, and baseball games would dissolve and be replaced by the familiar face seated behind a desk or maybe the wheel of a tractor . . . it could [last] minutes or hours.
How did this not tank his popularity? How did this not cause the entire country to think of him as that asshole who keeps interrupting the ballgame?
I felt the same way, but then I have what might be an especially low tolerance for politicians speaking and advertisements. Maybe its different when the broadcast could determine the fate of your whole family? So instead of "this fucking guy again, going on about politics ugh" its "oh my god what's going to happen? Is there a new policy that will be get me/lose me a lot of money and security?". Also lots of people chose to look at and think about trump all day everyday despite nothing interesting going on at all, so there is clearly an audience for annoying and dramatic politicking.
Chavez was backed by the Soviet sphere in the 1980s. In fact the pre-Chavez governments had already been pretty socialist but they took their commitment to human rights a little too seriously for the Soviet Union's tastes. (Which is to say, they actually criticized both sides' human rights records and the Soviets were the worse party. This upset the Soviets who saw human rights purely as a tool to criticize the capitalist world.) As a result they backed several even farther left governments, generally ones less committed to this whole 'democracy' thing. Chavez's movement was among them.
This backing mostly went away post-1991 but the Cubans remained close allies. In part because they needed a new source of gas and connection to the outside world as Russian support waned.
Chavez won because the previous governments had become fantastically corrupt leading to an election in which not being involved in any existing party was a huge advantage. In this environment (which included a former beauty queen gaining significant vote share) Chavez's very well organized and relatively well funded, partly from outside money, MBR-200 was able to stand up something like a party infrastructure fast while also credibly claiming they were outsiders. There was actually a minor split in the party between the Chavistas and the more radical communists who felt this was abandoning armed revolutionary struggle.
Once he was running his party abandoned basically all farther left policy language while simultaneously promising his party members this would be the thin end of the wedge. He ran on anti-corruption, increased welfare, and fighting against the traditional political parties. And once he was in power he increasingly centralized power in his movement and moved farther to the left. This is also why it survived his death: his party is still around and in charge.
By the way, I'm not sure if you're aware of this but Venezuela's agreed to hold internationally observed elections in 2024 in exchange for various kinds of sanctions relief and steps toward normalization. They've already backpedaled on that by trying to ban the primary opposition figure. But if Biden can manage to get an opposition leader into power it would be great for both countries. Venezuela can be spared a more traumatic way to transition away from the Chavistas and the United States can resume better relations with the country (which would be mutually beneficial in several ways).
It's been noticed that being a "resource-extracting" or "rentier" economy is bad for expanding the middle class and bad for democracy as a result. When you don't depend on taxing most of the country to do things, you tend to lose track of them.
Norway has an approximately Georgist approach to natural resource management, with roots stretching back to the early 20th century in that regard, and the oil system in particular was set up with the help of an Iraqi petroleum geologist who desperately wanted to save Norway from the resource curse:
The US is oil rich but rich enough in so many other ways that revenues from oil alone or even resource extraction in total don't dominate government revenue
A large oil fueled welfare state introduced a lot of opportunities to manipulate that for political power, including making some of it disappearing into officials' pockets. Both sides relied on this to maintain voting support and internal political discipline. Additionally, there were fairly effective reforms in the 1980s which resulted in a huge uptick in corruption prosecutions which made people feel corruption was getting worse even as it was getting better.
Of course, Chavez was the cure being worse than the disease. The big scandal in the early 1990s of $250 million disappearing is nothing compared to what happens every year now. And unlike that scandal, where the corrupt president was removed through democratic processes after investigative journalism, no similar removal or journalism is possible under Chavismo.
It's a foolish effort by Biden. Maduro will burn the whole country to the ground before he gives up power, and I'm sure Maduro Jr. will be just as much of a disaster as his Cuban-puppet daddy, or he'll "contract cancer" and be replaced with another Cuban puppet.
So please before calling Modi a dictator, define dictatorship and then judge Modi.
In China and North Korea they do not have a second party to vote for. Those are dictatorship.
Putin is potentially a dictator since he has imprisoned his opponents on bogus charges. So even if there are elections, there is no one strong enough that is not in jail on kangaroo court charges.
Modi is not jailing his opponents. His opponents are espousing minority appeasement policies (eg Quota/Affirmative Action) and losing elections.
I suspect Scott's definition of "dictator" might roughly correspond to "anyone the New York Times editorial board has called a dictator." (If he called Angela Merkel a dictator, that'd change my mind.)
You're joking but the whole episode around Truss did feel weirdly un-democratic. She was the head of an elected party and got deposed by [it was never really clear] to prevent her implementing (probably ruinous) economic reforms. It does seem to suggest that there are forces in the British state with the power to remove prime ministers if they attempt anything too disastrous.
So my understanding was that her party turned against her when she crashed the economy? I don't know much about British politics, but I'd assumed it was democratic (in the sense that it was elected officials using powers described in the law in an intended way)
She was removed by her own party (who also put her in power, she never led it in an election). Specifically, the person who told her she had to go was the chairman of the 1922 committee (Graham Brady), which is an association of Tory MPs who aren't on the government payroll.
Ah yes, Scott always turns to the New York times for advice on who is a good person. Well known fact.
(Since sarcasm doesn't translate well through text I'll just remind everyone that the NYT did a hatchet job on Scott that backfired on them rather amusingly so it is unlikely he turns to them for guidance for anything)
Yes, that's why the fact that he agrees with them is funny. (Yes, I know "reversed stupidity isn't intelligence," etc.)
When you're an institutionalist committed not to holding positions offensive to more than 70% of your social circle, you're going to be taking your cues from the New York Times, even if you hate them.
I quibble with the "taking your cues from" part. I never ever read the Times, quite deliberately avoiding any links that point to it (made very easy by the paywall, thanks NY Times). But I would not at all be surprised if I held some/many positions in agreement with NYT.
There's no reason why 'taking your cues' from the New York Times has to mean *directly* from them. Their takes are repeated (or the same takes are printed) all over mainstream respectable Twitters and blogs and indeed by that supermajority of your social circle who you want not to hate you. The New York Times is the simply most visible and highest-prestige of this broad group of opinion broadcasters, useful for the figure of speech called metonymy.
Particularly useful in this case because it's funny and sad.
Yeah I see your point. NYT has enough weight to get its ideas diffused into the system as if by osmosis. As a certain former President - "hated" and/but propelled into power by NYT and its ilk - liked to say, SAD!
While I agree Modi is not openly a dictator, he is trying very hard to destroy the opposition in very illiberal ways. He's weaponised the ED, taken over the courts, all media is now under his or his cronies control, and are extremely careful about upsetting him. Public criticism is essentially non-existent because people are too scared that the machinery will come after you. All of these are dangerous steps.
Modi/BJP have no incentive to make opposition stronger.
If the opposition had stopped taking unpopular positions of minority appeasement such as quota for x (x can be Muslims or other minorities group), the opposition would be stronger today. If Rahul Gandhi was not the face of opposition, Modi would not be looking at a 3rd term victory. So before blaming Modi, take a good look at his pathetic opposition. There are many TV channels that are left wing in India (NDTV et al). Not sure what is meant by all media now under his control.
I'm no fan of the opposition in India, they've been massive cock ups for India. But, and this is a big one, there's a difference between adopting bad policies, which the opposition has consistently done, and between messing with the institutions that allow democracy to function (checks and balances, media, judiciary, statistical institutions, bureaucracy), which no one has done to the extent Modi is doing since Indira Gandhi, and she was not as competent about it as he is. Also, not sure where you were when this happened, but NDTV was bought out by Adani.
None of the dictators reviewed so far (Erdogan, Modi, Orban, Xi, Putin, and Chavez) have been officially dictators. All of them still hold elections. All of them still have legal ways to be removed from power. All of them have put up roadblocks to being removed from power or exerted control over the media, to various degrees. Most of them are popular in their country.
There isn't a clear line one crosses to become dictator. These reviews so far have been about modern leaders who have some dictator-like aspects.
This is nonsense. Erdo, Modi, and Orban, I kind of see your point; but Putin hasn't been through a real election in over twenty years, and Xi has never been through any elections at all. The Red Cinese public can only vote directly at the local level, and only then for candidates approved by the Party.
There's also a lot of ways for initially-democratically-elected leaders to expand their powers, and remove any chance they'll be held accountable, before they reach the level of a Putin or a Chavez, even if they don't go as far as carrying out terrorist attacks against a bunch of poor people and blaming it on Muslims to start an imperialist war and maintain hold on power:
Xi has been through many elections, the most recent being earlier this year in March 2023. They may not be free or competitive elections, but that's exactly the point I'm making. All these leaders keep up the pretense of being elected. None of them have an official position of "dictator", "king", "emperor", or similar. They vary in how much they've rigged the game. There's a spectrum from less dictator-esque to more and there's no clear line to separate them.
No one is disagreeing that Xi or Putin belong in the Dictator's Book Club reviews. The GGP comment was disagreeing that Modi belongs.
Then they're not real elections! Fuck, the PRC doesn't even have direct bullshit elections for positions outside the lowest local level, and they have complete control over who gets picked for those anyway.
Your tone sounds like you're disagreeing with something, but you're not disagreeing with anything as far as I can tell.
Xi Jinping was elected in 2012, and re-elected every 5 years after that. They don't have direct elections, but neither does the US for the presidency. China has more layers of indirection (people elect county-level representatives, who elect provincial representatives, who elect the ~3000 members of the NPC, who elected Xi president), but it's not indirection that's the main problem; it's the rigging of the elections. Russia demonstrates that you can rig direct elections just fine.
Erdogan, Modi, Orban, Putin, and Chavez also have elections that aren't free or competitive, to various degrees. That's why they're in the Dictator Book Club series. For example, one study on India's democracy under Modi concludes:
> The BJP government incrementally but systemically attacked nearly all existing mechanisms that are in place to hold the political executive to account, either by ensuring that these mechanisms became subservient to the political executive or were captured by party loyalists. Almost all the techniques of what Sadurski calls the 21st century authoritarian’s “playbook” were deployed.
North Korea has two other parties besides the ruling party, China has eight so-called "minor" parties. Check, maybe other things that seem obvious to you are also wrong?
You're not paying attention - 'An investigation report by The Indian Express reveals that a total of 121 prominent politicians have been under ED probe ever since the NDA government came to power in 2014. Among those politicians who were booked, raided, questioned, or arrested by the ED, as many as 115 are Opposition leaders which makes it 95 per cent of total politicians.
This can be said as a significant increase in contrast to the probe agency's casebook in the UPA regime (2004 to 2014) which had only 26 political leaders under its scanner and it included 14 from the Opposition (54 per cent).'
That last point about how Chavez reminds you a lot about Trump was something we felt here in Venezuela too. Back in 2016 I remember pretty much everybody I knew was dreading that the gringo Chavez could win (sorry if that's an offensive term, I really have no idea how Americans feel about it but back then that was one of the ways we referred to Trump here).
But after Trump won and first it very quickly became clear that he was a strong hardliner against Maduro which made the Maduro government very scared for a while (at least until the collapse of Guaidó), and second that he rolled back Obama's Cuban thaw pretty much short-circuited the brain of a lot of us Venezuelans, me included for a good while, and we became staunch supporters of Trump.
I known plenty of people here that will never forgive Obama for that, the Cuban thaw pretty much solidified the idea that Obama was if not directly Chavista/Castrista then dangerously sympathetic to it on a lot of us
If you want an explanation for why the latino communities of Florida are so fond of Trump that's the best explanation I can come up with from my vantage point here in Venezuela.
I don't know if it helped Chavez, I never claimed that. What I meant is that the Cuban thaw was (and is to this day) seen by pretty much everybody in the opposition here as an unacceptable concession to both chavismo and castrismo on the part of Obama.
Anecdotally, how popular is Maduro now? Is it a case where everyone hates him but him and his cronies have the guns, or does he have a solid base of support still in the general population?
As far as I can tell it's the first one. The recent opposition primaries had a much, MUCH stronger showing than anybody was expecting and that's got every political actor here quite on edge, specially the government.
Was there some sort of an expectation that if Obama had just continued the hardline Cuba policies then *this* would have been the time the Communists lost power for good, or is this just a vibes thing?
I'm not a Venezuelan, but if I was I imagine I would feel that dropping policies that weaken Cuba, the country that strengthens the regime I don't like, would be something I would oppose. In other words, "the enemy of the friend of my enemy is my friend, but if they stop being the enemy of the friend of my enemy that that will be good for my enemy and bad for me, which would bother me."
or, less neutrally:
"the good guys oppose the bad guys who support the other bad guys who oppress me, and if the good guys stop doing that that is not good and very worrisome."
It doesn't just seem like a "vibes" thing, there is a causal connection you can draw there. Albeit a circuitous one.
It's pretty much that, yes. If Chavez had never entered the picture the Castro regime would have either had to severely change track and get on the US's good side or it would have collapsed completely during the early 2000s. Regardless of the thaw or anything else Obama did or didn't do, Chavez bought a golden life-raft for Cuba with the unimaginably huge oil windfall he got so the regime could have kept on trucking for a good long while as it has.
I appreciate your input as a Venezuelan very much but I think I can reasonably speak for many Americans when I say that Cuba is a *terrible* proxy for reading the tea-leaves in American politics and at this point has essentially nothing to do any kind of sympathy or antipathy for communism, socialism, or even any particular feelings for the Casto regime for the 99.9% of the U.S. population that *aren't* the descendants of Cuban emigres who were doing well under Bautista but faced disfavor or dispossession over Castro.
Cuba at large gets essentially no press coverage here and when the issue comes up, the default vibe is along the lines of "well, embargoing Cuba hasn't worked to destroy the Castro regime for the six-decades plus that we've been trying it, and every other Western nation including Canada seems to have no problem allowing people to visit and buy cigars, what are we trying to accomplish here any more? Whatever it was, it clearly hasn't worked. Given that, I should be allowed to go to Havana as a tourist and buy cigars." There's no broader left/right political valence to it because Cuba is so geopolitically irrelevant to the United States except as a possible tourist destination.
It's essentially only *because* it's such a non-issue to most Americans that the embargo continues, because continuing it is basically an electoral sop to the Cuban emigre community in Florida as an attempt to win votes--which, again, works because nobody else really cares about Cuba.
As a side note, this isn't the first time I've heard concern about potential Communist sympathies be expressed from a Latin American perspective (particularly vis a vis Venezuela) with respect to the way American elections go (and, again, I really appreciate the input) but cannot emphasize enough for observers there that there is no actual Red-Communist / Marxist / Leninist constituency here of any relevance even remotely. The actual debates (and the tossing around of the word "socialism," which is used much more loosely than "communism" is here) are almost entirely centered around the degree to which the U.S. should adopt social welfare states like those of North/Western Europe, and have nothing to do with *actual* Marxism/Leninism/Maoism.
Again, not trying to yell at you here and I really appreciate the input, just trying to clarify what I think may be a broader misunderstanding in Latin America about the interplay between the word "socialism" as used in U.S. politics relative to the fact that there's no actual leftist-in-the-sense-of-Communist constituency here.
I understand your points, and as I said this is the best explanation I've come up with from my own experience here in Venezuela.
"It's essentially only *because* it's such a non-issue to most Americans that the embargo continues, because continuing it is basically an electoral sop to the Cuban emigre community in Florida as an attempt to win votes"
Finally realizing that was what ended up souring me on Trump to be honest. As I said, his aggressive bluster against Maduro kinda short-circuited our brain and it took me an embarrassingly long time to come to that conclusion.
One thing that helped Chavez is that Venezuela's economy and culture was kind of "extractivist" and highly corrupt because of the massive dependence on the Oil Money even before he came along. I remember reading a blog from a Venezuelan talking about a particularly comical version of this: in order to pay your taxes, you had to get your tax form stamped. The bureaucrats in charge of the stamp quickly realized this, and started demanding bribes for people to pay their taxes.
I'd say the "flaw" in democracy is more that if you have a huge mass of very poor, sporadically employed people, it's possible to build up a political machine based off of handing out "goodies" for political support (I'm not saying that to dump on the people casting their votes for that - if you were deeply impoverished and sporadically employed, wouldn't you want to support the person who helps you?). In most democracies, there's a limit in that you're also aware that you need a productive economy with investment, and there's a pretty quick feedback loop on this stuff if it gets too expensive and your tax revenue starts cratering (which you can extend through borrowing, but only for so long). Having Big Oil Money lets you circumvent that limitation for a while.
It's also due to deliberate decision to do things like anonymising voting, such that you an bribe people all you like and they can take that bribe and walk into the booth and still vote for the other guy, which rather removes the incentive to hand out bribes outside the booth
That does help. Though I wonder at the relative order of things. Did people get richer, so they pushed for anonymous voting because they didn't need patronage? Or did they push for anonymous voting, and got richer afterwards?
Now that we're moving to mail-in, this will likely reverse. There's no anonymity there, at least if it's done in a manner that secures against fraud.
I know that in Australia, at least, anonymous voting was very consciously put in place to stop obvious bribery (with beer rather than hard cash, it is Australia :P ).
Our electoral commission is independent, though, so the angry punter no longer getting free beer didn't have the option to go vote for the pro-bribery-in-elections party
The commissioner is appointed by a joint parliamentary commission - independence is more a function of societal norms, it's pretty hard to guarantee in theory.
also, amending my earlier comment, anonymous voting in Australia came super early, predating the independent Electoral Commission - and indeed, predating "Australia" as a unified nation.
In point of fact the U.S. has an even bigger money-tsunami than Venezuela - being the world's reserve currency and a guaranteed market for national bond issues. We get to borrow basically infinite money at extremely low interest rates in ways that would be ruinous for any other country, but in our case appear to be defying fiscal gravity for the time being...for the time being...
The upside of the U.S. political being dysfunctional and extremely hard to get anything done in, is that it's also hard to get crazy things done in it.
Sort of. It's harder to pass crazy legislation, but it's also easier for e.g. courts to make crazy rulings, because the legislature doesn't rein them in.
I was also living in Venezuela when Chavez was elected for the first time, and what really impressed me was how sick people were of AD and COPEI (the two main political parties, very, very roughly analogous to the Democratic and Republican parties). Chavez' main opponent, Enrique Salas Romer, was also running as an independent and had a slight lead (30 percent to 25 percent, something like that--there were a LOT of candidates) and when AD and COPEI got cold feet and declared that they would both support Salas Romer--his support promptly dropped to 10 percent and Chavez's rose to 50.
I have to say, having seen Chavez in action, that when Trump came on the scene I was really struck by the similarity between them, in that, as far as I could see, neither wanted the presidency for ordinary political reasons; they just wanted to have the best possible stage for the (Chavez)/(Trump) ultimate reality TV show.
> In particular, he benefitted from a constitutional assembly; he was able to plan it so that a 52% showing by his party led to control of 95% of the seats, essentially letting him rewrite the constitution and gain unlimited power. Most western countries have better constitutional amendment processes than this, so we’re probably safe.
I'm really curious about how this worked. Like, sure, malapportionment and gerrymandering are things, but...?
Imagine a series of political subdivisions that each exactly match the national percentage, where the highest vote getter wins. So 52% in each voting district means a complete win. I presume that the remaining 5% were so heavily towards the opponents as to make this impossible or not worth the effort.
I mean, you're right, 52% -> 95% does actually sound quite doable with classic gerrymandering techniques. But like, the question is why on earth was the president given sole -- and I'm guessing likely unreviewable -- districting power for this purpose?? Like that's the vulnerability here.
People frequently underestimate the time and effort put into the American Constitution. Creating lasting and balanced rules for a nation is hard work. It's quite easy to get just enough people on your own side, especially if you can bribe or threaten them, to get them to legally give you whatever you want. If the rules don't permit your opposition real power to curb you, then that's the game.
I think I finally now understand why Dictatorships end up so irrationally bad and awful (eg discouraging accurate reporting) - it's because Trump, not the TV trope of ambitious tyrant - is the archetypal dictator. Becoming and remaining a dictator is an incredibly high risk move. If all you want is a few slave girls you can buy a compound and bribe some people. People become dictators because of a profound psychological need for admiration/control/etc that they can't ignore. Normal people who find themselves dictators behave differently. That gives you Khruschev, MBS or Hu Jintao not Xi or Putin.
Interestingly, if true, this suggests that monarchy might be strongly preferable to anything but a wealthy educated western style democracy. The uncertainty in succession/power means there will be a strong selection for nutters willing to make long shot gambles to gain power and the longer the system persists the greater the chance someone wins the power lotto and seizes control.
I understand the concern but look at Khrushchev. When he took control losing power meant a firing squad. By the time he left it meant a comfortable retirement. Same is true with Mao's succesors.
I think the effect you speak of only controls when you have a personal cult (the kind of psych I'm talking about). Otherwise if you aren't unnecessarily cruel the desire of other actors to avoid their own bad ends allows for retirement provided you can credibly commit to leave politics (tho I agree it's harder for charismatic first gen revolutionaries ...Castro couldn't have easily committed)
Mohammed Reza was the one of the best leaders in the history of Persian civilization. It's bullshit Commie/Islamist propaganda that he was at all monstrous. So much so that the single worst atrocity of his regime was, in fact, an obvious Khomeini'ist false flag:
That greatly overrated commie sow Marjane Satrapi is one of the many people responsible for perpetuating this disgusting coverup. If only she had the decency to be killed along with her treasonous uncle.
The operational problem with monarchy (besides it's instability, tendency to breed court politics, it's reward of toadies and courtiers over competent administrators, and the fact that it doesn't even solve the "going mad with power" problem that dictators have) is that it tends to throw up mediocrities. Look at Wilhelm II, Nicholas II, Charles II (or Charles III, for that matter). None of them are out and out maniacs, they're just the sort of people who should be managing a grocery store or working in an office rather than leading a country.
Say what you want about democracy, at least it tends to throw up leaders with some exceptional qualities - people who clawed their way past a packed field rather than being assigned the job based on which vagina they were pushed out of.
Ohh a democratic system with a broad middle class is obviously better, I was just comparing non-democratic options. We often seem to discourage monarchies because they don't have the pretense of anything but personal power.
And yes monarchies certainly have the mediocrity problem (though it's less mediocrity -- mediocre leaders could just ask for advice -- and more the conviction that one is brilliant when one isn't...an issue exacerbated by a lifetime of toadies) but simply choosing a random leader still might be better than letting whoever can grab dictatorial power do so.
I'd add that I suspect democratic governance is only stable/helpful when you do have a broad economic base. Countries full of poor people may be better off following a version of the Chinese system initially -- one in which the party elites were legitimately well compensated and without the Maoist legacy of individual control. I guess that's basically the Roman republic model (they had hundreds of stable years and would likely have managed a democratic transition in an industrial age). Countries with lots of poverty and a few highly profitable industries like oil may just be fucked.
The reason I say that is in such systems the populace won't be (and perhaps shouldn't be) inclined towards conservative (small c) incrementalism meaning they'll have to weigh policy considerations they lack the education and knowledge to judge. A poor Venezuelan farmer can't reasonably be expected to tell what's genuinely important economic policy and what's an attempt by elites to retain their advantage making the system extremely vulnerable to populists with bad policies.
Though all options seem pretty bad here...ideally we'd have some kind of benign colonial administration but I fear that any state that would do that well will be one which sees it as morally objectionable.
But in the context of an absolutist monarchy, ineffectual "mediocrities" as sovereigns, especially skint ones, are usually no bad thing in the long run because they give competent functionaries and counsellors a chance to have their own way up to a point and gain more experience and power in leadership, which they are then reluctant to forgo.
Of course one can have too much of a good thing, if they manage to depose the sovereign and become an even more despotic replacement!
Incidently, I wouldn't call Charles II a mediocrity. Given Parliament's recently gained supremacy, he managed the country with astute compromise and popular policies. It was his father Charles I's shortage of funds and obstinate refusal to compromise, incompetence in its own way, that led to his downfall and Parliament's victory (which is an example of my point).
Agreed that mediocre absolutist monarchs are a good thing in as much as they push the system towards less absolutism, that that's a bit like saying that horrifically violent dictators are a good thing in as much as they push the system towards the overthrow of the violent dictatorship.
The point is that monarchy, as a system, is flawed even on its own terms because it just does not produce better leadership than you would expect by random selection. And, in fact, because a would-be monarch is often primed from birth by having everyone defer to them, they are frequently the worst combination of egotistical and useless.
I agree that monarchies do not produce the best candidates for running a country, but the idea that a random selection would be equal is incredibly incorrect.
At the very least you would need to remove criminals, people suffering from malnutrition and other direct impairments, and the uneducated from the pool. You would also need to develop a leadership education program to teach this "random" person some of the things that a prince would have grown up learning through osmosis even if nobody taught him on purpose.
Outside of a few famous idiots, the history of monarchies would put them in the top ~1% of capable people in any country they ran, probably more like top .1%. In a country of a million people, that would still be 1,000-10,000 people equally or more capable and a bad failure rate for a monarchy, but not at all the same as random people.
As if the criminal tendencies of various kings have not been fodder for stories since the days of clay tablets. I'll also grant that they're better fed and sometimes get an education (although far, far less than one would expect in our technocratic era). As for 'direct impairments', I don't known if you've noticed the number of times that hereditary monarchy veers off into incest and genetic deformity? Or are you a fan of the Hapsburg chin?
All told, I'd put the failure rate for monarchy solidly in the 'average' category, as the good (food, sometimes education) is more or less balanced by the bad (raised in an environment that promotes mental pathology, family tree that forms an uroboros). I'd also say that the extent to which the negative tendencies are reduced and the positives reinforced almost exactly mirrors how autocratic the entire system is. More power concentrated in the hands of a divine ruler leads to marrying your sister and the Kafes, less leads to parliamentary monarchy and industrial revolution.
All of which leads me to the conclusion that the best form of monarchy is the one where the monarch is replaced entirely by someone who worked their way to leadership and had to defend it against multiple powerful interests before voluntarily surrendering it. I.E. democracy, or something with the same flavour.
> All of which leads me to the conclusion that the best form of monarchy is the one where the monarch is replaced entirely by someone who worked their way to leadership and had to defend it against multiple powerful interests before voluntarily surrendering it. I.E. democracy, or something with the same flavour.
There's also that Ottoman version where the successor would be whichever son managed to seize power and kill all his rivals. It doesn't have the "voluntary surrender" aspect, but it's got the others.
He isn't and I didn't claim that he was. I used him as an example of someone with a deep psychological need to be admired and feel he's on top.
Most people in Trump's situation would have choosen not to run rather than risk putting their shady buisnesses under the microscope. If they did run and win they'd have behaved very differently. He isn't and wasn't a dictator but he has the deep seated desperate need for approval I was talking about.
Shady businesses? Is that from press coverage or your actual knowledge of the situation? I won’t bring up Biden here because he didn’t even have a business, shady or otherwise.
Ah, of course. Sorry, I thought it might have been someone famous I'd never seen referred to by his initials, like one of the other comments referring to "LKY" (Lee Kuan Yew, the Singapore guy).
> I swear to the God of my fathers, I swear on my homeland, I swear on my honour, that I will not let my soul feel repose, nor my arm rest until my eyes have seen broken the chains that oppress us and our people by the order of the powerful
> I will not cease from mental fight, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, till we have built Jerusalem, in England's green and pleasant land.
IDK how obvious this is to people who grew up outside the UK's now-rapidly-vanishing tradition of nominal/cultural anglican christianity, but a salient characteristic of the church of england since ~1700 has been a remarkable ability to bury the significance of potentially very incendiary religious ideas in deliberately milquetoast procedural ritual. Someone from the US, for example, could hear us singing Jerusalem and assume that at least on some level we meant it, but for most people it really was just 'that vaguely patriotic religious song we sing sometimes'
Especially since the American analogue, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, IS taken seriously: the US fights all wars as though they were holy wars, to annihilation or unconditional surrender.
We DID win the wars. We just decided to withdraw and toss the victory to our enemies anyway, for stupid, shallow reasons that failed on even their own terms: whether Nixon in Vietnam, Obama in Iraq, or Biden in Afghanistan.
It probably is, but it could also be a hidden reference to a well-known illusion (tendency for native speakers to automatically correct some of the typos while reading, including double article thingy, quite well researched in cognitive psychology).
It's sort of common knowledge in rationalists circles, and I'm pretty sure Scott also mentioned it in some of his previous posts too. So one could suspect that double "the" was left in the text on purpose (I don't think it is the case, but it would be pretty on character for Scott to do if it was).
I think that Chris was just surprised that he noticed it at all, as native speakers usually don't (and neither do fluent non-native speakers, I personally did not notice the typo).
A lot of posts have Scott deliberately leaving several doubled "the"s in a paragraph, and then later referring to how you probably didn't notice all the doubled "the"s.
I'm realizing this is actually a pretty clever way to cover for a somewhat common typo.
I was living in New England during the Bush years, and I regularly saw ads by one of the Kennedy scions for a charity that provided free heating oil to the poor, "thanks to the generosity of Hugo Chavez and the people of Venezuela." At the time there were a lot of liberals who hated Bush and his endless wars and the way he treated the rest of the world like garbage... and there in Venezuela was a vocally anti-Bush politician, he gives to our poor and he's endorsed by a Kennedy! So I'm sure Chavez had a very high approval rating in some parts of greater Boston for a time, and equally sure that after Maduro took power and everything went to shit, they decided to collectively forget that.
I was a Daily Kos reader with no knowledge of Venezuela (or of the history of socialist governments, really) and I remember getting a vaguely positive vibe about Chavez from that site. Very much a "if Bush doesn't like him how bad can he be" thing.
There was also that famous Bernie Sanders quote wasn't there? "These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who's the banana republic now?" -- dated 2011
I've seen that quote posted hundreds of times by r/neoliberal and r/enoughsandersspam types as a dunk on Bernie and didn't even know that Bernie didn't actually say it.
I guess it's just confusing because by endorsing the editorial as a "Must Read" on his website, he maybe *sorta* endorsed its conclusion? Because the "Who's the banana republic now?" paragraph is literally the concluding paragraph to the essay. But it's still confusing: he never said it and never outright endorsed it, just endorsed the editorial as a whole... so I don't know whether it should count or not.
(It doesn't help matters of course that the original version of his 'retweet' that stuck around for literal years wasn't clear enough that it was a retweet, to be sure.)
Easy enough to condemn somebody in hindsight when we know more information and it doesn't matter anymore. There were a lot of people on the left that ranged between vaguely and fully pro-Chavez during the Bush years.
The Venezuelan leader was often marginalized as a radical. But his brand of socialism achieved real economic gains
By: DAVID SIROTA
TOPICS: EDITOR'S PICKS, HUGO CHAVEZ, HUMAN RIGHTS, LATIN AMERICA, POVERTY, SOCIALISM, VENEZUELA, POLITICS NEWS
...
No, Chavez became the bugaboo of American politics because his full-throated advocacy of socialism and redistributionism at once represented a fundamental critique of neoliberal economics, and also delivered some indisputably positive results. Indeed, as shown by some of the most significant indicators, Chavez racked up an economic record that a legacy-obsessed American president could only dream of achieving.
When a country goes socialist and it craters, it is laughed off as a harmless and forgettable cautionary tale about the perils of command economics. When, by contrast, a country goes socialist and its economy does what Venezuela’s did, it is not perceived to be a laughing matter – and it is not so easy to write off or to ignore..."
[Note: I am not yet aware if Mr. Sirota has ever addressed the state of the Venezuelan economy since then. He is perhaps too busy working as a senior adviser and speechwriter for Mr. Bernie Sanders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sirota
We shall have to settle for Mr. Sirota's concluding remarks, I suppose:]
"Are there any lessons to be learned from Venezuela’s decision to avoid that subsidization route and instead pursue full-on nationalization?
Likewise, in a United States whose poverty rate is skyrocketing, are there any lessons to be learned from Venezuela’s policies that so rapidly reduced poverty?
And in a United States that has become more unequal than many Latin American nations, are there any constructive lessons to be learned from Chavez’s grand experiment with more aggressive redistribution?
No doubt, there are few absolutely clear answers to those uncomfortable questions, if those questions are assessed honestly... But maybe now that the iconoclast is dead, the cartoon will end. Maybe now Chavez’s easily ridiculed bombast can no longer be used to distract from Venezuela’s record – and, thus, a more constructive, honest and critical economic conversation can finally begin."
EDIT: Wow, if you start digging through the archives, it's incredible what's been memoryholed, there's so much more Chavez praise out there that's been quietly buried. Example:
"Still, in the United States, the positive side of Chávez’s economic legacy is often overlooked. Ever since he was first elected President, in 1999, his critics have been predicting a collapse in the Venezuelan economy. So far, it hasn’t happened."
As illness ends Hugo Chávez’s rule in Venezuela, what will his legacy be? Richard Gott argues he brought hope to a continent.
...
Chávez’s search for a different economic policy, with a powerful role for the state, is thought to be foolish, utopian and destined to fail. Yet with many countries in Europe in a state of economic collapse – largely the result of their long embrace of neoliberal policies – his project for Latin America may soon have wider appeal.
...
Long after successive presidents of the United States have disappeared into the obscurity of their presidential archives, the memory of Hugo Chávez will survive in Latin America..."
"JOSEPH STIGLITZ, IN CARACAS, PRAISES VENEZUELA'S ECONOMIC POLICIES
Nobel Prize winning economist and former vice-president of the World Bank, JOSEPH STIGLITZ, praised Venezuela's economic growth and "positive policies in health and education" during a visit to Caracas on Wednesday.
In his latest book "Making Globalization Work," Stiglitz argues that left governments such as in Venezuela, "have frequently been castigated and called ‘populist' because they promote the distribution of benefits of education and health to the poor."
...
In terms of economic development Stiglitz argued it was not good for the Central Bank to have "excessive" autonomy. Chavez's proposed constitutional reforms, if approved in December, will remove the autonomy of the country's Central Bank.
[Quoter's note: this was how Chavez was able to take full control of the economy and hyperinflate the currency]"
Everything didn't go to shit with Maduro. Chavez had already fucked everything up aplenty, and would've either done the same things as Maduro or been poisoned by his Cuban masters had he not gotten cancer.
Calling the Venezuelan list "cancel culture" is ridiculous.
The total lack of specifics in the following statement reveals its vacuity. The author is entitled to his prejudices as much as anyone, but this is just....weak. "Look at the American regulatory state, and lots of it is ruinous ideas that probably sounded good to people who didn’t understand economics. Take a random Chavez proposal, call it “the Green New Deal”, and publish an editorial saying it will “make the one percent pay”, and half the US electorate will start protesting for it immediately."
"lots of it" "probably sounded good" "half the US electorate". Please.
The total lack of specifics in your criticism... Reveal its vacuity? Why do you disagree? The statement seems perfectly on point and clearly realistic to me
"lots of it" "probably sounded good". None of these are specific enough to be worth arguing against. I listed them in my original post. I was specific.
"lots of it": Scott has some very detailed and specific arguments about some very specific US-regulations - in the medical field, his expertise. Whole posts, much longer than the Chavez one. If you can not find them, I shall gladly assist you. (Actually, I agree with you that those posts are much better than the dictator club ones! Which are still reasonably amusing and enlightening enough. He tries to figure stuff out and share it. ) Bit wild to expect him going all in on US-politics in this piece about Venezuela. "half the US electorate" is specific - or he needs to give their names? "probably sounded good" - what the issue with that? Want a listing of a dozen possible polling results / or insider reports of meetings?
I'm not expecting him to go all in. I probably shouldn't have referred to the half the US. What I'm also objecting to is his treating his speculations as if they were fact. It seems pretty reasonable to ask for two or three examples of such regulations, for example. Or who they sounded good to? I mean, if you want me to take your positions seriously, give me something to work with! To be clear, I don't need insider reports-although there are plenty of those these days. Just make it clear with a couple of examples which regulations or laws you're talking about-I might even agree! But it's impossible to agree or disagree in a void.
Prediction markets are a recurrent theme here. "Mantic monday" posts. Often discussing why they are good, and how the gov tries to kill them with regulation. Another Leitmotiv are charter-cities who are based on the belief that it is easy to create a better-run place from scratch by cutting back on global over-regulation.
In a void? You do live in a country, right? Not in a void? You went to a school? Tried for tax-returns? Never met a rule you considered overdone? Where have you been during lockdowns? In a void?
Yeah. The idea that multiple intelligent and educated people semi independantly arriving to their views through participating in the marketplace of ideas where all kinds of views are available and then starting to spread these ideas on their own be successful and ending up in an equilibrium where most of the instutitions happened voluntary to share these ideas is, somehow, basically the same as a state leader putting their cronies in control of the intitutions so that these instututions spread only the ideas allowed by the states - is mind boggling. At this point we can say that there is no difference between democracy and dictatorship.
Authoritarian leaders do not do "cancel culture". They appeal to it as a boogeyman they need to fight against, thus justifying their censorship and control of the institutions.
> multiple intelligent and educated people semi independantly arriving to their views through participating in the marketplace of ideas where all kinds of views are available and then starting to spread these ideas on their own be successful and ending up in an equilibrium where most of the instutitions happened voluntary to share these ideas
The problem is that this reads like a massive euphemism for coercion.
But here we have Scott somewhat perpetrating this idea, so this can't be the whole answer.
Anyway, I'll still state it explicitly in hope it's going to somewhat help. Coecrcion is a spectrum. No action is totally "free from any influence" because we live in a causal iniverse, and it's not even clear whether alternative is even a coherent idea. And yet there is a magnitude of difference between being persuaded at a gun point and having opportunity to pursue your authenticity.
And inside this spectrum of coercion, there are magnitudes of differences between political coercion, economical coercion and societal coercion. When a government coerces you to do things you are fucked. When you can not afford not to do things you are also pretty much fucked but at least there are some occasional ways around the problem. When people approval/disapproval coerces you - well, it's still bad but very much manageable, especially if you have money and political protection (rights).
As a rule of thumb political coercion is worse than economical, which is worse than social. This rule breaks in extreme cases when a lot of wealth or a lot of social support can be leveraged and turned into political power. But in general, for most of the cases, it's a pretty good heuristic.
So when people claim that the fact that "cancel culture" or even just the fact that most media organically happened to be liberal instead of concervative is as bad as authoritarian/totalitarian state, when they do not see the difference between nearly no coercion and a whole lot of coercion, between social coercion and political coercion - it's a mistake of absurdly huge magnitude.
So, on the rhetorical side, I think the main problem swith your first description were that it elided the role of pressure behind terms like "semi independently" and "happened" and "voluntary", and that there was a stark difference between the places where you used nuanced language and the place where you just said something as if it were universally true ("intelligent", "educated", "all kinds", "on their own", "voluntary"). I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt because I assume you're coming up with this spontaneously in a conversation, and there's only so much nuance that can be packed into a sentence before it becomes unreadable, and it makes sense to focus the nuance on the aspects that the conversation appears to need. But if I were to encounter this in the wild, only the reference to "market" would make me think it wasn't about Mao's Cultural Revolution.
I do agree that there is no action that is completely free of pressure, but... let's just say I'm coming at this from a different perspective where the norms of discourse are vastly different, and it is very unusual for someone to come right out and say it like you did, for very good reasons that are, ironically, in fact due to social pressure. :-)
While I agree in general with your hierarchy of coercion, four big caveats come to mind. First, violence should be added, probably as a 2nd dimension rather than another level. (Although obviously political engagement is implicitly backed by state violence.) Second, those levels bleed into each other. The case with the bakery that wanted to refuse to make a cake is a good example - social bleeds into economic, bringing in politics, and not simply because of wealth or social support. Nighttime marches with burning torches to houses of politicians are another example. Third, social coercion can be seriously psychologically damaging, in ways that the other types are not. We are social apes. Fourth, your descriptions are value-neutral, so I'm assuming that you realize that these things can be applied for bad ends as well as good ends, and that good and bad are subjective. "The Scarlet Letter" comes to mind. In this case, I'm kind of taking a gun-control stance, saying that the weapons should be avoided on principle because people can't be trusted with them, while you appear to be implying that the solution to bad people with weapons is good people with weapons. I think that leads to an arms race and the collapse of civil society.
Regarding your final paragraph, I do think that most people complaining about cancel culture are primarily upset that it's being done to them, and wouldn't complain if it were the other way around. "Who, whom", and all that. When I was growing up, the main example was people being blacklisted for having communist connections. Also, I think "organically" is a very misleading term: not only is this the result of human action, but it imports a positive value association that is unwarranted. Calling it a "monoculture" might be a word with an equivalent negative association.
> I think the main problem swith your first description were that it elided the role of pressure behind terms like "semi independently" and "happened" and "voluntary", and that there was a stark difference between the places where you used nuanced language and the place where you just said something as if it were universally true ("intelligent", "educated", "all kinds", "on their own", "voluntary").
I have troubles understanding what you mean here. How is saying "semi independantly" elides the pressure? The "semi" part is specifically about that. Also you used "voluntary" as an example of both "nuansed" and "universally true" language.
Okay, I suppose you mean that when people are coercing others in a very strong meaning of the word, they may use euphemisms to make this coercion appear less severe? And it creates an implicit associations, that whoever says "semi independantly" actually means something more akin to "at a gun point"? That's true and that sucks. Still we need a way to talk about situations where there is nearly no coercion, where "semi independantly" is not an euphemism but an actual state of affairs, don't you agree?
> let's just say I'm coming at this from a different perspective where the norms of discourse are vastly different, and it is very unusual for someone to come right out and say it like you did, for very good reasons that are, ironically, in fact due to social pressure. :-)
I'll just put this into "non-autistic people are crazy and it's a miracle human society managed to come this far with them in charge" category.
> those levels bleed into each other. The case with the bakery that wanted to refuse to make a cake is a good example - social bleeds into economic, bringing in politics, and not simply because of wealth or social support.
Yes they do, but they are still distinguishable. Imagine if a bakery couldn't possibly afford not to make a cake? Or if it was literraly illegal to refuse to serve a customer. And I'd say that the bleeding in your example does happen due to social support. If al lot of people didn't care about the issue - nothing would happen.
> social coercion can be seriously psychologically damaging, in ways that the other types are not. We are social apes.
I think this is wrong. Not in a sense that social coercion can't be psychologically damaging but because other ways of coercion are damaging in a same and even more severe ways. I'm not sure how to put it into the words, so that a person who didn't experience real authoritarian regimes could understand but living under strong political coercion, where you do not have any power whatsoever - it just sucks your soul away. It turns people into little frightened, and pathetic creatures. Learned helplessness can't even begin to described this state. Everything good and true is twisted into evil and ugly parody of itself and the most horrific thing, is that with time people begin to break, to persuade themselves that this is how things are supposed to be, that they even enjoy it this way. You see the shell of your own mother tearfully ask you not to strip her from the doublethough she put herself into in order not to get crazy with horror. And you oblige, silently mourning her death as a subject of cognition.
I didn't live in real poverty, or, rather, I do not remember it, because being born in the 90s in Russia probably counts, but anyway, I heard that the psychological effects of continious exposure to it are somewhat resembling.
> Fourth, your descriptions are value-neutral, so I'm assuming that you realize that these things can be applied for bad ends as well as good ends, and that good and bad are subjective.
I don't think there is a universal answer here. We need forms of coordination inside society so that it worked at all. Some of them may include some forms of coercion which are actually working as intended for the greater good of all. Consider the fact that a person whose business plan is to sell terrible product that noone wants at huge prices is likely going out of business. Is it a form of economic coercion? Sure. Is it working as intended? Also true.
> Also, I think "organically" is a very misleading term: not only is this the result of human action, but it imports a positive value association that is unwarranted. Calling it a "monoculture" might be a word with an equivalent negative association.
I think that this is likely one of "working as intended with very little coercion" cases, hence the organically label. Look at, say, gay rights. Hundred years ago the mainstream media attitude was not supportive to them. And now it is. How comes? Was there a gay dictator who took controll over the media? Or was it a gradual proccess of more and more people changing their minds based on evidence who managed to appear despite the opposite bias?
It seems to me that Scott is using "cancel culture" here to refer to removing individuals from their jobs and preventing their use of the media (ie, platforming) as punishment, as opposed to throwing them in jail, torturing them, or murdering them in their beds. I don't think he's saying that the people on the list were persecuted for culture war reasons!
With regulating the broadcasters, there are laws on the books saying that radio and TV frequency allocations have to be "in the public interest" and every so often people float the idea of getting the FCC to rule that stations that carry Alex Jones and company aren't in the public interest. The FCC, even under Democratic presidents, has been extremely reluctant to go down that road, as they don't want to engage in political censorship and the bureaucrats involved would probably receive death threats.
The last serious domestic paramilitary threat in the US from what I've seen was the Rajneeshis. We got very lucky there wasn't an insurgency in Oregon, but even they could only have done so much damage, and they were running practice drills for their terror campaign every day. They weren't close to an existential threat, and they were significantly more dangerous than even the Oath Keepers, who've thankfully been hit with a strong decapitory blow from Uncle Sam, and all without any national terror campaign flaring up.
I think this is one of those comparisons that illustrates a frequent phenomenon: it's not confusing that Chavez is "left wing" and Trump is "right wing.
In both cases, and many others, people's stated political beliefs (and especially how they're categorized based on a simplistic system with two categories) are not in fact part of any coherent belief system. In a sort of long-running game of Improv, hucksters develop a political persona associated with groups that use certain kinds of buzzwords as a rallying cry, but the thing they're doing is manipulating (or perhaps riding the wave of) those groups, not actually reasoning about the meaning of the political theories associated with the terminology, or how to apply them.
It's similar to how dictatorships will name themselves things like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Trying to figure out why they're so bad at actually being democratic or a republic is missing the point: they're not actually trying, they're just using the words as idk maybe something like a form of attempted mass hypnosis and ritualized conformity system.
Sir Richard Wharton: Its full name is the People's Democratic Republic of East Yemen, sir. Humphrey Appleby: Ah, I see. So it's a communist dictatorship.
It's not that simple. And as awful as Trump was, it was actually advantageous that he had even fewer deep-seated convictions than Chavez. Comrade Hugo's sincere commitment to socialism turned what should be the dynamo of the Hispanosphere into what may be the only country in the Americas shittier than Haiti.
Dictators, and the dictatorially inclined, also don't favor systems at equal rates. They overwhelmingly prefer systems -- whether outright socialism, or whatever else moves away from capitalism -- that centralize and increase government control of the economy. Trump did as well, but he thankfully lacked the patience, the energy, and moral conviction to go all the way with it.
I'm struggling to see what the specific problem with Trump's tariffs were supposed to be, given that the Biden administration is currently locked in a trade war with China over their potential invasion of Taiwan and has either retained or doubled down on all the Trump-era policies formulated in that regard. And in the wake of the latest crisis in Israel and massive pro-palestine/hamas protests across western nations it seems likely there's going to be a crackdown on either muslim migration specifically or *all* migration in general.
Even if Trump himself is precisely the kind of erratic obligate narcissist ruling through Reality TV engagement metrics described when talking about Chavez, Trump's basic policy platform looks less crazy every year.
The point of the policy is not to maximise short-term economic returns (we have far too much of that kind of thinking already.) The point is to minimise industrial supply-chain dependency on a genocidal totalitarian state doomed to collapse thanks to the world's worst fertility crisis and a housing bubble orders of magnitude worse than subprime. Just as the point of migration restrictions is not to provide low-cost labour, but to ensure your country isn't flooded with an easily-radicalised helot population that could murder you over real or imagined historical grievances.
I searched to see if anyone else made this comment. The comparison to tariffs also doesn't make any sense to me.
Trump's tariffs are surely the opposite of Chavez's economics. They raised prices domestically which caused immediate hurt to the poor (short term cost), in order to build up the economy by generating jobs, expertise and national resilience against a potential foreign enemy (long term benefit).
Chavez's policies were the opposite of that: they reduced prices and gave handouts to the poor (short term benefit), whilst trashing the local economy (long term cost).
That argument felt unsupported and just like generic lazy "everyone bad is Trump" pattern matching.
Agreed. There's actually been a huge build-out of manufacturing capacity in the US over the past couple of years, especially in response to COVID and with the Biden administration's blessing, which I guess they deserve some credit for. A lot of the new factories are so heavily automated that the working class see virtually no benefit, though, except in the construction sector.
A lot of this was already baked into the system because Chinese labor costs have been increasing as their demographics turn sour, and there aren't enough other places with the combination cost-effective infrastructure and transport, ultra-low wages, and sufficient security/political stability to replace it. Plus, there's just enough geopolitical craziness going around that business has been concerned about overstretched supply chains and willing to spend a bit more to buy a bit of resilience.
This is just bullshit revisionism by Trotskyist psychopaths who don't want to accept Venezuela's problems were primarily because of socialism, and that the only way to rectify things is to move away from socialism.
In terms of dictators* this is interestingly the opposite of Lee Kuan Yew, who used his power to force through (mostly) technocratic anti-populist measures and then survived long term because they actually worked really well.
*Or, well, leaders that seems undemocratic, ymmv on whether LKY was a dictator
Or Park Chung Hee in South Korea. He was secure in power, cracked down on opposition violently, but seemed to be generally interested in making Korea powerful and rich. Even more surprising, he did a good job of it. The dictator who followed managed to not kill the golden goose, and now they're a rich democracy...talk about a lucky path! I wonder if being a United States vassal state is what made the difference for them. We let Park and his successor get away with quite a bit (since we needed them to Hold the Line against North Korea) but they still needed to keep us happy.
I knew a Singaporean who called him a dictator, but not with any negative connotation. It was just factually true, but also largely irrelevant considering their strong rule of law.
My impression reading this is that Scott's pushing a version of the standard narrative on Venezuela's, that leftism and illiberalism are dangerous for the economy (apologies if that's not the case).
I won't argue Chavez wasn't an incompetent manager, although it's not clear how many of Venezuela's problems stem from mismanagement vs the drop in oil prices or American sanctions, I would have liked more discussion on that issue.
If the main issue with Chavez was that he relied on popular appeal through policies that sounded good but weren't prudent. In way it's a problem that comes from not being doctorial enough and relying on popular support to stay in power.
Maybe that kind of populism is usually associated with the left, but there's also a symmetric tendency for rightists elected leaders to push policies that sound prudent but aren't actually. Austerity has been was electorally popular in the 2010s in the UK, but a lot of Keynesians will say it's responsible for the stagnation we've experienced.
This essay seemed to link leftism and illiberalism with economic mismanagement, but I'm not sure that's a fair association. China is an obvious example of effective economic interventionism married with a suppressed civil society.
Couldn't the conclusion just as easily be that populism was one reason for Venezuela's decline (alongside external shocks) and leftism and illiberalism were only incidental.
I might just be jaded from all the arguments ad-Venezuela from 5-10 years ago, but holding leftism accountable for whatever a half-dictator, half-reality-tv-star is doing in the third world (even a left-wing one) feels a lot like asking the Chicago school to apologise for Trump.
Similarly, I was left wondering whether I'd missed a semantic shift a few years ago that had made "populist" a term that could only be applied to nominal right-wingers. Chavez seems like the epitome of a populist, which according to Oxford via Google is "a person, especially a politician, who strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.". So I can't figure out why the book review only applies the term to not-Chavez nominal conservatives.
BTW, since nobody has mentioned it, the documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised is an amazing inside view pro-Chavez of the 2002 coup-countercoup. Easy to see why people would like Chavez at the time.
Part of running a country is ensuring that long term effects, including the extremely obvious reality of fluctuating oil prices, will not crash the economy. If oil has to be at unusually high prices for an indefinite period of time to survive, then it's not a good system.
I don't get the impression that American sanctions made that much of a difference, and I understand that the US actually imports oil from Venezuela. Even if American sanctions were drastic, that's something that a country seeking to nationalize foreign assets should really consider. Should America ignore that their citizen's investments in foreign countries were stolen? I get that a sovereign country has the right and power to do so, but they don't have the right and especially not the power to prevent other countries from reacting in ways to protect their own interests or the interests of their citizens.
> Austerity was electorally popular in the 2010s in the UK, but a lot of Keynesians will say it's responsible for the stagnation we've experienced.
Despite all the Tories' trumpeting of austerity, attempting to gain kudos from their supporters and hopefully attract some more for Doing the Right Thing even if unpopular, in practice there never really was any austerity! In other words, it was all a big dog whistle, with very little substance.
Also, the UK has been treading water economically for a good twenty years or more, before this so called austerity was even stated Tory policy, and Gordon Brown (Labour PM until 2010) was spending like a drunken sailor on shore leave. Remember that note the outgoing Treasury minister left his Tory successor? "Sorry, the money's all gone!" :-)
FWIW, I reckon most of the reason for the UK's stagnation is that Labour and Tory politicians for many years have been ever more desperately gaming the GDP growth figure by increasing public spending. This has been in part to prevent foreign investors from panicking at a temporary decline in GDP (which would have been a likely consequence of genuine austerity!) and moving their funds elsewhere. It also reduces unemployment, which admittedly isn't entirely a bad thing, but at the cost of locking more of the workforce in mostly unproductive low-skilled make-work public sector jobs, mooching around Government offices clutching important looking papers but achieving little else!
Shri Lanka and Lebanon are examples of currently ongoing crisis under what look like pretty rightist governments. And what about historical cases like 90s Russia or the Great Depression?
I would say that 1) I did not say all economic collapses of this sort are leftist; it's only the overwhelming majority, and 2) the Great Depression is absolutely nothing like what happened in Venezuela.
Banning agrochemicals to promote organic farming, and diversity quotas in government are "leftist" in modern American English.
And the prolongation of the economic downturn of 1929 into the decade-long Great Depression WAS due to Franklin Roosevelt's decidedly non-"rightist" policies.
I don't think Lebanon is a good example; I would bet that it would be having a crisis no matter what the politics of its government. And I don't think "left" and "right" are good descriptions for Lebanon's politics. The third largest party in parliament is literally Hezbollah, and if you define them as "left", pretty much anything else will be "right".
Anything bad happening to right-wing governments is explained away as the result of external factors, as an inevitable price for future good things happening later down the line, as a result of the policies of a previous left-wing government, or as a result of the policy or government secretly being left-wing. In this they ironically mirror the most ardent of unreconstructed communists.
I’ve also read Rory Carroll’s book, which is excellent, and I wrote myself a (Spanish-language) book about Chávez and “Chavismo,” after I spent years covering the subject for the Wall Street Journal and got to meet Chavez himself. So I have a small explainer on the mall incident referred to early in the review.
I talked to people involved in that situation, because Venezuela is full of ex officials who quarreled with the regime and are willing to spill the beans. They told me the whole mall thing (which is in Youtube and has become legendary as the “exprópiese” incident all over the Spanish-speaking world) was well-planned in advance. Chavez knew that he was going to take over the mall, and the people with businesses in the mall (many of them jewelers) knew it too, so they arranged a degree of state compensation for losing their stores days before.
Let me say that the day when I met Chávez was also very illustrative about his ways with power. I was covering a three-day visit he did to Beijing in late 2008, as the only WSJ reporter who spoke Spanish in all of Asia at the time (I actually lived in Singapore then) and Chávez at one point noticed that the Spanish-speaking media contingent included attractive young women eager to talk to him. So he invited us reporters to the embassy for drinks and pizza that night.
The night at the embassy was chaotic, as everything about Chávez was, to the point that when the time arrived to order pizza, it turned out that nobody in the embassy, or among the traveling group of reporters, spoke Mandarin Chinese other than myself. So I had to take an embassy van with a very friendly embassy official to buy the pizza and deliver it in the building. Chávez ended up speaking a lot and eating no pizza. About a decade later, the helpful embassy official ended up in Madrid, broke and asking her LinkedIn acquaintances for a job to pay the rent.
The thing I learned from this is that oil wealth needs to be shared, preferably the Norwegian way and within the democratic system. Unlike other forms of industries where businesses can say they are wealth creators - oil firms are wealth extractors. Obviously there is value in the extraction of the oil from the ground but any company with a license can do that. The license creates the monopoly. Excluding the bottom 99% here ensures a revolution.
Norway is obviously the poster child for how to do it right. In the US the state that most resembles a petrostate*, Alaska, cuts every citizen a check each fall for "their share" of the oil money. It certianly helps make up for the higher cost of living. One weird effect is that it allows a proportion of the population to effectively live as subsistence hunters, since the oil money acts as a cash infusion for things like snowmobiles and heating oil. I mean, that and the dividends Native Corporations give out to their members, but that's another story altogether.
*Oil makes up something like 20% of Alaska's GDP and oil taxes supply 90% of the State's budget. Federal and State spending makes up another 18% or so of Alaska's GDP. So even though Alaska is only the 4th largest producer of oil in the US, it's economy is by far the most oil dependent (with the possible exception of North Dakota after the recent oil boom. But North Dakota's agricultural industries are ar larger piece of their GDP than oil, and Alaska has no industries even close to oil. Seafood is the next biggest, and it's something like 1/5th the size of oil).
> The other smart Saudi move was the decision to never fully nationalize Aramco… or rather, to fail to nationalize Aramco.
> Iraq, Iran, and Venezuela all nationalized their foreign-built and operated oil companies, and all three predictably produced extremely corrupt and inefficient oil industries. Saudi Arabia actually had the stupid idea to do the same thing, and even created a parallel state-run company known as Petromin which handled all non-oil aspects of petroleum operations. Despite Petromin’s reputation for being extremely corrupt and inefficient, the Saudi government tried to subsume Aramco under its operations after it bought out the Americans. But the legitimately heroic Aramco board of directors revolted, and threatened to resign en masse along with most of the executive staff, so the Saudi government backed down. Aramco absorbed Petromin in 2005 and remains a technically private company to this day (the second largest on earth at time of writing).
On the other hand, Nigeria appears to have found a completely different way to fail:
> In 2005, a bunch of vaguely aligned but disparate mafia groups masquerading as liberation movements consolidated into the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND). Recall, virtually all of Nigeria’s oil is in the Igbo-dominated Niger Delta. From the onset of independence, a lot of Niger Delta locals resented foreign oil corporations and Lagos politicians getting rich off their oil. Plus, given that environmental regulations were not exactly a priority in post-colonial Nigeria, the delta was turning into a toxic wasteland and many of the fishing and agriculture industries of the region were dying. MEND brought together numerous groups that ostensibly fought for the independence of the Niger Delta, but more accurately excelled at setting up fiefdoms, stealing oil, and extorting locals, all for personal enrichment.
> The result was a lot of clashes between mercenaries hired by Western oil companies and rag-tag militias launching ambushes. The actual death toll was never too high, but plenty of engineers and oilmen were captured and held for ransom. Meanwhile, MEND made serious inroads tapping into Western-built infrastructure. They started by literally poking holes into pipelines to siphon off oil, and eventually graduated to building entire refineries and an entire off-shore oil terminal for illicit exports.
About short-termism: One interesting factor here could be whether the individual or the party (at least if it's a stable party) is the main driver. The party is in some ways like a monarchy - it's not just here for the term of one guy. For instance, the Swedish Social Democratic Party (that I don't sympathize with) doesn't just want power this term or even this decade - they want it _forever_ but within the democratic system, which means that at least some of the time, they operate at a horizon of literally several decades (this includes training their own future politicians from their teens in a plethora of systems). It also means that they _will_ ditch a sufficiently unpopular idea once it starts to hurt them (be it the socialization of all companies, resistance to the EU, extremely liberal refugee migration, resistance to NATO, resistance to nuclear power) even when this means taking a 180 ideological turn.
Meanwhile, an individual might not care one whiff what happens the day after the term ends.
So in summary: Chavez was a dictator-lite who ruled via being democratically elected, repeatedly, and who did not kill his opponents but did jail them ineffectively.
Well ok then.
At least there is a sentence noting that Venezuela was a nation of massive inequality when oil prices fell and Chavez came to power.
What is notably missing is any description of what Chavez' policies did for Venezuelans overall - was it positive? negative?
Other notable omissions or oversights:
What was the role of the entrenched opposition? Was it purely because they hated Chavez' populist methods, or because he took away control of their golden geese, or because he was a dictator(lite), or because he was a bad manager of the nationalized golden geese or something else or all of the above? Given the many public and certainly more private actions which were taken in opposition to Chavez, this seems a significant gap.
What was the role of foreign powers during Chavez' rule? It is notable that sanctions were not enacted until Chavez passed away. Does this mean Chavez was a Latin Erdogan - able to skillfully dance between superpowers to get the most for Venezuela, to the annoyance of all? This also seems a significant oversight.
I think the note about the list of party supporters/opponents effectively determining whether you had a livelihood or not, plus emergency overrides of every news station and checks/balances in office, meant that elections were hollow even if they were conducted fairly on paper.
Let me put it this way: it isn't clear that this list is much different than the wholesale job changes during a party switchover of the White House. The scale is likely bigger, but then again these people were not voting for Chavez to start with.
Or put another way: the implicit assumption you make that most people signing the original petition (the source of the list) was an undecided or neutral voter is probably not a good one. I'm sure some were, but I am even more sure most didn't like Chavez to start with.
Secondly, the article itself notes the haphazard and mild ways with which Chavez executed on his repression (or incompetent, YMMV). This was not remotely an East Germany Stasi situation.
Wholesale job changes during a party switchover, are a classic sign of gross corruption. Which isn't quite the same thing as dictatorship, but they are correlated. In the United States, and I'm pretty sure almost every other Western industrial democracy, the only people who lose their jobs during a party switchover are the <<1% of civil servants with high-level policymaking responsibilities. It's actually illegal for a US President to fire anyone else, except with the most meticulously documented and litigated proof of cause. And job turnover in the private sector as a result of party turnover, is absolutely not a thing.
If there are enough people scheduled to be "changed" out of a job that you need a secret master list or computer program to keep track of them, then what you are seeing is *very* different than what happens when the White House changes hands. And a pretty good warning sign that it's time to grab your go bag and passport.
AFAIK this is precisely what some people call "the deep state" -- the unfireable mass of unelected bureaucrats who actually run the day-to-day life in regimes which are Officially "not corrupt" and "truly democratic" on account of NYT, WP, et al saying so.
How very insultingly presumptuous of you. Some of us prefer this system, not because the newspapers you hate tell us to, but because we've actually studied American history and know how horribly corrupt the civil service was when we ran it your way.
It's quite clear to the naked eye that many people actually like the system precisely as it is, and not because told to by the NYT, but on their own steam, and cheer when the NYT justifies it. And perhaps even subscribe to it for that reason. And it's no mystery that people who win from a system will prefer it.
What I don't grasp is, why call it "democracy", when it's the unelected, permanent apparatchiks who actually rule? In what role does the "demos" appear, other than as spectator?
I think it is simplistic to say that the ten thousand or so jobs that incoming new Presidents need to fill, are the full extent of personnel changes. Among other things, the people brought in themselves hire and fire.
As for "secret master list or computer program" - actually, the political parties do this. A major reason why Trump's tenure was dysfunctional was that the Republican party either didn't do this or Trump didn't automatically accept all Republican party bureaucrat recommendations, or more likely both.
The very possibly overegged point is that the extent of government or government controlled jobs in Venezuela's economy vs. all the rest of the jobs. Venezuela is not a full on Communist economy and there is a very well documented class of wealthy and middle class individuals who are not working for government. According to Wiki: PDVSA - the Venezuelan national oil company, has all of 70,000 employees. The percentage of workforce that is government or government related in Venezuela is high - 24% according to Wiki but the US has 13.4% - also pretty high.
Chavez at one point was inviting poor Colombians to come, and giving them the immediate right to vote, in order to boost his election results.
As for whether or not it was good for the country, just look around South America right now - over 7 million have left. The wealthy ones were often American citizens, by virtue of their fathers arriving to help with the oil, and marrying a senorita. Now they're mostly in Miami, and a huge voting block which is going to make it very hard for any candidate who smells even vaguely socialist to get elected.
Tho poor ones left on foot - there's something like 4 million in Colombia alone (a nation with 50 million). To imagine the effect, think about how crappy things get in the USA when unemployment goes up to 8%. Now imagine it nearly doubling (since the baseline rate in Colombia was already something like 8% before they arrived, and reached ~15% in 2020). If you want to know what Colombians think about Venezuelans, you can basically take what Americans say about Mexicans. Not to say all those things are TRUE, but they're widely perceived.
South America is a very large area. While Venezuela's conditions are terrible - the country has also been under the US sanctions hammer since 2014.
But more importantly - there are masses of South and Central Americans leaving for greener pastures from all manner of causes: Honduras after the Clinton sponsored coup, the ongoing shitshow of Guatemala, the ongoing shitshow of Argentina, etc etc. Not obvious to me that Venezuela is really an exception given sanctions plus immigration comparables.
I'm not aware of 25% of the population leaving either Argentina, which strikes me as a pretty dramatic difference. Not sure what you mean by "immigration comparables", but otherwise you don't seem to have either data, or an argument. Happy to revisit if you do.
Given that oil prices fell first, then had sanctions added on - not the least bit clear that your point is as strong as stated.
Do you really require data for this straightforward logic exercise?
As for Brookings: can't say that I am particularly impressed by neocon publications saying that sanctions are not that bad particularly given neocon use of it against any and all nations perceived to be contra-US interests. Here is an example of Brookings neocon publishing: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/neocon-lessons-for-democrats/
If you're genuinely stupid enough to think sanctions are the reason the country with the largest proven oil reserves in the world, which was in living memory one of the richest countries anywhere on Earth, is now as poor as Haiti, you vastly overestimate American power, and are unlikely to be persuaded by anything resembling facts.
But then again, you probably would've also figured out socialism is a bad idea by now.
If you're genuinely stupid enough to think that sanctions don't hurt a country, then you are welcome to argue with the US and European governments.
Nor is your assertion that "[Venezuela] was in living memory one of the richest countries anywhere on Earth" the least bit accurate.
Have you ever been in Venezuela?
It looks nothing whatsoever like Abu Dhabi or Riyadh or Geneva.
Venezuela has, by some accounts, the largest oil *reserves* of any country but this is not the same thing as actual wealth. Nigeria, for example, is the 9th largest oil exporter but not a "rich" country except compared to its African neighbors. Venezuela, by comparison, is 22nd in rank of countries that export oil.
Your fixation with socialism is not my problem, but your lack of grasp of ground facts is.
Of course they hurt a country! But sanctions don't turn what was, and should be, one of the world's wealthiest countries into one of the world's poorest.
"Now is your assertion... the least bit accurate?"
Yes!
In 1960, Venezuela had a per-capita GDP comparable to Western Europe; higher than Italy, Ireland, or Austria; and higher than anywhere in the Hispanosphere, with the second-highest country of Uruguay at half their level:
In 1970, after a decade of Franco moving away from his self-destructive autarchic policies, Venezuela was now behind Spain, but still ahead of anywhere else in the Hispanosphere aside from them and Argentina, ahead of most everyone in the Americas aside from the US, Canada, the Bahamas, and Argentina:
However, you'll notice their trend's still downward. That's because Chavez wasn't the first socialist asshole to fuck up the country's economy. That would be the socialist assholes in Acción Democrática, whose boneheaded bungling of the country's economy was already paving the way for the boneheaded bungling of Cokey Gonzales and the fucking Bus Driver's cratering of the nation.
For foreign powers, I remember the news talking about Chavez rattling sabers against the US, and Obama talking about shaking hands with Chavez as a way of undermining Chavez's claims that he was opposing US suppression. That's all I know about the role of foreign powers.
I did not study Venezuela and Chavez, but I distinctly remember Chavez doing things like giving cheap gasoline to Cuba. This kind of thing likely did not endear him to American neocons and what not. Chavez also gave free gasoline to Nicaragua and likely other fellow traveler Central/South American nations.
I also distinctly remember Venezuela having military exercises with Russia although I'm not sure this was during Chavez' era - but it probably was.
As such, foreign powers is definitely a relevant issue.
"He continued to hold mostly fair elections throughout his reign. His party even lost some of them!"
That's why I think "but this country holds democratic elections!" means nothing as to whether it's really a democracy.
Though by this account, it's debatable how much of a dictator Chavez really was; if he didn't engage in 'disappearing' his enemies or an equivalent of Argentina's Dirty War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_War, and if a political opponent could keep their phone to engage in criticisms from prison instead of being tortured and/or murdered, then maybe he did have some lingering shreds of "there's things you don't do in a democracy" remaining.
As South American dictators go, he's a lot better on that scale, at least. Maybe he was more of a Frederick the Great style enlightened despot, who wanted things to go better for the people, but wasn't able to run the country effectively:
"Partly you hope that the country has enough non-elected elites that they can stop this kind of thing."
Here's where I shout NO NO NO! Even in this review, Venezuela *had* non-elected elites, that's *how* Chavez was able to appeal to the people. The elites were quite happy living in their little bubble, creaming off the wealth that they felt was their due, and who cares about the rest of the nation, we're all right Jack:
"The oil company was an island of relative competence, run by technocrats, oligarchs, and economists. They fancied themselves above the civilian government, and although they would graciously share revenue with the state, they weren’t going to play by its rules."
Now, *that's* a dictatorship. We're not elected, we're not accountable to anyone, we hold the wealth and the productivity, we do as we please and nobody can tell us what to do.
Ordinary people will look around and go "Hang on a minute, who are all these guys telling us how to live our lives? Who voted for them - nobody? How did they get power? Isn't the government *supposed* to be the boss of them?" and that's how you get a populist like Chavez, and the burping general, gaining support and approval. The stuck-up blue-bloods who think you're not fit for them to wipe their feet on? Yeah, belch in their faces!
This is part of why Dominic Cummings downfall delighted a lot of ordinary people. He was unelected, relied on pull and influence to get where he got, clearly didn't hold himself accountable to the rules that he imposed on the 'little people' - and so when he was thrown under the bus by Boris, very few wept salt tears.
Unelected elites will always engender suspicion and resentment, which leads to revolutions. If you don't want dictators, make sure that your elites *are* accountable to someone.
One or the unremarked legacies of Hitler is the poisoning of the term "national socialism", so it is inextricably linked to fanatical racism. Thus blinds us to the fact that it is absolutely possible to marry Big Government with Nationalism under a big mouth grandstanding winding.
This isn't just the usual form of fascism, it's the original kind. Trump & Chavez are much closer to Mussolini than to a fanatical idealist like Hitler (yes, Hitler had ideals: horrible, horrible ideals, but ideals nonetheless).
My point is that just because these yahoos fall well short of Hitlerian evil, does not mean they aren't bad and don't deserve to be opposed. And it's a shame that we can't call their antics by the right name: national socialism.
Many of Latin America's problems are caused because it's far, FAR too easy to amend the constitution. One of the advantages of federalism may be that it keeps enough internal opposition to prevent the true momentary cohesion necessary to destroy a country's institutions.
You spend the first part of the review telling stories about how he unilaterally dictated things, and everyone did those things or was fired, so it seems odd to then question whether "dictator" applies. Maybe you have some connotation of dictator in your head that excludes a guy who wins multiple popular elections, but by denotation he surely was. He had absolute authority. A monarchy would still be a monarchy even if we had term limits on them and selected the monarch by voting (a bizarre system that only George Lucas, for some reason, seems invested in.)
One could argue that if the dictator was still subject to democratic elections, that ultimately the authority remained with the people. But the guy was never tested with a scenario in which the rule of law clearly demanded he abdicate power, it's hard to say whether he remained subject to a power that was never exerted. The two main descriptors of any government are "who makes the decisions" and "what powers does it have", and a government where one guy makes the decisions and the government power is unlimited is clearly an authoritarian dictatorship no matter what window dressing you put on it.
That describes every UK Prime Minister pre-2005 (unrestricted power to appoint judges and members of the upper house, only constraint in passing laws is maintaining the support of their own party in the lower house), and to some extent Lincoln and FDR. Elective dictatorship is a concept, but most people associate modern dictatorships with the fact that they don't have to win free and fair elections to stay in power.
Yeah, I never really got the whole "hurr durr, queens aren't elected, Lucas dum" complaint. Naboo's youth fetish is much weirder than their elected monarchy.
Perhaps it keeps the tabloids busy covering her latest hairstyle and outfit, thus providing cover for the rest of the government to be quietly competent?
"Seize power at gunpoint" arguably comes in two fundamentally different flavours -- "with help from foreigners" and "without help from foreigners". The latter is arguably as "democratic" a process as any conceivable paper election (but with "lead ballot" rather than paper.)
Doesn't seem true - one faction (the military) controls a majority of the guns, and a well-organized subfaction within the military can take power even if the rest of the military isn't necessarily on board. A well-organized 5% of the population can seize power via guns whereas it takes 50% of the electorate to do so democratically.
In countries with universal conscription, the army is usually a representative sample of the population. And civil war, while obviously unpleasant process, accounts for and rewards individual engagement level "for/against" arguably more than dropping a ballot in a ballot urn does. Without intervention by foreigners, the side that can muster more people willing to fight/die, or at least to provide materiel support -- typically wins. I find it hard to see what is less than fully democratic about the process, if the word indeed has any meaning.
AFAIK the "small faction in the military takes it all" scenario almost always involves foreign support (or at least promises thereof.)
>In countries with universal conscription, the army is usually a representative sample of the population.
Is it? Generals are not elected: even if most of the country is technically "in the army" the army itself is run by officers who are not chosen based on the wishes of the enlisted, nor are they supposed to represent them.
Officers (in particular, in the field, when bullets are flying) ultimately live & die at the pleasure of their subordinates. (See e.g. the Russian army & navy in 1917; or recall "fragging" in the American war in Vietnam, for illustrative if extreme examples of "they failed to represent the wishes of the enlisted".)
The fact that it is easier for members of the army to murder their superiors than in other industries does not make the military a representative democracy where the leadership represents the interests of the enlisted.
Yet another great post of this series. I have no knowledge on Latin American politics, and I don't understand Spanish at all, but I remember in early 2000s in university I came accross Chavez's videos online and it was so captivating. Not a studio but somewhere open air shooting ad hoc, he is kind of holding court with his ministers and other bigwigs around him, he receives a random phone call from a citizen complaining from something and he fires a minister as a result on the spot there. It was hilarious and great TV. If it was so captivating for me even though I don't understand the language and know nothing of the culture, I cannot imagine how it was for the locals.
All of South American politics is a expression of one dynamic - a battle for control between the rich whiter people and the poorer browner people. Most of the time, the latter are more popular, so the United States inevitably assassinates their leaders and coups their governments. Venezuela is the one major example where that hasn't happened. That Scott falls where he does is disappointing but not remotely surprising.
As I've said many times, there's no fundamental reason that rationalists should have such a resolutely right wing, pro-American position on foreign policy. (If you care about facts and evidence you know that we have acted with deadly indifference to human rights and democracy, particularly in Latin America.) In fact, that's one of the core pieces of evidence that rationalism is simply a rebranded offshoot of contemporary American conservatism - there's no reason the default rationalist position should be neoconservative, based on rationalist principles, and yet it is.
If the consequence of failing to coup/assassinate Chavez is that Venezuela was plunged into borderline-famine conditions and the poor browns suffered far worse poverty relative to their peers in other LatAm nations, doesn't that make a kind of argument for keeping the right in power? Do you not consider the other dictators that Scott has critiqued to be 'right wing'?
I'm fairly confident the 'rich whiter people' demographic will overlap heavily with the 'knows how to actually run an oil refinery' demographic, so granting this group responsibility will be indistinguishable from handing this group power.
> Venezuela is the one major example where that hasn't happened.
Not from lack of trying! (And recall e.g. Cuba -- how many assassination attempts did F. Castro survive? IIRC the man himself once said that he had lost count.)
In the past 25 years, AFAIK there's been one successful coup in South America, which was by the left, and zero assassinations.
There have been plenty of conservative wins that AFAIK had nothing to do with the US, for example Bolsonaro in Brazil.
I am running a dictator book club. Chavez (and by extension Maduro) seems like the most interesting Latin American dictator of the past 25 years. I don't know if you want me to ignore him or pretend he was good, but I'm not going to do either. I think you're demanding I stop thinking about this issues in detail in favor of adopting your super-over-simplified-long-out-of-date conflict story, which I'm not going to do. I think trying to tar people's communities with the "right wing" slur if they talk about topics that don't fit your narrative is a bully move and not worthy of you.
AFAIK zero successful ones (but if one were to count attempts -- Maduro repelled a US-sponsored invasion, and shortly after that, somehow dodged a professionally-built drone copter bomb.) And IIRC there are even people who consider Chavez's cancer to have been triggered by a (radiological?) assassination weapon -- but I'm not aware of any publicly-available direct evidence for this. Before replying "adjust foil hat!", recall that e.g. N. Ceaușescu is known to have ordered that certain "problem people" be "solved" in precisely this way.
I'm not trying to exculpate the US government, just saying this is not a good explanatory force for the recent course of South American history (unless you think fear of assassination has prevented people from running!)
Fear of assassination can prevent people from peacefully retiring. If they lose power they lose protection.
There is also the Palpatine gambit from the Star Wars prequels. If you survive an assassination attempt while you are still somewhat popular, the people will cut you some slack and let you do whatever you want. For example Bolsonaro got stabbed in the gut in 2018 and this made him more popular.
By the time someone qualifies as a dictator, fear of spending the rest of their life in a prison cell under the Hague is sufficient to prevent them from peacefully retiring.
25 years is an odd cutoff point. The Japanese haven't acted like irredeemable assholes towards their neighbors for way more than 25 years, but lots of people in East Asia still hate them and this hate still influences politics in the region. Humans are a social species with access to language, so people can learn to keep grudges from their parents. Not every country can be like Germany or Vietnam.
As for how long-out-of-date grudges affect politics in South America, let me give a specific example. During the global war on terror there was this controversy about the US water-boarding prisoners of war in Guantanamo Bay and it just so happened that my aunt was water-boarded by the Paraguayan police in the 80s, raising some alarming questions about the involvement of the US in developing enhanced interrogation techniques for (or from?) South American dictatorships and about how stupid did the US government think the rest of the world was if they expected us to believe that "enhanced interrogation techniques" were not torture.
Some people close to my aunt were therefore inclined to vote for whichever candidate spoke the most empty rhetoric against US imperialism. Fortunately we didn't have a charismatic potential dictator at the time in Paraguay, but if people in Venezuela had similar things happen to their aunts then I can see why they would believe Chavez.
Blaming the US is popular in South America, but that thing about rich white people vs poorer browner people is not how most South Americans see their own history. Not even the left wing ones.
For starters, we don't have a miscegenation taboo. Most of the time you can't visually tell apart who is a descendant of the colonial oppressors and who is a descendant of the colonial oppressed. When you can, it's because that person is a native South American, and they are never popular and never have any real power outside of maybe Bolivia.
This is highly dubious, Freddie. The '70 cou attemp, which the US had a small part in, was a complete failure that even we ourselves backed out on, but the idiot who did it rammed ahead anyway. The '73 coup against Allende had nothing to do with the US and everything to do with Allende running the country into a ditch:
Nor was he the most popular. He won with less than 37% of the vote, and likely would've lost even that had the KGB not bribed a lefty opponent senator into standing down:
Also, what on Earth did the likes of Castro and Ortega ever care about popular will? They came to power via violence and terror against the populous, and stayed in power in that same fashion.
This is very well-written and well reasoned; I just wanted to add that the reason why Venezuela's oil revenues are more sensitive to price fluctuations is that Venezuelan oil reserves are largely composed of heavy crude (higher molecular weight, more sulfur) resulting in higher refinement costs and lower profit margins per barrel. The breakeven price for Venezuelan crude was ~57.90 $/barrel in 2015, while the Saudi breakeven price was ~31.00 $/barrel. That's one of the core reasons why the oil market downturn in 2015 hit the Venezuelan economy so hard.
I appreciate the link, but this seems to be a dispute related to who the legitimate leader of the country currently is, and given that Venezuela's nominal GDP is ~100 billion dollars I doubt this would make a large difference either way.
The propositions (1) "ruler's policies wrecked $country's economy" and (2) "ruler's policies enraged international power elites and the latter punitively wrecked $country's economy" are distinct -- and distinguishable, if one is willing to admit the possibility (and FWIW they are not mutually exclusive.)
AFAIK in all cases to date where hypothesis (1) was pushed (in particular, by American/Anglo propagandists, officials, "thought leaders", etc.) there's a solid case to be made for (2).
This theory is extremely convenient for people who support policies that consistently empirically ruin economies!
But I think Venezuela is a pretty strong counterargument. Venezuela got very rich through most of Chavez's time in power. It wasn't until oil prices went down (and Venezuela lost the ability to pump oil effectively) that the country started doing badly. Anglo elites were happy to buy Chavez's oil when it benefitted them, and even widely-loathed countries like Iran and Russia can do well off oil when they've got it. Chavez's problem was that he weakened Venezuela's ability to pump oil, plus destroyed its internal economy so that it didn't have many other options. I would also recommend re-reading the section on Ciudad Guayana and on the farming co-ops - this doesn't look like foreigners wrecking an otherwise pristine economy!
> Chavez's problem was that he weakened Venezuela's ability to pump oil
This in particular IMHO seems like a confirmation of (2). Though Chavez is in no way blameless, he evidently planned to "invent the parachute while falling", having not taken care to develop the ability to pump without help from foreigners.
Chavez's predecessors had been reliant on foreign oil companies, but in the 1970s they nationalized their oil production under PDVSA, a pretty competent oil company that had some foreign partnerships but also did a lot of stuff on its own. The book suggests pre-Chavez PDVSA was competent, early-Chavez PDVSA was also competent, but Chavez specifically fired all the competent people from PDVSA in order to increase his power over it, and after that it was no longer competent. See part IV of the post.
Chavez's problem was that *he*, Chavez, weakened Venezuela's ability to pump oil. Not that "international power elites" did so. That's solidly (1) territory. As Scott notes, by the time Chavez took power, Venezuela's ability to pump oil was entirely in the hands of Venezuelans.
They did need foreign refineries run by "international power elites" to buy and refine the oil; Venezuela's heavy crude is notoriously difficult to refine. But those refineries consistently bought whatever oil the Venezuelans were willing and able to sell, at the same market price that they bought such oil from everybody else. Give an "international power elite" the choice between making billions of dollars in easy profits, or trying to undermine a foreign government for grins and giggles, and they're going to go for easy profits every time.
> For whatever reason, I find Chavez scarier than most of the other dictators I’ve been reading about. The others seem like aberrations of democracy. Chavez seems like its monstrous perfection: a reminder that in the absence of virtue, what appeals to the people can be the opposite of what’s good for the state.
To me, it seems like a highlight of the point you made in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bad-definitions-of-democracy-and, which some libertarians have been making for a while, and which the US Founders were very explicit about: Too much "democracy" is quite bad, and should only be used when it's actually required that the government handle some problem. Take the land appropriation example from this review--strong private property rights are important for a functioning economy, and should not be taken away simply because of a vote of the majority. Individual rights like speech and religion fall in the same bucket--even if 1 single person disagrees with everyone else, they have the right to that belief.
I think that part of the reason American democracy has been able to avoid being destroyed by populism (so far) was this conception and culture of individual rights and limitations on government power, inherited from the English tradition and pre-dating democracy as the primary form of government. The Supreme Court passed down many rulings saying "screw your majority vote, the Constitution says no." (at least prior to FDR--who might have been our Chavez if he hadn't died, and who still might be responsible for our eventual collapse). But this is a *culture* that exists in the bulk of the population, not a single policy or form of government.
I see Hugo Chavez took power in 1999; I remember an SNL skit from around then, A Glimpse Of Our Possible Future, in which President Al Gore constantly used the Emergency Broadcast System to monopolize Primetime Television to talk about global warming. I'm left wondering if Saturday Night Live is in fact responsible for Venezuela.
One obvious reason such dictatorship is less likely in the US is that the US is already a managed democracy in the sense that you cannot win the presidential nomination for either of the two parties which are institutionally embedded in the electoral process without the backing of at least a handful of billionaire backers.
This works as a managed democracy much in the same way that people in Iran can vote for president but only candidates that have been approved by their Guardian Council. The US doesn't have as formal of a council but the amount of political, financial, and media power that a few hundred individuals at the top of the system can generate gives them veto power if there's any candidate they all find truly unacceptable. One can argue there is no specific guideline that makes it illegal for the nominee to have no backers within the .001% of the income distribution, but the mechanisms of action are clear as are the motives. It would be irrational for them not to engage in this activity when the ROI of elite and regulatory is so favorable compared to allowing policies supported by 65-70% of the public that could harm specific interests.
The United States is one of the longest-running and most successful oligarchies in the same way that China is one of the longest and most successful one-party states. Both systems are relatively insulated from consequential populism by the simple expedient of making sure that only those who are already wealthy and represent a deep network of the ultra-wealthy owners of assets are allowed anywhere near the executive.
We aren't likely to see this scale of looting and institutionalized incompetence without the participation and consent of existing oligarchs since the public is already outside of the policy process in the economic sphere.
1. Impressive workup. 2. I don't have all day, but I wasn't seeing what strikes me as the glaring similarity to Donald Trump. - A reminder of how little left versus right matters in considering the psychology of totalitarian narcissism.
It's funny seeing Chavez again, honestly. People may not remember it, but back in the day people would not stop praising him and his policies as the Socialist wave of the future, *the* defining counterexample to the failures of Capitalism after the 2008 Crisis and Occupy Wall Street. The man's cult of personality wasn't limited to just his own country, it extended to wherever people were desperate to justify naked populism as compassion. How else would the famed Bernie Sanders quote-
"These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who's the banana republic now?"
Still, there are many, *many* more examples out there. If you start digging, it's incredible what's been memoryholed over time, there's so much 'Aged Like Milk'/'Me Sowing vs. Me Reaping' Chavez praise out there that's been quietly buried. Example:
The Venezuelan leader was often marginalized as a radical. But his brand of socialism achieved real economic gains
By: DAVID SIROTA
TOPICS: EDITOR'S PICKS, HUGO CHAVEZ, HUMAN RIGHTS, LATIN AMERICA, POVERTY, SOCIALISM, VENEZUELA, POLITICS NEWS
...
No, Chavez became the bugaboo of American politics because his full-throated advocacy of socialism and redistributionism at once represented a fundamental critique of neoliberal economics, and also delivered some indisputably positive results. Indeed, as shown by some of the most significant indicators, Chavez racked up an economic record that a legacy-obsessed American president could only dream of achieving.
When a country goes socialist and it craters, it is laughed off as a harmless and forgettable cautionary tale about the perils of command economics. When, by contrast, a country goes socialist and its economy does what Venezuela’s did, it is not perceived to be a laughing matter – and it is not so easy to write off or to ignore..."
[Note: I am not yet aware if Mr. Sirota has ever addressed the state of the Venezuelan economy since then. He is perhaps too busy working as a senior adviser and speechwriter for Mr. Bernie Sanders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sirota
We shall have to settle for Mr. Sirota's concluding remarks, I suppose:]
"Are there any lessons to be learned from Venezuela’s decision to avoid that subsidization route and instead pursue full-on nationalization?
Likewise, in a United States whose poverty rate is skyrocketing, are there any lessons to be learned from Venezuela’s policies that so rapidly reduced poverty?
And in a United States that has become more unequal than many Latin American nations, are there any constructive lessons to be learned from Chavez’s grand experiment with more aggressive redistribution?
No doubt, there are few absolutely clear answers to those uncomfortable questions, if those questions are assessed honestly... But maybe now that the iconoclast is dead, the cartoon will end. Maybe now Chavez’s easily ridiculed bombast can no longer be used to distract from Venezuela’s record – and, thus, a more constructive, honest and critical economic conversation can finally begin."
[Overall, that's the best one I've ever found, but there are plenty of lower-grade examples out there:]
"HUGO CHÁVEZ: MAN AGAINST WORLD
As illness ends Hugo Chávez’s rule in Venezuela, what will his legacy be? Richard Gott argues he brought hope to a continent.
...
Chávez’s search for a different economic policy, with a powerful role for the state, is thought to be foolish, utopian and destined to fail. Yet with many countries in Europe in a state of economic collapse – largely the result of their long embrace of neoliberal policies – his project for Latin America may soon have wider appeal.
...
Long after successive presidents of the United States have disappeared into the obscurity of their presidential archives, the memory of Hugo Chávez will survive in Latin America..."
"Still, in the United States, the positive side of Chávez’s economic legacy is often overlooked. Ever since he was first elected President, in 1999, his critics have been predicting a collapse in the Venezuelan economy. So far, it hasn’t happened."
"JOSEPH STIGLITZ, IN CARACAS, PRAISES VENEZUELA'S ECONOMIC POLICIES
Nobel Prize winning economist and former vice-president of the World Bank, JOSEPH STIGLITZ, praised Venezuela's economic growth and "positive policies in health and education" during a visit to Caracas on Wednesday.
In his latest book "Making Globalization Work," Stiglitz argues that left governments such as in Venezuela, "have frequently been castigated and called ‘populist' because they promote the distribution of benefits of education and health to the poor."
...
In terms of economic development Stiglitz argued it was not good for the Central Bank to have "excessive" autonomy. Chavez's proposed constitutional reforms, if approved in December, will remove the autonomy of the country's Central Bank."
[Note: this was the last step to Chavez taking *full* control of the economy and crashing the value of the currency; I believe similar 'reforms' are behind Turkey's current hyperinflation under Erdogan]
If you are able to choose what type of dictator you want to live under, its best to live under either a clownish left-wing populist type who will at least make attempts to make your situation better (while being kind of clumsy and ineffective at sending your family to a reeducation camp), OR under a serious-minded technocratic type in the developmental economic school who will very efficiently give the land to the peasants and institute growth-minded economic reforms while also very efficiently locking you and your family up for speaking out against the state/littering in public.
The worst options are clownish right-wing authoritarians with romantic dreams that require enormous amounts of people to be liquidated, serious-minded left-wing authoritarians with technocratic dreams that require enormous amounts of people to be liquidated, and any flavour of religious authoritarianism (because not only are you sent to a work camp/prison colony, but you're still expected to go to church twice a day).
2)
The type of dictator a country gets seems to fit its national character, with the quirks of the particular person affecting how the whole thing is expressed. Your nation of depressive, romantic alcoholics tends to produce a depressive (or manic-depressive) romantic alcoholic, whose passion for, say, ships or judo then feeds into the particular weirdness of their reign.
Presumably American dictatorship, when it comes, will come at the hand of an optimistic, aggressive narcissist whose particular passion for anime catgirls will lead to a horrific era of neko-eugenics...
I'm from Venezuela and think I can answer a couple of your questions:
To start, yes Trump is EXACTLY like Maduro, and what Trump would be if the United States did not have solid institutions.
How is Maduro still in power?
Cuba, Cuba, Cuba. The influence of Cuba on Chavez himself and the Chavista governments since '98 is much stronger and more important than (based on the review) the book implies. Chavez was Fidel Castro's Manchurian Candidate. Castro had been trying to get control of Venezuela's oil wealth for decades, even training guerillas to launch an invasion in 1967.
Maduro while not being particularly competent himself is just a puppet of Cuba who have had over a half century of experience of how to stay in power (mainly elite intelligence of everything going on in the military to nip any discontent in the only people that are able to overthrow a government in the bud).
How did Chavez achieve so much power and why hasn't it happened in the US?
I don't want to get al neoliberal on you, but institutions. Between changing the constitution and then early in his rule having essentially 100% of congress after the opposition boycotted the election he just eliminated any institutional independence and prioritized a single characteristic for selecting people to every single governmental role: Loyalty to Chavez. That was the only thing that mattered, in fact people were promoted to roles BECAUSE they were not qualified for them, that put them entirely in debt to the guy who put them there.
On the other hand, the US institutions have been around for a lot longer (Venezuela really only enjoyed 40 years of democracy, from the removal of dictator Perez Jimenes in 1958 to Chavez's victory in 1998) so they were young and fragile and easy to change. Concepts like the filibuster which so many people get so much in arms about are the exact reason why it is SO much harder for something like this to happen in the US. It was institutions that prevented Trumps deranged 'stolen election' play from working. Every lawsuit and attempt got shot down. All governments suck but some suck less than others.
"This is the point where I’m supposed to explain how Chavez went from democratically-elected president to dictator. It’s tough, because it’s debatable how much of a dictator he was."
Proceeds to describe how the whims of one man decided the fate of a nation, spurred a list of untouchables, created a parallel judicial system, kill protestors, Text also omits how he illegally financed left-wing parties in LATAM via drug money.
I volunteered three months in Venezuela right after Chavez died. I met two categories of people who most supported him: the wealthy, connected men with nice watches, and the very very poor. The poorest of the poor would say to me with such sincerity: Chavez really cared about us, no one cared about us like Chavez. It was actually beautiful, their belief, if not so creepy, given that they were still poor in part due to all that corruption and mismanagement.
Also funny: I went to a punk concert and everyone was like "Viva Chavez!" Punks were so pro government. Same with artsy theatre people.
The people most against Chavez were anyone well educated and what was left of the middle class. And there it was widespread opposition.
It's hard to argue that a man democratically elected in free elections multiple times was a 'dictator'
Also it seems like you're underplaying Chavez' economic achievements. For instance in 1999, 23.4% of the population were recorded as being in extreme poverty, this fell to 8.5% in 2011. This is quite an achievment.
Yes, he did manage to lower poverty temporarily by giving away a bunch of oil money, and in the process he almost destroyed the country and massively increased poverty in the long run. Bravo.
It's sad that most of the attempts to provide more for the poor and to reform colonial-era land holding and similar imbalances are joined at the hip with extreme incompetence and pandering that ends up tanking the economy. What if Chavez could have put more oil money into reducing poverty without all of the other things?
On the other side, sound economic management seems to preclude enough attention to redistribution. It doesn't seem like it should fundamentally be that hard to both grow the economy and split up the proceeds in a more humane way. I guess it's partly because each of those goals is embedded in one side of a political struggle where both sides would love to run amok if given the opportunity, so balancing the seesaw is inherently hard.
I think another aspect is that managerial capability is often so closely associated with the right that in many cases the left learns to despise competence itself, not just the people on the right who display it.
That's definitely the case sometimes, but not always. For example, in the u.s., right now, the left, as it were, more or less embraces technocracy (which it equates with competence), while the right is more into gleefully smashing things in a populist manner (c.f. other comments here about Trump being like a gringo Chavez minus ideology and the ability to actually accrue power)
I agree. I was thinking more of the various developing countries where left leaning governments make bad decisions on the actual merits. In the US, the right currently sets a very low bar, and the left is relatively pragmatic. Apart from housing and energy regulation, the US does pretty well overall. Given how rich we are as a country, if anything I would like to see some more reinvestment/ redistribution.
Someone found the link on the subreddit, it's https://youtu.be/px04jhigE-0?si=W1hKaq5t5OX9Z-I- (Eructo Acosta Carles)
Hmm, this seems to be a top level comment that was meant to be a reply to someone else's comment.
Probably to vorkosigan1, given the word "void".
Yeah, that's probably it.
ooops, you are right, ofc - as in Moon Moth. Will replace. Thank you!
Now that it's deleted, the placeholder appears to me as the first comment in chronological order.
Oh, Substack, I wish you'd spend time fixing your comment section bugs...
What you`'d suggest? 1. Deleting the whole thing upon deletion of starting comment? - There are quite a few of those. Some may contain useful content. And the experienced reader is quick to skip. / 2. Puting the first reaction to a now-deleted comment in first place would be much worse/confsuing/irritating. 3. No idea. - What I miss is a fast scroll down option in the archive, SSC-like.
This essay suffers from some cognitive noise emitted by the word "dictator." The problem with Chavez was that his policies incredibly sucked, not the extent to which he was (or was not?) a "dictator." Those policies would have been deeply ruinous even if they had been (were?) backed in a fully democratic manner.
This is true, but:
1. "Dictator Book Club" has a nice ring to it
2. I think part of the point of democracy (more technically "liberalism") is making it hard to enact bad policies. If there had been a flourishing opposition media, a strong court system, and good separation of powers, Chavez probably couldn't have done half of what he did. So part of the story of him doing bad things is the story of him crushing opposition media, the courts, and separation of powers, which at least loosely can be called dictatorship.
Is there a way to make it harder to enact bad policies without also making it harder to enact good ones? Or is that too much to ask?
Opposition media, judicial review, and separation of powers are all generally good things, but they also all make it harder to accomplish anything. (And perhaps that's the point?)
If it takes ten minutes to get anything done, ideas that only sound good for the first five minutes will be abandoned before they have the chance to cause damage.
That might work in some cases, but it requires people to spend more than five minutes figuring out whether a proposal is actually good.
In the US, I suspect most of our representatives rarely do that before taking sides on a bill. And if they do spend time deliberating, it's just as likely to be over whether a policy is popular rather than whether it's good.
I think the presumption is that this works asymmetrically in favor of good policymaking if only because it's so much easier to draft and enact bad policy than to draft and enact good ones. This is what tends to bias many people into being "directional libertarians," although I think that the burden of proof placed on rebutting the laissez faire presumption is a key distinction between neoliberals and doctrinaire capital-l Libertarians here.
As to enacting good policy at all, I guess the hope is that some combination of popularity and intrinsic genuine value gets over the frictions implicit in naive factionalism, but admittedly that probably seemed like it worked a lot better in the 1990s than in today's environment of reflexive partisanism and anti-the-other-side politics
I suspect the root of that reflexive partisanism is energy scarcity, so it'll clear up once there's enough cheap solar power for hardware R&D to have better return-on-investment than ideological purity-testing or raiding rival factions.
> In the US, I suspect most of our representatives rarely do that before taking sides on a bill.
All the same arguments for not thinking about your vote (as a member of the public) also apply -- in fact, apply more strongly -- to American representatives.
They are subject to serious social penalties for voting the wrong way, and in general their vote won't make a difference one way or the other.
Imperial China had an explicit zero-party system: factionalism was a serious crime. The English tradition is somewhat different.
I'll grant that the social penalties are much higher for members of Congress. But the argument that one vote won't make a difference is a lot weaker in a crowd of a hundred than in a crowd of a hundred million.
In particular, Joe Manchin has been a critical swing vote in the Senate on many different issues. As I understand it, he basically got to pick what would pass from Biden's "Build Back Better" agenda.
Ideas that sound very bad to the pubic but very good to specific interests with deep pockets and long memories tend to not be abandoned but rather brought back again and again regardless of the damage they do:
https://nassimtaleb.org/2016/08/intolerant-wins-dictatorship-small-minority/
When it comes to things like a preparation standard for food it tends to be pretty harmless, or even a positive for an inclusive society. When it comes to things like foreign policy, a large gap between policy set through pressure and rewards at the level of representatives and public opinion can be destabilizing to representative government, civil rights, etc.
If the special interest group's second or third draft of some plan eventually passes judicial review with 10% less benefit to them in exchange for 80% less gratuitous collateral damage, that's still a comparative win for checks-and-balances, relative to some dictator implementing their first draft without asking any such questions.
Judicial review is itself downstream from partisan politics and much of policy is beyond its reach, either by convention or by law.
I would be curious if there's any concrete example of judicial review where the benefit is slightly reduced in exchange for less "collateral damage" inflicted on the public rather than the interests of a specific lobby.
Without some tangible cases, abstract ideals and hypotheticals can be used to defend any status quo without actually addressing the real past and present policy outcomes which are more predictive of the future than the purely theoretical.
The article is about things that don't cause harm to the majority but make a difference to a (potentially tiny) minority. Foreign policy is not in that category. If you get it wrong, people suffer.
In theory foreign policy decisions decisions should be made by trying to balance the short and long term national interest while representing public sentiment. In practice, these decisions are just as susceptible to influence by specialized lobbies who are well organized, have a clear idea of their interests, and are intolerant of any individual and organization who does not align with their interests.
This isn't limited to the Israel lobby by any means, but it's a particularly high visibility outlier where nearly all elected officials regardless of party express similar policy views which do not represent the views of their constituents and in some cases appear to contain material falsifications or strong assertions of fact made without evidence or with evidence which is presented then retracted without explanation.
Well, if you're living in a 1st world nation getting foreign policy wrong mostly means that *other* people suffer, not voters, and though local (in the sense of within the nation's borders) economic impacts form poor foreign policy are real they tend to be more long term and hard to tie to any one policy decision
You can also do set-ups like proportional representation and parliamentary systems, which tends to push towards more centrist and stable policymaking because the folks in the legislature have to form governing coalitions among diverse parties.
Proportional representation does not push towards more centrist policies. What it does is ensure that the party with the smallest representation that still can form a majority within a coalition has enormously outsized power.
This only doesn't happen if that party is such that they cannot form a coalition, e.g. the Rhino Party, which tends to have Groucho Marx's policy.
Hardly. What we see in European PR systems is that it yields bizarre and very unstable coalitions as every non-conservative party tries to keep conservatives out of power. The result is long periods where there's no democratic representation in government at all with "caretaker" governments that are actually just the party that lost power, frequent collapses, and obviously stupid coalitions of people who can't agree on anything except the importance of not being the conservatives. Meanwhile the large parts of the population that votes for the conservative party or parties simply get frozen out of power entirely even when they're the biggest voting bloc.
I once supported PR and thought it sounded like good sense. But it's been tried and the results are worse. FPTP forces a small number of parties to generate internally coherent coalitions _before_ going to the voters, which works better.
Talking about Germany specifically this is blatantly wrong.
Scanning governing parties over at Wikipedia I get the following result:
Conservative: 35 years of governing (CDU + FDP)
Centrist: 15 years of governing (CDU + SPD)
Center-left: 20 years of governing (SPD + FDP + optional Green Party)
Left: 10 years of governing (SPD + Green Party)
Seems like to claim that conservatives have been frozen out of power you'd first need to argue that CDU is not conservative. It is largest German party and has provided the chancellor for the majority of Germany's history. People can argue how right vs how centrist they are exactly but I don't know anyone who doesn't think they're a conservative party.
Germany's relatively unusual for a PR country, in that it still broadly has a two-party system. This may be a result of having a mixed member system as opposed to a party list one, but may also be cultural (Austria has a party list system, but also has a two-party system).
The freezing out conservatives point is wrong unless you use the word "conservative" idiosyncratically; most European countries have a cordon sanitaire (agreement not to form a coalition) against the nationalist right, but these generally aren't the old mainstream conservative parties.
Germany is the country in which the current political and media classes are openly talking about banning the AfD. It has recently been governed by the so-called rainbow coalition (incoherently). It's a textbook example of this problem.
As for the CDU being conservative, er, maybe once. Not for a long time, hence the rise of a new conservative party. There was nothing even slightly conservative about Merkel's decisions about mass immigration or nuclear power.
Even if "keeping conservatives out of power" actually means right-wing populists/nationalists, this is false. Finland, a PR country, currently has right-wing populists as a governing party while Sweden, also a PR country has them as a supporting party with a lot of influence. They've also been in similar status in PR-using Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Austria and many, many other countries during the years. If you just mean Germany, you should say Germany - though, as the comment below states, postwar Germany's political system has been *remarkably* stable for an European political system.
Historically, the supposed instability of PR systems has been at least as much related to keeping *Communists* out of power rather than the far right, at least in Italy and Finland. The size of the Communist party also created instability in FPTP-using France, however.
We're talking about the Finland where in 2017 the left split the True Finns down the middle after Halla-aho won a massive lead in a vote over who should be the leader, and the other parties said they would never enter a coalition with them if the result was respected? Then the TF members who had been given cabinet positions under the previous leader all immediately defected to a brand new party nobody had voted for (Blue Reform) and the TF, who had done very well in the election, was once again suddenly frozen out of government.
It took the voters evicting ALL the defectors from government in the next election, destroying Blue Reform entirely, and then awarding the TF an even bigger vote share to actually get them into a coalition.
And that happened in .... April 2023. Finland isn't a counter-example, it's a good example of the problem. PR should have resulted in the [True] Finns voters being listened to a long time before these events, but instead the voters were repeatedly stabbed in the back and their MPs were corrupted by the other parties insisting they'd prefer no government at all than one with the right wing. It is a farce of a system.
> Sweden, also a PR country has them as a supporting party with a lot of influence.
Sweden Democrats were also frozen out of power for almost all of their existence by other parties refusing to work with them, weren't they? Why do you keep citing cases where what I'm talking about has happened? It required them to grow to become the second biggest party overall before the other parties gave up and did what PR suggested they should have been doing all along.
Remember, this is the system in which small parties supposedly have excessive influence. Wrong. It's a system in which small left wing parties have excessive influence because the left is so extreme they'd rather team up with literally anyone other than conservatives.
What we get in the UK is the Conservatives governing without having a majority of the vote.
They got ~44% of the popular vote which is more than any other party by a long way. By majority do you mean 50%? If so, how would that work in a system with more than two parties, in which it's normal that no party gets to 50%?
There are one-rep-per-electorate systems that aren't FPTP, and they're basically strictly better, btw. Ranked Choice aka. Single Transferable Vote is the simplest of those in the sense of most similar to FPTP, and it makes a huge difference in allowing minor parties to exist and apply policy pressure, because now you can 'vote' for a single issue party without wasting your vote in the decision of which major party gets the government (and then the winning government can see that eg. Legalise Cannabis Now was popular with both the electorate in general and specifically with their own voters, even if it didn't actually win any seats in Parliament)
Weimar Germany had proportional representation. That didn't tend toward "centrist and stable policymaking".
The Weimar Republic had a clause that allowed the President to effectively rule by decree in an emergency, in which they could declare the emergency. It was already being used even before Hitler came to power.
One modification that does need to be made to PR systems, though, is a minimum party threshold - usually 5% is good to get seats. That makes it easier for parties to form working coalitions while still making it relatively easy to form new political parties that can win representation (especially if you have a federalized system that lets them win representation at lower levels of government first, where they'd need fewer votes than at the national level).
The inescapable flaw of proportional representation is that it explicitly centers parties. Partisanship is a bad thing, and removing the opportunity to vote for a candidate as a person rather than as a member of their party supercharges it.
I think political parties are good - they allow for the rise of political figures who would otherwise be excluded for lack of fame or money.
Even if they do uniquely have that effect (and I don't see why they would), it's far from obvious that it's a good thing, and certainly not enough to outweigh all of the problems of partisanship.
Futarchy. But more relevant to the present, I imagine having competent civil servants and influential civil society (like think tanks) that can lobby for / against things and affect how policies actually materialize.
Make conditional prediction markets on the outcomes of possible policies, then only implement ones that do well in the market.
2. is where we disagree. I don't believe that liberal institutions preferentially impede bad policies, even when they succeed at enforcing adherence to their procedures. The reason is that those procedures are orthogonal to the good or bad quality of (many) policies.
If you believe that it's easier to break things than improve them any force which limits radical change preferentially impede bad policies -- even if they can't tell good and bad reforms apart.
That evaluation assumes that one is starting from a relatively good point within possibility space, so that any change is likely to be in a bad direction. I don't believe that assumption holds for contemporary Western regimes.
Really? As compared with the vast majority of political and economic systems through the history of the world if sure seems like western regimes are better places to live and work.
I mean if you don't believe this than shouldn't you be happy to move to a random country in the world rather than living in the west?
> ... shouldn't you be happy to move to a random country in the world ...
That is not logically the correct test for what I said. You made a strong claim about the gradient of any change likely being bad. That has to be assessed in regard to the proximate possibility space, not by looking at contemporary Third World countries, as if the latter were a good proxy for the former.
Related to point 2 there is something very important I notice that is missing from the post is the assembly elections of 2005. Chavez was already well on his way destroy the independence of the institutions, but in 2005 the opposition decided to boycott the elections entirely which gave Chavez 100% control of it pretty much, and one of the things the assembly did was give him the power to rule by decree under a permanent state of exception justified by an "economic war" against Venezuela led by the US. That excuse remains in use even to this day to justify all sort of abuses of power by the executive. Pretty much until his death Chavez was more king than president in a sense. That boycott is the single greatest blunder the opposition here has ever made IMHO, which is saying something since our opposition is pretty much a caste of professional blunderers.
Source: I've lived in Venezuela all my life.
As someone who's followed this story a bit for a long time, using assemblies as an end-run around parliament seems to have been a common tactic for both Chavez and Maduro. If you lose an election you just claim to be "listening to the voice of the people" and establish an alternate seat of power until you get what you want. FWIW this was also something the communists at my university were pretty keen on.
It's also how the modern US was founded though (using a convention as and end-run around the Articles Congress).
Ehh, no not really. The Constitutional Convention wasn't an assembly which could decide or establish anything on its own. The delegates to it understood that they had neither legal authority nor political standing to do that. Rather, the constitution that they drafted had to be ratified by a supermajority of the states in order to go into effect.
That's very different from the sort of assembly that Chavez used, which simply passes a new law and declares it to be the law of the land.
"If you lose an election you just claim to be "listening to the voice of the people" and establish an alternate seat of power until you get what you want."
Funnily enough, this struck me with regard to the proposal for term limits on the Supreme Court. Same rhetoric about the voice of the people, etc.:
“An organized scheme by right-wing special interests to capture and control the Supreme Court, aided by gobs of billionaire dark money flowing through the confirmation process and judicial lobbying, has resulted in an unaccountable Court out of step with the American people. Term limits and biennial appointments would make the Court more representative of the public and lower the stakes of each justice’s appointment, while preserving constitutional protections for judicial independence,” said Senator Whitehouse, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Courts Subcommittee. “As Congress considers multiple options to restore the integrity of this scandal-plagued Court, our term limits bill should be front and center as a potential solution.”
“The Supreme Court is facing a crisis of legitimacy that is exacerbated by radical decisions at odds with established legal precedent, ethical lapses of sitting justices, and politicization of the confirmation process,” said Senator Booker. “This crisis has eroded faith and confidence in our nation’s highest court. Fundamental reform is necessary to address this crisis and restore trust in the institution. Setting term limits for Supreme Court justices will restore accountability and depoliticize the confirmation process, and term limits are a commonsense change that an overwhelming majority of Americans support. I’m proud to stand with my colleagues to champion this effort.”
“Term limits will help restore credibility and trust to our nation’s highest court. This proposal is simple and fair: each President, elected by the American people, will appoint two Supreme Court justices for each term. Our bill strips out the toxic politics, partisan obstruction, and retirement gamesmanship that have eroded public trust, not just in the Supreme Court, but in our entire system of justice. Detached from the public and more politicized than ever, the Supreme Court will continue to face a crisis of legitimacy without this kind of fundamental reform,” said Senator Blumenthal.
“It shouldn’t be controversial to say that the American people deserve a Supreme Court insulated from politics. But when every confirmation turns into an all-out partisan battle, or when one administration alone can overturn a lifetime of precedent, it’s clear: the Court has lost its way,” said Senator Padilla. “By imposing commonsense term limits, we can lower the temperature on political brinksmanship and start to restore trust in the highest court in our land.”
I mean the *good* argument for term limits on the Supreme Court is just to end the macabre farce of waiting around for them to die at politically opportune or inopportune times, tactically timing their resignations for political reasons rather than their ability to keep doing the job, and the incentives to nominate the youngest candidates you can get away with.
If each justice serves for a single 18-year term and can't be renominated, you avoid all that nonsense while still keeping the same level of independence.
It's not actually a very left-wing idea. I remember a decade ago when the 18-year term limit proposal was being tossed around on right-libertarian blogs, alongside the challenge to Obamacare's mandate.
IMHO, the single greatest issue with the US supreme court is "the politicization of the confirmation process" and it's the root from which every other problem comes from. The fact that the justices are political appointees is absolutely nuts to me. And on that note, the calls for term limits and impeachment of justices is such a transparently political ploy it's not even funny. It's clear the objective is to explicitly take the politicization of the supreme court to it's absolute extreme and make activist judges inevitable. I mean, what justice is going to remain impartial when they known that their job depends on staying on the good graces of the current administration and congress?
Term limits are not, in themselves, a bad idea; staying on the Court even when you are so ill you are not capable of concentrating or suffering some cognitive decline (come on, sending decisions from your hospital bed?) and until you die is not good for anyone. "Yes, Justice Brown's family may be ordering the coffin and choosing a grave plot, but he's perfectly capable of complex legal thought even though he is literally on his death bed on full life support!"
Making a call for avoiding such scenarios and term limits so judges can serve for [twenty, thirty, pick a number] years but not indefinitely, and getting around the worst of the acrimony on confirmation hearings by giving every President two picks, no arguments about 'is it start, middle or end of administration?' isn't bad.
Couching the call in the language of shadowy billionaires and the will of the people and out of line with what (we like and want) the Spirit of the Age feels, that is the same kind of dictatorship language whether it comes from the right or the left, and it's what the Democratic senators sounded like.
>The fact that the justices are political appointees is absolutely nuts to me.
Do you have an alternate election procedure in mind? Direct election (as is the case for many state-level judges) would make the process more political rather than less. And if they're to be appointed through some non-political mechanism, then that raises the question of who should be trusted with that appointment power.
I think the Chavez story raises serious doubts about the ability of the standard liberal system to function in a society that lacks a broad base of wealth and an educated populace.
A country with a large impoverished population (esp when it has oil wealth or the like) will reverse the usual conservative pressure provided by the voters. That makes sense when it feels like you have a lot to lose...when your comparative poverty makes it feel like you have little to lose (however incorrectly) and lots to gain I fear the voters will act to overcome any institutions that try and limit popular sovereignty. An educated populace has a similar effect. Even if it doesn't help you avoid bad choices it's a force for stability.
As such I fear that, since breaking things is much easier than fixing them, trying to impose liberal institutions prior to economic growth may actually do more harm than good (but it's just a fear not a conclusion).
So... the prerequisite is a large, healthy middle class that thinks things are going well for them and doesn't want to rock the boat too much?
Right, which is why most traditional forms of democracy have always limited suffrage to landowners.
Things started going wrong when we let every random jerk with possession of an adult human body start voting.
I don't think that's why they limited suffrage. They did that for the usual selfish reasons.
Any benefits were largely a happy accident (even when they hit on that justification).
The party that promises to expand suffrage (either through expanded voting rights or mass migration or so on) is always going to have a statistical advantage in the polls, so this seems like an inherent kind of feature creep in democratic politics.
It doesn't happen instantly and i's a very slow creep. It's not hard to see why. Expanded suffrage doesn't benefit every party equally. The party that represents landowners has no incentive to expand suffrage to non landowners. The party of non landowners would benefit from expanded suffrage, but it has to get into power in a system that s biased against them.. By that logic , it shouldn't happen at all, but there are factors still, like the threat of revolution, and elites adopting left/liberal ideologies.
They don't need to think things are going well for them -- only be very aware of how much worse things could be.
During the great depression things were going pretty bad for many Americans but they still realized that they were doing better than many other countries so choose somewhat more radical incremental change rather than blowing everything up.
Pretty much, or at least your deeply poor voters have to be scarce enough that they don't form a decisive voting bloc (you can also throw in reforms designed to make it harder to explicitly link patronage to voting, like secret ballots and so forth).
Yeah, I think there's a lot of mistaking the indicators of success for the prerequisites.
The US is not above such mistakes. The biggest boneheaded mistake you've recently done was to think that people would become middle class if they owned a house, so you made buying a house really easy. Owning a house is a marker of success, not a prerequisite. So you ended up with a lot of people not making the mortgage payments, and you're *still* working through the results.
I wouldn't care as much if your boneheaded mistake didn't cause problems in the rest of the world.
My apologies (and sympathies) if you're not actually American.
I share the fear. Kuwait - oil rich, poor in education/other bases of wealth - had to look more democratic after its liberation by the US (Bush sr.). They installed a parliament, that voted eg to cancel all credit card debts of Kuwaitis. Fun read from when it was still a movement https://kuwaittimes.com/indebted-kuwaitis-call-on-amir-to-cancel-their-loans/ (I recall, the amir refused. Probably did some nice thing to keep his "suffering" people happy.)
But Venezuela had one of the highest per-capita GDPs in the world. It was the richest country in the Hispanosphere. Poverty was worse almost everywhere else on Earth before that idiot Chavez turned his home into Haiti.
Per capita GDP doesn't mean much when it's all oil money, you need to look at something like "what the median adult is contributing to the GDP"
> part of the point of democracy (more technically "liberalism") is making it hard to enact bad policies
The point of democracy is to ensure the demos controls the government. Nothing in it has anything to do with good or bad policy. This framing makes me think you're heading in the same direction as the NYT set, where policies they personally like being forced on people against their will is "democracy" and policies they dislike being democratically implemented is "populism".
There is no way to stop a democratic government implementing bad policy. The entire COVID story was nothing but horrifically bad, economy-destroying totalitarian madness for years on end. If that were true then opposition media, strong courts and good separation of powers would have popped up to try and stop COVID policy, but of course they all immediately decided these were the best things ever and promptly steamrollered the citizens, media and few politicians who were expressing doubts (since vindicated).
Fundamentally the best you can do is wait for people to learn important lessons. The failure of pure socialist economics has mostly been learned by now, albeit it keeps resurfacing under different guises where it pretends to be something else. The new lessons we're learning are about the incompetence, bias and rank corruption of the supposedly neutral and independent technocratic classes, that in prior decades were being delegated a lot of power due to disillusionment with politicians. The new swing is going to to a mix of more empowered politicians and / or more referendums.
> The entire COVID story was nothing but horrifically bad, economy-destroying totalitarian madness for years on end.
Two and a half months of lockdown and a six month squabble over vaccines where both sides approached the issue like morons is now "years on end". We have been at war with Eastasia for years on end.
Not sure where you lived in 2020, but around here the lockdown lasted a whole lot longer than two and a half months. And the school closures, which while they don't add up to Full Lockdown on their own were probably the most damaging manifestation of lockdownism, lasted a lot longer than two and a half months pretty much everywhere.
"Strongman Book Club" also has a nice ring to it, and would be more descriptive. (Well, unless you plan to cover women.)
I think you did a good job explaining how this was at best the weakest dictatorship on the list and at worst not a dictatorship. It's valuable to the long term project to establish a lower bound, and I think you did, with the bonus of finding it *more* scary for the United States.
I propose "Tyrant Book Club" as a possible revision, referencing both the Classical meaning (a ruler who gained power illegitimately or who governs unconstrained by law and tradition) and the modern meaning (a particularly brutal or oppressive ruler).
There's still some hyperbole involved in many cases, but "tyrant" seems like a somewhat better fit than "dictator" for a leader like Chavez or Orban whose governance is much more in the nature of "torturing democratic institutions until they'll confess to anything" than overthrowing those institutions and replacing them with an explicitly autocratic and authoritarian regime (like any number of 20th century dictators did) or even hollowing out the democratic institutions and wearing their carcass as a skin suit (like Putin).
Furthermore, "tyrant" has almost identical connotations to "dictator", and at least to my ears "Tyrant Book Club" has as good a ring as "Dictator Book Club".
I was also going to argue that Classical Greek political terms were objectively classier than their Latin counterparts, but when I tried to formulate a case for that, I immediately thought of several counterexamples where the Latinate term is clearly classier: "Republic" vs "Democracy", "Civil" vs "Political", and "Imperial" vs "Autocratic". So I withdraw that point at least.
Well...it has been known from Plato's days that democracy does not necessary lead to good outcomes.
While at it: What is puzzling about politics in the US is why it for so long has been different from politics in Latin America. Structurally speaking, the US ought to be similar to Brazil and Argentina, which similarly are large, mainly immigrant American countries. (Venezuela is arguably a pimped up version of Argentina.) Trump is a very recognizable political figure in Latin American political culture. So perhaps the US is finally "coming home" after a very long sort-of European detour (from the sane part of Europe).
For thirty years now, I have been peddling a theory about "the gradual Latin-Americanization of US political culture". If Trump wins again next year, that will be another win for the theory.
Probably related to the reason that the UK has been more functionally governed than Spain for most of the last few centuries; Not sure precisely what that reason *is*, but settler colonies taking after their founders shouldn't be surprising
New reader here.
This is my first article from you, and goddamn was it good.
You really are worthy of your reputation.
As I Venezuelan I can tell you, the single reason Chavez didn't become a full blown dictator was because he died young. I shudder just imagining the mere idea of Chavez handling the economic collapse of 2015-2020.
The word "dictator" etymologically derives from word-as-law. And Chavez was making law simply by declaring things on TV. It is true that in the US our presidents can make laws via executive order, which means we're not quite as far from Venezuela as we like to think.
Chavez used TV instead of a pen and a phone, that was his mistake! 😁
https://www.npr.org/2014/01/20/263766043/wielding-a-pen-and-a-phone-obama-goes-it-alone
"President Obama has a new phrase he's been using a lot lately: "I've got a pen, and I've got a phone."
He's talking about the tools a president can use if Congress isn't giving him what he wants: executive actions and calling people together. It's another avenue the president is using to pursue his economic agenda.
Since the start of the year, the president has announced three new economic "promise zones," a college affordability initiative and a manufacturing research hub. These are all part of what the White House is calling a "Year of Action." And they're all things that didn't require Congress to do anything — something the president makes a point of saying.
"I am going to be working with Congress where I can to accomplish this, but I am also going to act on my own if Congress is deadlocked," he said at an education event at the White House on Thursday. "I've got a pen to take executive actions where Congress won't, and I've got a telephone to rally folks around the country on this mission."
Does anybody know how the "economic promise zones" worked out? If they succeeded, I'd really like to know about that.
In practice, "dictator" (on the English net, at least) is used to describe any ruler disapproved of by Harvard, US Dept. of State, NYT, etc (C. Yarvin's "Cathedral" organs) -- regardless of precisely how said ruler came to power.
Interesting read - I lived in Caracas when Chavez came to power. He was very charismatic and I was amazed at how he could speak for hours on end. It was heartbreaking to see the collapse of their society.
Can you say more? What was it like there?
There was a lot of hope that social ills would be righted and that the poor would have a hand up. I remember being swayed by some of his speeches, as he seemed to really have a heart for the poor. There was also fear for many, particularly the middle class, of losing what they had. The economic slide downhill began with firing people who knew how to do their jobs, particularly at the state money making machine PDVSA (oil) and replacing them with political appointees, and with taking away basic freedoms such as the right to vote according to one’s conscience, by firing government workers who did not vote for the Chavez regime. The money was still flowing to those in power but just a different group. And the people suffered. There was an excellent blog following all the changes called The Devil’s Excrement. Good to look up if you have an interest.
I really like this series. It's a great idea, and the individual reviews are good. I hope that you write something synthetic at some point: tie all the strands together and give us your coherent picture about dictatorship.
This was my favorite of the series.
But then again I grew up under Venezuela's Chavez, and this was a trip on the memory lane of my formative years.
I'm interested in any extra insight you might have.
One point that was perhaps not discussed in the book was how well rewarded folks who stood by Chavez were (those actively and publicly supporting him during and after the 2003 strikes). PDVSA mid level workers and low level government employees that were militant to the cause in those days are incredibly wealthy today. They likely moved to Miami or Dominican Republic around 2013 and have likely returned post dollarization.
Chavez' government also overpaid for key private assets, buying the silence and strongly encouraging the emigration of many in the economonic elite.
If you want to further your readings of Venezuela in the post Chavez era, there is a fun quasi-fiction book that explains the plundering of the state post Chavez death. Not sure if it has been translated to english.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Aventuras_de_Juan_Planchard
I vaguely recall a quip from your old, old blog about being such a sympathetic reader that if you ever started reading about dictators, you’d become an authoritarian…is this whole series an inside joke?
I don't remember saying that, but this book certainly didn't make me a Chavista.
You may be thinking of his Epistemic Learned Helplessness, which was originally on the livejournal but later got reposted on SSC: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/
The general idea was he figured out he was too easily convinced. I'll leave it to you to re-read the implications of that realization, and the moral of the essay.
I don’t think that was it, but thank you for looking, since this is definitely going to drive me crazy.
(Just want to emphasize he was clearly joking in context, so there’s no confusion)
The book had to be "really good" though. https://web.archive.org/web/20131230121553/http://squid314.livejournal.com/153546.html
Thank you
You should do some on benevolent or arguably-benevolent dictators, like LKY, Ataturk, or Park Chung-Hee. I'd like to see what makes them different from the worse model, whether there's some legible-from-the-outside difference or whether it's just the luck of the draw.
So far I've been concentrating on modern (ie past ~20 years) dictators, especially ones who took previously semi-democratic polities and made them worse. I might eventually have to branch out from there, but I think they're the most informative and want to exhaust the supply before going into anything deeper.
I might be running low on dictators like that though, does anyone have any suggestions for other modern ones famous enough to get books about them?
Lee Kuan Yew only resigned from the Cabinet in 2011, and his reign is widely praised as the best-case scenario for a dictatorship. I'd be interested to learn whether a similar success could be achieved in a more democratic state.
Benevolent dictators are still dictators, right?
If so, Paul Kagame is one who I think you'd find very interesting. He is responsible for ending a genocide and rebuilding a country after unimaginable horror and strife. A genuine 20th century hero, when Western countries and the UN failed. He has also abolished term limits (for himself only), banned opposition parties, arrested critical journalists, and there have been stories of extra judicial killings.
For me a lot of discussion about dictators resolves too easily with the conclusion "wouldn't it be nice if they'd been a bit more like us". But in Rwanda from 1994 to...maybe now, you have a situation where it's almost impossible to imagine democratic norms functioning. What if a 'benevolent dictator' is the better choice?
However, given that his story has not resolved yet, I'm not sure if there are any great biographies which offer an impartial view on offer at the moment.
Kagame is an awful psychopath and one of history's worst mass murderers. It's shameful anyone would call him a hero:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39199932-in-praise-of-blood
If you're looking for "overthrew democracy", the answer is Ortega in Nicaragua, much more clearly than Chavez. (The twist is that he was already dictator once, in 1979-1990, then got forced into stepping aside, spent 16 years in opposition, then won in 2006 and became dictator again. The moral is you can't really have a democracy if there's a two-party system and one of the parties will cancel the democracy the minute they win.)
Many of the post-Soviet ones are interesting; Niyazov is particularly authoritarian, so it might be interesting to review how one builds a North Korea-style thing. Lukashenko is another clear example of how democratic systems can be vulnerable to someone openly running on "this democracy thing isn't working out, let's go back to the old dictatorship"; that's how he won in 1994. Applications to the US may not exist.
A possible sub-theme might be "dictatorships that kind of make sense in context"? Kagame in Rwanda is a brutal dictator, but he actually ended the genocide and won a series of apocalyptic wars. The Aliyev family in Azerbaijan (Heidar and his son, Ilham) had the good fortune of striking oil and the wisdom of friendship with the US; 'have competent offspring' is an old lesson but many monarchies don't manage it.
LKY was 'Prime Minister emeritus' and had substantial influence in Singapore until his death in 2011; he's an absolutely fascinating man that others have discussed upthread, though the trend here is the opposite (he built a very authoritarian system but it is very very gradually transitioning to democracy in a planned way).
If you're trying to do something which has lessons for the United States, though, maybe a series on transformative leaders in modern democracies might make more sense? Try to learn from what the previous generation of long-serving leaders, like Merkel or Chirac, did right or wrong; they're not in the full light of history yet but some of their decisions are now reviewable.
If you want a uniquely Canadian form of "nice" dictatorship, consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Duplessis
I wanted to recommend an English-language biography of Finland's ex-president Urho Kekkonen (https://kansallisbiografia.fi/english/person/632) for an example of a politician with clear authoritarian tendencies but who still doesn't properly count as a dictator since he had to operate in a strong democracy, but couldn't actually find any.
Trump. If you believe his detractors, he’s an authoritarian that was held in check by our democracy. No, I don’t believe it. We have an administrative state ruled covertly by bureaucrats. Anyone who talks about democracy has no knowledge of the definition of the word. There’s literally no mechanism for citizens to enforce their choices. Again and again we get policies that most people don’t want. Where’s that democracy again?
"We have an administrative state ruled covertly by bureaucrats. "
Which might be a good thing , for reasons explained in the OP.
No, you get the policies you want, and when they suck, you re-write history to construe them as imposition of some foreign body.
See the Iraq war: the same people all too happy to call anybody questioning it an America-hating terrorist now cry on how "the deep state" sent their kids to die in the desert
There is no mechanism by which the American public gets to consciously choose policy. If you mean a great deal of the polity is brainwashed into supporting the current war, then yes, they get what they asked for. It worked really well in 2003, when there was zero sense in attacking Iraq, unless you were deep state and therefore would profit with money and power. The forever war is what is changing the minds of the formerly rah rah go war for America people. They’re beginning to realize they’ve been had.
What countries *do* have mechanisms for citizens to enforce their choices? Has there ever been a democracy, by your definition?
Historically, absolutely! the classic Athenian (and other Greek city-state) democracies represented well the wishes of the citizens, and managed this by having a very small fraction of their population actually be citizens.
In modern times, there are countries like Switzerland that do a *lot* of their governance via referendum and thus policy is relatively reliably that which the majority of voter prefer, though I am not Swiss and don't have a firm grasp of the details. (and also, "majority prefers" doesn't preclude "40% absolutely detests")
Asked about whether there are books about Kekkonen in English and there's this one: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/finland-the-kekkonen-years-william-bell/1114188575
And this coming the next year: https://www.ahlbackagency.com/2023/07/world-english-rights-to-gordon-f-sanders-book-the-note-crisis-kekkonen-kennedy-khrushchev-and-the-cold-war-sold-to-cornell-university-press/
Okay yeah I really want Scott to write a post about Duplessis now. Many biographies to choose from, too!
If you drop the modern requirement, there's always the O.G. - Caesar.
Or Huey Long , for a left-populist.
Dictator was a different role then. If you’re going to do history at least find out what actually happened
It might be interesting to examine why Silvio Berlusconi *didn't* become a dictator, despite controlling most Italian media and entering politics in a power vacuum after a corruption scandal forced all the existing political parties to dissolve. The circumstances seem similar to other dictators you've discussed, but Berlusconi never quite consolidated his power and his reign ended when he lost a de facto confidence vote in the wake of the financial crisis.
I'll second this. There was a lot of panic and rhetoric by his opponents, but then nothing particularly horrible seemed to happen, and I never dug enough into the context around him to figure out what was actually going on.
Third this please. It would be another contrasting look at a "Trump-like" (not saying he was, but that seems to be the impression).
Trump didn’t become a dictator either despite panic and unending rhetoric. The second term might be different but our oligarchy won’t allow it. It seems more likely to me that we get a leftist dictator, who like Chavez, will talk about helping the poor while consolidating power. Does Newsom have the balls to go all in?
I think the only reason Jan 6th didn't turn out worse is that the vast majority of the crowd (99.9%) was truly just there for a protest. If there were hundreds or thousands, instead of merely tens, who had bad intentions, it could have turned out very differently. Julius Caesar reportedly refused a crown three times, but I don't think Trump has the ability to refuse extra-constitutional power even once. (To be fair, neither did Caesar, and I'd put a small amount of money on Trump refusing a literal crown at least once.)
"Tens"? So far 160 participants have pleaded guilty, and another 122 have been convicted at trial, of violent felonies committed at the capitol that day. Assaulting or injuring a police officer, using a deadly weapon, etc. If we restrict the definition of "bad intentions" to those sorts of acts it's in the low hundreds at least.
Personally I would also include as "bad intentions" trying to stop Congress from certifying the electoral college ballots. That definition covers another couple hundred 1/6/21 participants who've pled guilty to or been convicted of that without any conviction for specific violent acts.
Then there are several hundred individual trials still to come, and a few dozen more participants (identified via security camera footage) who the FBI is still searching for.
Well, it could've caused a much bigger crisis, but I doubt that there was any scenario in which Trump ended up with a crown. That probably required a civil war, and no powerful ostensibly pro-Trump faction really wanted it.
They needed the feds to create a riot. As for refusing the crown, that’s a matter of opinion. I think you’re wrong about Caesar. It was a power struggle all right, but those murderers weren’t trying to save democracy either.
I've always said he's the Italian analogue to Trump, rather than Mussolini.
On one hand, he could extract pretty much everything one could extract from a democracy plus some ("some" being the mob).
On the other, the Italian constitution is so strong that the only way to seize more than that would have been literal blackshirts in the Constitutional Court.
So the keen businessman obviously was going to prefer to milk the cow forever, every legislature a bit more, over some gamble that would see him allied with unreliable fanatics to rule over ruins
Mugabe.
I second that.
I strongly recommend reading LKY's From Third World to First. It's his perspective on his tenure as Prime Minister of Singapore from 1959 to 1990, and more broadly the history of the country he was so instrumental in. It's an excellent read, and he is very passionate that his actions that you will consider dictatorial were justified and necessary, and explains his reasoning at length
I know next to nothing about Singaporean history but my very rough impression is that Raffles is also considered to have been something of an exceptionally competent governor in Singapore's early history and development -- is this roughly accurate? Did Singapore effectively benefit from not one but two people effectively filling the role of benevolent dictator?
Tracing Woodgrains has a very good review of it here, for anyone interested: https://tracingwoodgrains.substack.com/p/book-review-from-third-world-to-first
The Marcos family.
Netanyahu (Not a dictator, but if Modi and Erdogan apply so does he)
Hamas (or its chairman)
The page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_backsliding lists (apart from the ones you've already covered) Ethiopia, El Salvador, Israel, Peru, Poland, Romania, Serbia. Some of those might be stretching things unreasonably far to include in a Dictators Book Club, but others, not.
"the 10 countries with the highest degree of autocratizing from 2009 to 2019 were Hungary, Turkey, Poland, Serbia, Brazil, Bangladesh, Mali, Thailand, Nicaragua, and Zambia."
Thailand and Peru would seem like interesting cases - is Peru ever _not_ a mess?
Poland just had an election in which the governing party lost.
Yes, exactly. You can have democratic backsliding (as the Wiki page is about) without it yet being a dictatorship. As I _actually said there_.
Dukanovic in Montenegro (he's gone now after losing an election earlier this year, but was in power for 30 years) is a good case study in soft dictatorship. Lukashenko's also an option, but broadly boils down to democracy being unpopular in the 90s so people voted against it.
Otherwise, going non-recent, FDR is probably the most interesting in a US context (he ruled for life, funnelled public money into his own political machine and threatened the Supreme Court into submission).
Nazarbayev may be an interesting example of soft dictatorship. Unlike neighboring Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tadjikustan, people enjoyed much more freedom under his rule, yet his grip on power was stronger than in Russia. It's not an example of a subversion of a democracy, but of a situation when there was a hope for democracy, but people, including middle class educated ones, were happy to accept a dictatorship instead.
In the post-Soviet world, it seems that many (most?) people understand that "democracy" is simply a code word for: marionette rule by Washington/London, organized mass impoverishment, oligarchs cutting apart and cashing in what might have remained of industry, demographic collapse, NATO bases hosting nukes, etc.
Because that is what happened in many cases when "democracy" was tried, much to the surprise of those swallowing the official Western mythology that "democracy" is the panacea to all their problems. This mythology isn't all empty propaganda, but can be easily portrayed that way by counter-propaganda taking advantage of acute disillusionment.
Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda. I enjoyed the book Do Not Disturb by Michaela Wrong. It covers the rise and rule of the Rwandan Patriotic Front that currently holds power.
African politics in general deserves a lot more attention than it gets, and Kagame in particular is an incredibly impactful figure in the history of multiple countries.
> especially ones who took previously semi-democratic polities and made them worse. I might eventually have to branch out from there, but I think they're the most informative
Why is it more informative to look exclusively at bad retrospective outcomes?
> does anyone have any suggestions
- Duterte
- Orbán
- the slightly earlier prototype for modern populist-authoritarians, Slobodan Milosevic
As an offshoot of this theme, you would probably also really enjoy some comparative books on 21st-century authoritarianism. In particular, I strongly suggest:
- The Revenge of Power by Moises Naím. I list this first because Naím combines the perspectives of an economist, a journalist, and a Venezuelan former government official who witnessed Castro's rise to power from the inside. He draws connections and parallels through not only the usual suspects, but also some you might not think to connect, like Berlusconi in Italy. I found this book riveting.
- This Is Propaganda by Peter Pomarantsev. Pomarantsev was born in Soviet Ukraine, fled with his family to Western Europe as a child, and grew up in the UK; that story is the prologue to the book itself, which is a whirlwind tour of modern authoritarian propaganda operations from the Philippines to Serbia to Mexico.
You'd probably also appreciate Anne Applebaum's Twilight of Democracy, although you'd have to overlook your grudge against NYT columnists. I do think it's really illuminating, though, because it's the story of a Reagan Republican, the wife of a conservative Polish politician, witnessing this sort of populist-authoritarian takeover from the inside - from "her" side - first in Poland and then in the US, and the personal fallout from the resulting schisms.
The interesting thing about LKY is that the second generation seems to have succumbed to the same old political incentives. I was reading up about a family fight between the siblings and it seems the eldest son has succeeded to the position on what, to me, seems primarily nepotism and is trying to build up a cult of personality around his late father (and by extension, the family mystique and mythos) to advantage himself - something like the Kims in North Korea.
His father seemingly didn't want anything like that, his sister and brother are rowing with him over that, and there's a lot of not very clear 'so the brother and his son(s) went overseas with a large chunk of family wealth and are fighting political battles back home in Singapore' and again, it seems to be a dynastic struggle in the making as to who will succeed the current PM - one of his sons or one of his nephews?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Hsien_Loong#Controversies
The obvious lesson to take from this is that Latin American socialism is bad.
Here's my question about this. Evo Morales got elected in Bolivia in 2006 on basically the same platform as Chavez, i.e. nationalise energy, oppose US imperialism and generally implement full socialism. The result of this was that GDP doubled and the poverty rate was cut in half. Bolivia is pretty chaotic and the MAS leadership are still throwing bricks at each other, but it seems like on the whole the Morales government was a good period for the country.
Chavez and Morales believe the exact same things and are each other's closest ally. How come Chavez completely destroyed Venezuela, but Morales seems to have improved Bolivia? What's going on there?
The economic boom you're referring to started before Morales. It was largely the result of the resolution of the Gas War which saw voters drop opposition to the exploitation of gas in exchange for a system where the state got more control and took a bigger share of the pie. This more stable environment encouraged investment which Morales then unilaterally changed the terms of, basically getting a bunch of gas companies to agree to build infrastructure then changing the terms of the deal after it was built. However, unlike Chavez he continued to allow them to operate the companies.
Morales then continued to expand various forms of natural resource exploitation to fund welfare while not directly running industries. Unfortunately he couldn't get much foreign investment due to his previous actions. But there were industries, like logging, which could be done without much advanced tools. This type of thing (and in fact mainly gas) accounts for most of the quadrupling of GDP. Which, to be clear, went from $1,000 per capita to $4,000. And like many petrostates follows oil prices.
I'd go farther and say Latin American politics is just bad. It is dominated by populism to an unusual extent.
Most recent Brazilian election: "Well, one guy is a corrupt populist socialist who loves Putin, but he's certainly better than the alternative!"
Not that Latin American regimes of the right are great.
> Soap operas, films, and baseball games would dissolve and be replaced by the familiar face seated behind a desk or maybe the wheel of a tractor . . . it could [last] minutes or hours.
How did this not tank his popularity? How did this not cause the entire country to think of him as that asshole who keeps interrupting the ballgame?
I felt the same way, but then I have what might be an especially low tolerance for politicians speaking and advertisements. Maybe its different when the broadcast could determine the fate of your whole family? So instead of "this fucking guy again, going on about politics ugh" its "oh my god what's going to happen? Is there a new policy that will be get me/lose me a lot of money and security?". Also lots of people chose to look at and think about trump all day everyday despite nothing interesting going on at all, so there is clearly an audience for annoying and dramatic politicking.
Chavez was backed by the Soviet sphere in the 1980s. In fact the pre-Chavez governments had already been pretty socialist but they took their commitment to human rights a little too seriously for the Soviet Union's tastes. (Which is to say, they actually criticized both sides' human rights records and the Soviets were the worse party. This upset the Soviets who saw human rights purely as a tool to criticize the capitalist world.) As a result they backed several even farther left governments, generally ones less committed to this whole 'democracy' thing. Chavez's movement was among them.
This backing mostly went away post-1991 but the Cubans remained close allies. In part because they needed a new source of gas and connection to the outside world as Russian support waned.
Chavez won because the previous governments had become fantastically corrupt leading to an election in which not being involved in any existing party was a huge advantage. In this environment (which included a former beauty queen gaining significant vote share) Chavez's very well organized and relatively well funded, partly from outside money, MBR-200 was able to stand up something like a party infrastructure fast while also credibly claiming they were outsiders. There was actually a minor split in the party between the Chavistas and the more radical communists who felt this was abandoning armed revolutionary struggle.
Once he was running his party abandoned basically all farther left policy language while simultaneously promising his party members this would be the thin end of the wedge. He ran on anti-corruption, increased welfare, and fighting against the traditional political parties. And once he was in power he increasingly centralized power in his movement and moved farther to the left. This is also why it survived his death: his party is still around and in charge.
By the way, I'm not sure if you're aware of this but Venezuela's agreed to hold internationally observed elections in 2024 in exchange for various kinds of sanctions relief and steps toward normalization. They've already backpedaled on that by trying to ban the primary opposition figure. But if Biden can manage to get an opposition leader into power it would be great for both countries. Venezuela can be spared a more traumatic way to transition away from the Chavistas and the United States can resume better relations with the country (which would be mutually beneficial in several ways).
What caused the corruption of the pre-existing parties, if there's a simple answer to that?
Likely the oil wealth.
It's been noticed that being a "resource-extracting" or "rentier" economy is bad for expanding the middle class and bad for democracy as a result. When you don't depend on taxing most of the country to do things, you tend to lose track of them.
Fair enough, though it could be observed that Norway seems to have avoided that temptation.
I don't know a lot about Norway, but I think they had a relatively large middle class before they discovered oil there.
As opposed to subsistence farmers that is.
Sure.
see my comment up thread RE: how norway avoided the resource curse
Norway has an approximately Georgist approach to natural resource management, with roots stretching back to the early 20th century in that regard, and the oil system in particular was set up with the help of an Iraqi petroleum geologist who desperately wanted to save Norway from the resource curse:
Shorter take:
https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/norways-sovereign-wealth-fund
Longer take:
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/05/17/norway-the-once-and-future-georgist-kingdom/
The United States is another example of an oil-rich country that doesn't match the description, precisely.
Note in particular Alaska has a (somewhat) similar approach to natural resource management as Norway.
The US is oil rich but rich enough in so many other ways that revenues from oil alone or even resource extraction in total don't dominate government revenue
A large oil fueled welfare state introduced a lot of opportunities to manipulate that for political power, including making some of it disappearing into officials' pockets. Both sides relied on this to maintain voting support and internal political discipline. Additionally, there were fairly effective reforms in the 1980s which resulted in a huge uptick in corruption prosecutions which made people feel corruption was getting worse even as it was getting better.
Of course, Chavez was the cure being worse than the disease. The big scandal in the early 1990s of $250 million disappearing is nothing compared to what happens every year now. And unlike that scandal, where the corrupt president was removed through democratic processes after investigative journalism, no similar removal or journalism is possible under Chavismo.
" The big scandal in the early 1990s of $250 million disappearing is nothing compared to what happens every year now."
Yeah, the irony seems pretty palpable.
It's a foolish effort by Biden. Maduro will burn the whole country to the ground before he gives up power, and I'm sure Maduro Jr. will be just as much of a disaster as his Cuban-puppet daddy, or he'll "contract cancer" and be replaced with another Cuban puppet.
India is a democracy and Modi won the elections twice in a row.
His party got a stinging defeat in the regional elections in the state of Karnataka.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/13/indias-congress-party-defeats-narendra-modis-bjp-in-karnataka-state-elections
So please before calling Modi a dictator, define dictatorship and then judge Modi.
In China and North Korea they do not have a second party to vote for. Those are dictatorship.
Putin is potentially a dictator since he has imprisoned his opponents on bogus charges. So even if there are elections, there is no one strong enough that is not in jail on kangaroo court charges.
Modi is not jailing his opponents. His opponents are espousing minority appeasement policies (eg Quota/Affirmative Action) and losing elections.
I suspect Scott's definition of "dictator" might roughly correspond to "anyone the New York Times editorial board has called a dictator." (If he called Angela Merkel a dictator, that'd change my mind.)
I think Left liberals like Scott are not ok with leaders on the right (Sunak and Modi) winning elections. So they call them dictators.
Sunak? I’ve never heard anyone call Sunak a dictator.
Next up in dictator book club: Liz Truss
You're joking but the whole episode around Truss did feel weirdly un-democratic. She was the head of an elected party and got deposed by [it was never really clear] to prevent her implementing (probably ruinous) economic reforms. It does seem to suggest that there are forces in the British state with the power to remove prime ministers if they attempt anything too disastrous.
So my understanding was that her party turned against her when she crashed the economy? I don't know much about British politics, but I'd assumed it was democratic (in the sense that it was elected officials using powers described in the law in an intended way)
She was removed by her own party (who also put her in power, she never led it in an election). Specifically, the person who told her she had to go was the chairman of the 1922 committee (Graham Brady), which is an association of Tory MPs who aren't on the government payroll.
If Sunak wins two elections in a row (like Modi has), Scott will do a hit piece on him calling him a dictator (like Modi).
His loose use of the term "dictator" offends Indians like me who voted for Modi in a free and fair election.
Unless you're from his constituency (unlikely), you voted for his party. That's not the same thing.
Yes, I meant voting for his party.
Ah yes, Scott always turns to the New York times for advice on who is a good person. Well known fact.
(Since sarcasm doesn't translate well through text I'll just remind everyone that the NYT did a hatchet job on Scott that backfired on them rather amusingly so it is unlikely he turns to them for guidance for anything)
Yes, that's why the fact that he agrees with them is funny. (Yes, I know "reversed stupidity isn't intelligence," etc.)
When you're an institutionalist committed not to holding positions offensive to more than 70% of your social circle, you're going to be taking your cues from the New York Times, even if you hate them.
I quibble with the "taking your cues from" part. I never ever read the Times, quite deliberately avoiding any links that point to it (made very easy by the paywall, thanks NY Times). But I would not at all be surprised if I held some/many positions in agreement with NYT.
There's no reason why 'taking your cues' from the New York Times has to mean *directly* from them. Their takes are repeated (or the same takes are printed) all over mainstream respectable Twitters and blogs and indeed by that supermajority of your social circle who you want not to hate you. The New York Times is the simply most visible and highest-prestige of this broad group of opinion broadcasters, useful for the figure of speech called metonymy.
Particularly useful in this case because it's funny and sad.
Yeah I see your point. NYT has enough weight to get its ideas diffused into the system as if by osmosis. As a certain former President - "hated" and/but propelled into power by NYT and its ilk - liked to say, SAD!
While I agree Modi is not openly a dictator, he is trying very hard to destroy the opposition in very illiberal ways. He's weaponised the ED, taken over the courts, all media is now under his or his cronies control, and are extremely careful about upsetting him. Public criticism is essentially non-existent because people are too scared that the machinery will come after you. All of these are dangerous steps.
Thanks.
Modi/BJP have no incentive to make opposition stronger.
If the opposition had stopped taking unpopular positions of minority appeasement such as quota for x (x can be Muslims or other minorities group), the opposition would be stronger today. If Rahul Gandhi was not the face of opposition, Modi would not be looking at a 3rd term victory. So before blaming Modi, take a good look at his pathetic opposition. There are many TV channels that are left wing in India (NDTV et al). Not sure what is meant by all media now under his control.
I'm no fan of the opposition in India, they've been massive cock ups for India. But, and this is a big one, there's a difference between adopting bad policies, which the opposition has consistently done, and between messing with the institutions that allow democracy to function (checks and balances, media, judiciary, statistical institutions, bureaucracy), which no one has done to the extent Modi is doing since Indira Gandhi, and she was not as competent about it as he is. Also, not sure where you were when this happened, but NDTV was bought out by Adani.
None of the dictators reviewed so far (Erdogan, Modi, Orban, Xi, Putin, and Chavez) have been officially dictators. All of them still hold elections. All of them still have legal ways to be removed from power. All of them have put up roadblocks to being removed from power or exerted control over the media, to various degrees. Most of them are popular in their country.
There isn't a clear line one crosses to become dictator. These reviews so far have been about modern leaders who have some dictator-like aspects.
Scott's definition of "dictator" seems to be
Rightwing leaders who keep getting elected for a decade despite their non-liberal right wing views.
Such as Modi.
We Indians laugh at Scott's characterization of Modi as a "dictator".
You are literally commenting on an article about a left-winger.
Thats an exception.
Okay dude
> There isn't a clear line one crosses to become dictator
Well there's that one river... have we checked how many of these leaders have been to Northern Italy?
This is nonsense. Erdo, Modi, and Orban, I kind of see your point; but Putin hasn't been through a real election in over twenty years, and Xi has never been through any elections at all. The Red Cinese public can only vote directly at the local level, and only then for candidates approved by the Party.
There's also a lot of ways for initially-democratically-elected leaders to expand their powers, and remove any chance they'll be held accountable, before they reach the level of a Putin or a Chavez, even if they don't go as far as carrying out terrorist attacks against a bunch of poor people and blaming it on Muslims to start an imperialist war and maintain hold on power:
https://www.hudson.org/national-security-defense/vladimir-putin-1999-russian-apartment-house-bombings-was-putin-responsible
Xi has been through many elections, the most recent being earlier this year in March 2023. They may not be free or competitive elections, but that's exactly the point I'm making. All these leaders keep up the pretense of being elected. None of them have an official position of "dictator", "king", "emperor", or similar. They vary in how much they've rigged the game. There's a spectrum from less dictator-esque to more and there's no clear line to separate them.
No one is disagreeing that Xi or Putin belong in the Dictator's Book Club reviews. The GGP comment was disagreeing that Modi belongs.
"They may not be free or competitive elections"
Then they're not real elections! Fuck, the PRC doesn't even have direct bullshit elections for positions outside the lowest local level, and they have complete control over who gets picked for those anyway.
Your tone sounds like you're disagreeing with something, but you're not disagreeing with anything as far as I can tell.
Xi Jinping was elected in 2012, and re-elected every 5 years after that. They don't have direct elections, but neither does the US for the presidency. China has more layers of indirection (people elect county-level representatives, who elect provincial representatives, who elect the ~3000 members of the NPC, who elected Xi president), but it's not indirection that's the main problem; it's the rigging of the elections. Russia demonstrates that you can rig direct elections just fine.
Erdogan, Modi, Orban, Putin, and Chavez also have elections that aren't free or competitive, to various degrees. That's why they're in the Dictator Book Club series. For example, one study on India's democracy under Modi concludes:
> The BJP government incrementally but systemically attacked nearly all existing mechanisms that are in place to hold the political executive to account, either by ensuring that these mechanisms became subservient to the political executive or were captured by party loyalists. Almost all the techniques of what Sadurski calls the 21st century authoritarian’s “playbook” were deployed.
(https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/lehr-2020-2009/html#j_lehr-2020-2009_s_007_w2aab3b7b3b1b6b1ab1b8Aa)
No one has claimed all these leaders are equally undemocratic. Some are less democratic than others.
North Korea has two other parties besides the ruling party, China has eight so-called "minor" parties. Check, maybe other things that seem obvious to you are also wrong?
Are you suggesting NK and China have free and fair elections?
These "parties" are probably props to attempt to show that these 2 countries have "democracies".
'Modi is not jailing his opponents'
You're not paying attention - 'An investigation report by The Indian Express reveals that a total of 121 prominent politicians have been under ED probe ever since the NDA government came to power in 2014. Among those politicians who were booked, raided, questioned, or arrested by the ED, as many as 115 are Opposition leaders which makes it 95 per cent of total politicians.
This can be said as a significant increase in contrast to the probe agency's casebook in the UPA regime (2004 to 2014) which had only 26 political leaders under its scanner and it included 14 from the Opposition (54 per cent).'
https://www.india.com/news/india/enforcement-directorate-casebook-95percent-of-politicians-booked-by-ed-since-2014-from-opposition-report-5643576/
That last point about how Chavez reminds you a lot about Trump was something we felt here in Venezuela too. Back in 2016 I remember pretty much everybody I knew was dreading that the gringo Chavez could win (sorry if that's an offensive term, I really have no idea how Americans feel about it but back then that was one of the ways we referred to Trump here).
But after Trump won and first it very quickly became clear that he was a strong hardliner against Maduro which made the Maduro government very scared for a while (at least until the collapse of Guaidó), and second that he rolled back Obama's Cuban thaw pretty much short-circuited the brain of a lot of us Venezuelans, me included for a good while, and we became staunch supporters of Trump.
I known plenty of people here that will never forgive Obama for that, the Cuban thaw pretty much solidified the idea that Obama was if not directly Chavista/Castrista then dangerously sympathetic to it on a lot of us
If you want an explanation for why the latino communities of Florida are so fond of Trump that's the best explanation I can come up with from my vantage point here in Venezuela.
Did the Cuban thaw help Chavez? How?
I don't know if it helped Chavez, I never claimed that. What I meant is that the Cuban thaw was (and is to this day) seen by pretty much everybody in the opposition here as an unacceptable concession to both chavismo and castrismo on the part of Obama.
Anecdotally, how popular is Maduro now? Is it a case where everyone hates him but him and his cronies have the guns, or does he have a solid base of support still in the general population?
As far as I can tell it's the first one. The recent opposition primaries had a much, MUCH stronger showing than anybody was expecting and that's got every political actor here quite on edge, specially the government.
Was there some sort of an expectation that if Obama had just continued the hardline Cuba policies then *this* would have been the time the Communists lost power for good, or is this just a vibes thing?
I'm not a Venezuelan, but if I was I imagine I would feel that dropping policies that weaken Cuba, the country that strengthens the regime I don't like, would be something I would oppose. In other words, "the enemy of the friend of my enemy is my friend, but if they stop being the enemy of the friend of my enemy that that will be good for my enemy and bad for me, which would bother me."
or, less neutrally:
"the good guys oppose the bad guys who support the other bad guys who oppress me, and if the good guys stop doing that that is not good and very worrisome."
It doesn't just seem like a "vibes" thing, there is a causal connection you can draw there. Albeit a circuitous one.
It's pretty much that, yes. If Chavez had never entered the picture the Castro regime would have either had to severely change track and get on the US's good side or it would have collapsed completely during the early 2000s. Regardless of the thaw or anything else Obama did or didn't do, Chavez bought a golden life-raft for Cuba with the unimaginably huge oil windfall he got so the regime could have kept on trucking for a good long while as it has.
I appreciate your input as a Venezuelan very much but I think I can reasonably speak for many Americans when I say that Cuba is a *terrible* proxy for reading the tea-leaves in American politics and at this point has essentially nothing to do any kind of sympathy or antipathy for communism, socialism, or even any particular feelings for the Casto regime for the 99.9% of the U.S. population that *aren't* the descendants of Cuban emigres who were doing well under Bautista but faced disfavor or dispossession over Castro.
Cuba at large gets essentially no press coverage here and when the issue comes up, the default vibe is along the lines of "well, embargoing Cuba hasn't worked to destroy the Castro regime for the six-decades plus that we've been trying it, and every other Western nation including Canada seems to have no problem allowing people to visit and buy cigars, what are we trying to accomplish here any more? Whatever it was, it clearly hasn't worked. Given that, I should be allowed to go to Havana as a tourist and buy cigars." There's no broader left/right political valence to it because Cuba is so geopolitically irrelevant to the United States except as a possible tourist destination.
It's essentially only *because* it's such a non-issue to most Americans that the embargo continues, because continuing it is basically an electoral sop to the Cuban emigre community in Florida as an attempt to win votes--which, again, works because nobody else really cares about Cuba.
As a side note, this isn't the first time I've heard concern about potential Communist sympathies be expressed from a Latin American perspective (particularly vis a vis Venezuela) with respect to the way American elections go (and, again, I really appreciate the input) but cannot emphasize enough for observers there that there is no actual Red-Communist / Marxist / Leninist constituency here of any relevance even remotely. The actual debates (and the tossing around of the word "socialism," which is used much more loosely than "communism" is here) are almost entirely centered around the degree to which the U.S. should adopt social welfare states like those of North/Western Europe, and have nothing to do with *actual* Marxism/Leninism/Maoism.
Again, not trying to yell at you here and I really appreciate the input, just trying to clarify what I think may be a broader misunderstanding in Latin America about the interplay between the word "socialism" as used in U.S. politics relative to the fact that there's no actual leftist-in-the-sense-of-Communist constituency here.
I understand your points, and as I said this is the best explanation I've come up with from my own experience here in Venezuela.
"It's essentially only *because* it's such a non-issue to most Americans that the embargo continues, because continuing it is basically an electoral sop to the Cuban emigre community in Florida as an attempt to win votes"
Finally realizing that was what ended up souring me on Trump to be honest. As I said, his aggressive bluster against Maduro kinda short-circuited our brain and it took me an embarrassingly long time to come to that conclusion.
This doesn't change that Obama's Cuba thaw was both strategically wrong and morally disgusting. Though given his Iran policy, it's par for his course.
He really is a ln awful man. Much more like Trump than anyone wants to admit.
What effect did the Obama thaw with Cuba have on the Cuban/Venezuelan/Latam situation? Did it help empower Chavez like figures?
Refer to here for my answer to that question https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/dictator-book-club-chavez?r=cpqft&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=42919437
One thing that helped Chavez is that Venezuela's economy and culture was kind of "extractivist" and highly corrupt because of the massive dependence on the Oil Money even before he came along. I remember reading a blog from a Venezuelan talking about a particularly comical version of this: in order to pay your taxes, you had to get your tax form stamped. The bureaucrats in charge of the stamp quickly realized this, and started demanding bribes for people to pay their taxes.
I'd say the "flaw" in democracy is more that if you have a huge mass of very poor, sporadically employed people, it's possible to build up a political machine based off of handing out "goodies" for political support (I'm not saying that to dump on the people casting their votes for that - if you were deeply impoverished and sporadically employed, wouldn't you want to support the person who helps you?). In most democracies, there's a limit in that you're also aware that you need a productive economy with investment, and there's a pretty quick feedback loop on this stuff if it gets too expensive and your tax revenue starts cratering (which you can extend through borrowing, but only for so long). Having Big Oil Money lets you circumvent that limitation for a while.
Patronage networks translating to political power seems to be the default for democracies. This goes back at least to the Romans.
It's happened a fair bit in the US. Look at Tammany Hall.
To the extent that it has become less common in the West, it's likely due to people as a whole getting richer and less dependent on patrons to do so.
It's also due to deliberate decision to do things like anonymising voting, such that you an bribe people all you like and they can take that bribe and walk into the booth and still vote for the other guy, which rather removes the incentive to hand out bribes outside the booth
That does help. Though I wonder at the relative order of things. Did people get richer, so they pushed for anonymous voting because they didn't need patronage? Or did they push for anonymous voting, and got richer afterwards?
Now that we're moving to mail-in, this will likely reverse. There's no anonymity there, at least if it's done in a manner that secures against fraud.
I know that in Australia, at least, anonymous voting was very consciously put in place to stop obvious bribery (with beer rather than hard cash, it is Australia :P ).
Our electoral commission is independent, though, so the angry punter no longer getting free beer didn't have the option to go vote for the pro-bribery-in-elections party
How do you actually get an independent commission though? Who selects members and under what circumstances do they serve?
American judges are "independent" and many are. Their process sure doesn't seem like it guarantees it though.
The commissioner is appointed by a joint parliamentary commission - independence is more a function of societal norms, it's pretty hard to guarantee in theory.
also, amending my earlier comment, anonymous voting in Australia came super early, predating the independent Electoral Commission - and indeed, predating "Australia" as a unified nation.
In point of fact the U.S. has an even bigger money-tsunami than Venezuela - being the world's reserve currency and a guaranteed market for national bond issues. We get to borrow basically infinite money at extremely low interest rates in ways that would be ruinous for any other country, but in our case appear to be defying fiscal gravity for the time being...for the time being...
The upside of the U.S. political being dysfunctional and extremely hard to get anything done in, is that it's also hard to get crazy things done in it.
Sort of. It's harder to pass crazy legislation, but it's also easier for e.g. courts to make crazy rulings, because the legislature doesn't rein them in.
The US federal deficit is 5.3% of GDP, which is typical of the last few decades. Oil is 12-25% of Venezuela's GDP.
I was also living in Venezuela when Chavez was elected for the first time, and what really impressed me was how sick people were of AD and COPEI (the two main political parties, very, very roughly analogous to the Democratic and Republican parties). Chavez' main opponent, Enrique Salas Romer, was also running as an independent and had a slight lead (30 percent to 25 percent, something like that--there were a LOT of candidates) and when AD and COPEI got cold feet and declared that they would both support Salas Romer--his support promptly dropped to 10 percent and Chavez's rose to 50.
I have to say, having seen Chavez in action, that when Trump came on the scene I was really struck by the similarity between them, in that, as far as I could see, neither wanted the presidency for ordinary political reasons; they just wanted to have the best possible stage for the (Chavez)/(Trump) ultimate reality TV show.
> In particular, he benefitted from a constitutional assembly; he was able to plan it so that a 52% showing by his party led to control of 95% of the seats, essentially letting him rewrite the constitution and gain unlimited power. Most western countries have better constitutional amendment processes than this, so we’re probably safe.
I'm really curious about how this worked. Like, sure, malapportionment and gerrymandering are things, but...?
Imagine a series of political subdivisions that each exactly match the national percentage, where the highest vote getter wins. So 52% in each voting district means a complete win. I presume that the remaining 5% were so heavily towards the opponents as to make this impossible or not worth the effort.
I mean, you're right, 52% -> 95% does actually sound quite doable with classic gerrymandering techniques. But like, the question is why on earth was the president given sole -- and I'm guessing likely unreviewable -- districting power for this purpose?? Like that's the vulnerability here.
People frequently underestimate the time and effort put into the American Constitution. Creating lasting and balanced rules for a nation is hard work. It's quite easy to get just enough people on your own side, especially if you can bribe or threaten them, to get them to legally give you whatever you want. If the rules don't permit your opposition real power to curb you, then that's the game.
I think I finally now understand why Dictatorships end up so irrationally bad and awful (eg discouraging accurate reporting) - it's because Trump, not the TV trope of ambitious tyrant - is the archetypal dictator. Becoming and remaining a dictator is an incredibly high risk move. If all you want is a few slave girls you can buy a compound and bribe some people. People become dictators because of a profound psychological need for admiration/control/etc that they can't ignore. Normal people who find themselves dictators behave differently. That gives you Khruschev, MBS or Hu Jintao not Xi or Putin.
Interestingly, if true, this suggests that monarchy might be strongly preferable to anything but a wealthy educated western style democracy. The uncertainty in succession/power means there will be a strong selection for nutters willing to make long shot gambles to gain power and the longer the system persists the greater the chance someone wins the power lotto and seizes control.
I understand the concern but look at Khrushchev. When he took control losing power meant a firing squad. By the time he left it meant a comfortable retirement. Same is true with Mao's succesors.
I think the effect you speak of only controls when you have a personal cult (the kind of psych I'm talking about). Otherwise if you aren't unnecessarily cruel the desire of other actors to avoid their own bad ends allows for retirement provided you can credibly commit to leave politics (tho I agree it's harder for charismatic first gen revolutionaries ...Castro couldn't have easily committed)
The arrest of Pinochet probably marked the end of that practice. Now, dictators die with their boots on.
Mohammed Reza was the one of the best leaders in the history of Persian civilization. It's bullshit Commie/Islamist propaganda that he was at all monstrous. So much so that the single worst atrocity of his regime was, in fact, an obvious Khomeini'ist false flag:
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/1978-four-terrorists-burned-420-movie-goers-alive-iran-105082
That greatly overrated commie sow Marjane Satrapi is one of the many people responsible for perpetuating this disgusting coverup. If only she had the decency to be killed along with her treasonous uncle.
The operational problem with monarchy (besides it's instability, tendency to breed court politics, it's reward of toadies and courtiers over competent administrators, and the fact that it doesn't even solve the "going mad with power" problem that dictators have) is that it tends to throw up mediocrities. Look at Wilhelm II, Nicholas II, Charles II (or Charles III, for that matter). None of them are out and out maniacs, they're just the sort of people who should be managing a grocery store or working in an office rather than leading a country.
Say what you want about democracy, at least it tends to throw up leaders with some exceptional qualities - people who clawed their way past a packed field rather than being assigned the job based on which vagina they were pushed out of.
Ohh a democratic system with a broad middle class is obviously better, I was just comparing non-democratic options. We often seem to discourage monarchies because they don't have the pretense of anything but personal power.
And yes monarchies certainly have the mediocrity problem (though it's less mediocrity -- mediocre leaders could just ask for advice -- and more the conviction that one is brilliant when one isn't...an issue exacerbated by a lifetime of toadies) but simply choosing a random leader still might be better than letting whoever can grab dictatorial power do so.
I'd add that I suspect democratic governance is only stable/helpful when you do have a broad economic base. Countries full of poor people may be better off following a version of the Chinese system initially -- one in which the party elites were legitimately well compensated and without the Maoist legacy of individual control. I guess that's basically the Roman republic model (they had hundreds of stable years and would likely have managed a democratic transition in an industrial age). Countries with lots of poverty and a few highly profitable industries like oil may just be fucked.
The reason I say that is in such systems the populace won't be (and perhaps shouldn't be) inclined towards conservative (small c) incrementalism meaning they'll have to weigh policy considerations they lack the education and knowledge to judge. A poor Venezuelan farmer can't reasonably be expected to tell what's genuinely important economic policy and what's an attempt by elites to retain their advantage making the system extremely vulnerable to populists with bad policies.
Though all options seem pretty bad here...ideally we'd have some kind of benign colonial administration but I fear that any state that would do that well will be one which sees it as morally objectionable.
We don’t have democracy
But in the context of an absolutist monarchy, ineffectual "mediocrities" as sovereigns, especially skint ones, are usually no bad thing in the long run because they give competent functionaries and counsellors a chance to have their own way up to a point and gain more experience and power in leadership, which they are then reluctant to forgo.
Of course one can have too much of a good thing, if they manage to depose the sovereign and become an even more despotic replacement!
Incidently, I wouldn't call Charles II a mediocrity. Given Parliament's recently gained supremacy, he managed the country with astute compromise and popular policies. It was his father Charles I's shortage of funds and obstinate refusal to compromise, incompetence in its own way, that led to his downfall and Parliament's victory (which is an example of my point).
You are correct - I was thinking of Charles I.
Agreed that mediocre absolutist monarchs are a good thing in as much as they push the system towards less absolutism, that that's a bit like saying that horrifically violent dictators are a good thing in as much as they push the system towards the overthrow of the violent dictatorship.
The point is that monarchy, as a system, is flawed even on its own terms because it just does not produce better leadership than you would expect by random selection. And, in fact, because a would-be monarch is often primed from birth by having everyone defer to them, they are frequently the worst combination of egotistical and useless.
I agree that monarchies do not produce the best candidates for running a country, but the idea that a random selection would be equal is incredibly incorrect.
At the very least you would need to remove criminals, people suffering from malnutrition and other direct impairments, and the uneducated from the pool. You would also need to develop a leadership education program to teach this "random" person some of the things that a prince would have grown up learning through osmosis even if nobody taught him on purpose.
Outside of a few famous idiots, the history of monarchies would put them in the top ~1% of capable people in any country they ran, probably more like top .1%. In a country of a million people, that would still be 1,000-10,000 people equally or more capable and a bad failure rate for a monarchy, but not at all the same as random people.
As if the criminal tendencies of various kings have not been fodder for stories since the days of clay tablets. I'll also grant that they're better fed and sometimes get an education (although far, far less than one would expect in our technocratic era). As for 'direct impairments', I don't known if you've noticed the number of times that hereditary monarchy veers off into incest and genetic deformity? Or are you a fan of the Hapsburg chin?
All told, I'd put the failure rate for monarchy solidly in the 'average' category, as the good (food, sometimes education) is more or less balanced by the bad (raised in an environment that promotes mental pathology, family tree that forms an uroboros). I'd also say that the extent to which the negative tendencies are reduced and the positives reinforced almost exactly mirrors how autocratic the entire system is. More power concentrated in the hands of a divine ruler leads to marrying your sister and the Kafes, less leads to parliamentary monarchy and industrial revolution.
All of which leads me to the conclusion that the best form of monarchy is the one where the monarch is replaced entirely by someone who worked their way to leadership and had to defend it against multiple powerful interests before voluntarily surrendering it. I.E. democracy, or something with the same flavour.
> All of which leads me to the conclusion that the best form of monarchy is the one where the monarch is replaced entirely by someone who worked their way to leadership and had to defend it against multiple powerful interests before voluntarily surrendering it. I.E. democracy, or something with the same flavour.
There's also that Ottoman version where the successor would be whichever son managed to seize power and kill all his rivals. It doesn't have the "voluntary surrender" aspect, but it's got the others.
If Trump is a dictator what did he dictate?
He isn't and I didn't claim that he was. I used him as an example of someone with a deep psychological need to be admired and feel he's on top.
Most people in Trump's situation would have choosen not to run rather than risk putting their shady buisnesses under the microscope. If they did run and win they'd have behaved very differently. He isn't and wasn't a dictator but he has the deep seated desperate need for approval I was talking about.
Shady businesses? Is that from press coverage or your actual knowledge of the situation? I won’t bring up Biden here because he didn’t even have a business, shady or otherwise.
"Here may be found the last words of Donald of Arimathea."
Who's KBS?
Typo...meant MBS.
Ah, of course. Sorry, I thought it might have been someone famous I'd never seen referred to by his initials, like one of the other comments referring to "LKY" (Lee Kuan Yew, the Singapore guy).
Hm, compare and contrast:
> I swear to the God of my fathers, I swear on my homeland, I swear on my honour, that I will not let my soul feel repose, nor my arm rest until my eyes have seen broken the chains that oppress us and our people by the order of the powerful
> I will not cease from mental fight, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, till we have built Jerusalem, in England's green and pleasant land.
IDK how obvious this is to people who grew up outside the UK's now-rapidly-vanishing tradition of nominal/cultural anglican christianity, but a salient characteristic of the church of england since ~1700 has been a remarkable ability to bury the significance of potentially very incendiary religious ideas in deliberately milquetoast procedural ritual. Someone from the US, for example, could hear us singing Jerusalem and assume that at least on some level we meant it, but for most people it really was just 'that vaguely patriotic religious song we sing sometimes'
Especially since the American analogue, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, IS taken seriously: the US fights all wars as though they were holy wars, to annihilation or unconditional surrender.
"As [christ] died to make men holy / Let us die to make men free! / As God is watching on! / Glory, Glory Hallelujah"
For all the melodrama, it still brings a tear to my eye.
It's a great song, yeah.
I'm sorry, have you been in a coma since 1945?
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/courage-strength-optimism/bidens-enduring-afghanistan-debacle
I did not claim the US always WINS these wars.
We DID win the wars. We just decided to withdraw and toss the victory to our enemies anyway, for stupid, shallow reasons that failed on even their own terms: whether Nixon in Vietnam, Obama in Iraq, or Biden in Afghanistan.
This is cope. A loss due to internal divisions is still a loss. In fact, that is the usual way empires lose against far weaker foes.
As someone who grew up American Episcopal, I quite agree. :-)
> the the result, fiasco
For some reason I noticed this one immediately
Yeah me too, but I thought it was a typo
Is it not?
It probably is, but it could also be a hidden reference to a well-known illusion (tendency for native speakers to automatically correct some of the typos while reading, including double article thingy, quite well researched in cognitive psychology).
It's sort of common knowledge in rationalists circles, and I'm pretty sure Scott also mentioned it in some of his previous posts too. So one could suspect that double "the" was left in the text on purpose (I don't think it is the case, but it would be pretty on character for Scott to do if it was).
I think that Chris was just surprised that he noticed it at all, as native speakers usually don't (and neither do fluent non-native speakers, I personally did not notice the typo).
I think there's running thing where Scott leaves these in as some kind of experiment
A lot of posts have Scott deliberately leaving several doubled "the"s in a paragraph, and then later referring to how you probably didn't notice all the doubled "the"s.
I'm realizing this is actually a pretty clever way to cover for a somewhat common typo.
I was living in New England during the Bush years, and I regularly saw ads by one of the Kennedy scions for a charity that provided free heating oil to the poor, "thanks to the generosity of Hugo Chavez and the people of Venezuela." At the time there were a lot of liberals who hated Bush and his endless wars and the way he treated the rest of the world like garbage... and there in Venezuela was a vocally anti-Bush politician, he gives to our poor and he's endorsed by a Kennedy! So I'm sure Chavez had a very high approval rating in some parts of greater Boston for a time, and equally sure that after Maduro took power and everything went to shit, they decided to collectively forget that.
I was a Daily Kos reader with no knowledge of Venezuela (or of the history of socialist governments, really) and I remember getting a vaguely positive vibe about Chavez from that site. Very much a "if Bush doesn't like him how bad can he be" thing.
There was also that famous Bernie Sanders quote wasn't there? "These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who's the banana republic now?" -- dated 2011
Though looking deeper into it, it seems that Sanders didn't say it himself, he just essentially 'retweeted' a newspaper editorial by the Valley News Editorial Board on his Senate page that said that: https://www.econlib.org/bernie-sanders-didnt-say-it/. You can pull up a copy of that Senate page at https://web.archive.org/web/20190306014455/https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/close-the-gaps-disparities-that-threaten-america, for some reason it's been taken down and is no longer available.
(If you want to look at the earlier version of the 'retweet' that didn't sufficiently clarify it was 'retweeting' the Valley News Editorial Board and got people confused into remembering the quote as something Mr. Sanders himself said, see https://web.archive.org/web/20131120170952/http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/close-the-gaps-disparities-that-threaten-america)
I've seen that quote posted hundreds of times by r/neoliberal and r/enoughsandersspam types as a dunk on Bernie and didn't even know that Bernie didn't actually say it.
Should be noted that when Chavez died Bernie called him a "dead communist dictator". (https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/11511/)
I guess it's just confusing because by endorsing the editorial as a "Must Read" on his website, he maybe *sorta* endorsed its conclusion? Because the "Who's the banana republic now?" paragraph is literally the concluding paragraph to the essay. But it's still confusing: he never said it and never outright endorsed it, just endorsed the editorial as a whole... so I don't know whether it should count or not.
(It doesn't help matters of course that the original version of his 'retweet' that stuck around for literal years wasn't clear enough that it was a retweet, to be sure.)
Easy enough to condemn somebody in hindsight when we know more information and it doesn't matter anymore. There were a lot of people on the left that ranged between vaguely and fully pro-Chavez during the Bush years.
It wasn't just the Bush years, this example is from 2013: https://www.salon.com/2013/03/06/hugo_chavezs_economic_miracle/
"Hugo Chavez’s economic miracle
The Venezuelan leader was often marginalized as a radical. But his brand of socialism achieved real economic gains
By: DAVID SIROTA
TOPICS: EDITOR'S PICKS, HUGO CHAVEZ, HUMAN RIGHTS, LATIN AMERICA, POVERTY, SOCIALISM, VENEZUELA, POLITICS NEWS
...
No, Chavez became the bugaboo of American politics because his full-throated advocacy of socialism and redistributionism at once represented a fundamental critique of neoliberal economics, and also delivered some indisputably positive results. Indeed, as shown by some of the most significant indicators, Chavez racked up an economic record that a legacy-obsessed American president could only dream of achieving.
For instance, according to data compiled by the UK's Guardian newspaper (https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/oct/04/venezuela-hugo-chavez-election-data), Chavez’s first decade in office saw Venezuelan GDP more than double and both infant mortality and unemployment almost halved...
When a country goes socialist and it craters, it is laughed off as a harmless and forgettable cautionary tale about the perils of command economics. When, by contrast, a country goes socialist and its economy does what Venezuela’s did, it is not perceived to be a laughing matter – and it is not so easy to write off or to ignore..."
[Note: I am not yet aware if Mr. Sirota has ever addressed the state of the Venezuelan economy since then. He is perhaps too busy working as a senior adviser and speechwriter for Mr. Bernie Sanders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sirota
We shall have to settle for Mr. Sirota's concluding remarks, I suppose:]
"Are there any lessons to be learned from Venezuela’s decision to avoid that subsidization route and instead pursue full-on nationalization?
Likewise, in a United States whose poverty rate is skyrocketing, are there any lessons to be learned from Venezuela’s policies that so rapidly reduced poverty?
And in a United States that has become more unequal than many Latin American nations, are there any constructive lessons to be learned from Chavez’s grand experiment with more aggressive redistribution?
No doubt, there are few absolutely clear answers to those uncomfortable questions, if those questions are assessed honestly... But maybe now that the iconoclast is dead, the cartoon will end. Maybe now Chavez’s easily ridiculed bombast can no longer be used to distract from Venezuela’s record – and, thus, a more constructive, honest and critical economic conversation can finally begin."
EDIT: Wow, if you start digging through the archives, it's incredible what's been memoryholed, there's so much more Chavez praise out there that's been quietly buried. Example:
"Still, in the United States, the positive side of Chávez’s economic legacy is often overlooked. Ever since he was first elected President, in 1999, his critics have been predicting a collapse in the Venezuelan economy. So far, it hasn’t happened."
(From https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/venezuelas-resource-curse-will-outlive-hugo-chvez, in 2013)
&
"HUGO CHÁVEZ: MAN AGAINST WORLD
As illness ends Hugo Chávez’s rule in Venezuela, what will his legacy be? Richard Gott argues he brought hope to a continent.
...
Chávez’s search for a different economic policy, with a powerful role for the state, is thought to be foolish, utopian and destined to fail. Yet with many countries in Europe in a state of economic collapse – largely the result of their long embrace of neoliberal policies – his project for Latin America may soon have wider appeal.
...
Long after successive presidents of the United States have disappeared into the obscurity of their presidential archives, the memory of Hugo Chávez will survive in Latin America..."
(From https://web.archive.org/web/20170201004012/http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/world-affairs/2013/01/hugo-chavez-man-against-world, an article that has since been taken down from the New Statesman website)
&
"JOSEPH STIGLITZ, IN CARACAS, PRAISES VENEZUELA'S ECONOMIC POLICIES
Nobel Prize winning economist and former vice-president of the World Bank, JOSEPH STIGLITZ, praised Venezuela's economic growth and "positive policies in health and education" during a visit to Caracas on Wednesday.
In his latest book "Making Globalization Work," Stiglitz argues that left governments such as in Venezuela, "have frequently been castigated and called ‘populist' because they promote the distribution of benefits of education and health to the poor."
...
In terms of economic development Stiglitz argued it was not good for the Central Bank to have "excessive" autonomy. Chavez's proposed constitutional reforms, if approved in December, will remove the autonomy of the country's Central Bank.
[Quoter's note: this was how Chavez was able to take full control of the economy and hyperinflate the currency]"
(From https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/2719/)
This really deserves to be a top level comment
You know what? Why not, I'll try it.
Everything didn't go to shit with Maduro. Chavez had already fucked everything up aplenty, and would've either done the same things as Maduro or been poisoned by his Cuban masters had he not gotten cancer.
This review is a curate's egg-good only in parts.
Calling the Venezuelan list "cancel culture" is ridiculous.
The total lack of specifics in the following statement reveals its vacuity. The author is entitled to his prejudices as much as anyone, but this is just....weak. "Look at the American regulatory state, and lots of it is ruinous ideas that probably sounded good to people who didn’t understand economics. Take a random Chavez proposal, call it “the Green New Deal”, and publish an editorial saying it will “make the one percent pay”, and half the US electorate will start protesting for it immediately."
"lots of it" "probably sounded good" "half the US electorate". Please.
The total lack of specifics in your criticism... Reveal its vacuity? Why do you disagree? The statement seems perfectly on point and clearly realistic to me
"lots of it" "probably sounded good". None of these are specific enough to be worth arguing against. I listed them in my original post. I was specific.
"lots of it": Scott has some very detailed and specific arguments about some very specific US-regulations - in the medical field, his expertise. Whole posts, much longer than the Chavez one. If you can not find them, I shall gladly assist you. (Actually, I agree with you that those posts are much better than the dictator club ones! Which are still reasonably amusing and enlightening enough. He tries to figure stuff out and share it. ) Bit wild to expect him going all in on US-politics in this piece about Venezuela. "half the US electorate" is specific - or he needs to give their names? "probably sounded good" - what the issue with that? Want a listing of a dozen possible polling results / or insider reports of meetings?
Thanks!
I'm not expecting him to go all in. I probably shouldn't have referred to the half the US. What I'm also objecting to is his treating his speculations as if they were fact. It seems pretty reasonable to ask for two or three examples of such regulations, for example. Or who they sounded good to? I mean, if you want me to take your positions seriously, give me something to work with! To be clear, I don't need insider reports-although there are plenty of those these days. Just make it clear with a couple of examples which regulations or laws you're talking about-I might even agree! But it's impossible to agree or disagree in a void.
Substack is terrible for finding old posts, but here are a few:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-government-is-making-telemedicine
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-fda-has-punted-decisions-about
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/welcome-to-the-terrible-world-of
One of several about fish-oil ;) : https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/details-of-the-infant-fish-oil-story
On SSC: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/24/employer-provided-health-insurance-delenda-est/
Prediction markets are a recurrent theme here. "Mantic monday" posts. Often discussing why they are good, and how the gov tries to kill them with regulation. Another Leitmotiv are charter-cities who are based on the belief that it is easy to create a better-run place from scratch by cutting back on global over-regulation.
In a void? You do live in a country, right? Not in a void? You went to a school? Tried for tax-returns? Never met a rule you considered overdone? Where have you been during lockdowns? In a void?
Yeah. The idea that multiple intelligent and educated people semi independantly arriving to their views through participating in the marketplace of ideas where all kinds of views are available and then starting to spread these ideas on their own be successful and ending up in an equilibrium where most of the instutitions happened voluntary to share these ideas is, somehow, basically the same as a state leader putting their cronies in control of the intitutions so that these instututions spread only the ideas allowed by the states - is mind boggling. At this point we can say that there is no difference between democracy and dictatorship.
Authoritarian leaders do not do "cancel culture". They appeal to it as a boogeyman they need to fight against, thus justifying their censorship and control of the institutions.
> multiple intelligent and educated people semi independantly arriving to their views through participating in the marketplace of ideas where all kinds of views are available and then starting to spread these ideas on their own be successful and ending up in an equilibrium where most of the instutitions happened voluntary to share these ideas
The problem is that this reads like a massive euphemism for coercion.
Well if it reads this way than it's indeed a problem. I would naively think that educating people about the fallacy of gray should fix that.
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/fallacy-of-gray
But here we have Scott somewhat perpetrating this idea, so this can't be the whole answer.
Anyway, I'll still state it explicitly in hope it's going to somewhat help. Coecrcion is a spectrum. No action is totally "free from any influence" because we live in a causal iniverse, and it's not even clear whether alternative is even a coherent idea. And yet there is a magnitude of difference between being persuaded at a gun point and having opportunity to pursue your authenticity.
And inside this spectrum of coercion, there are magnitudes of differences between political coercion, economical coercion and societal coercion. When a government coerces you to do things you are fucked. When you can not afford not to do things you are also pretty much fucked but at least there are some occasional ways around the problem. When people approval/disapproval coerces you - well, it's still bad but very much manageable, especially if you have money and political protection (rights).
As a rule of thumb political coercion is worse than economical, which is worse than social. This rule breaks in extreme cases when a lot of wealth or a lot of social support can be leveraged and turned into political power. But in general, for most of the cases, it's a pretty good heuristic.
So when people claim that the fact that "cancel culture" or even just the fact that most media organically happened to be liberal instead of concervative is as bad as authoritarian/totalitarian state, when they do not see the difference between nearly no coercion and a whole lot of coercion, between social coercion and political coercion - it's a mistake of absurdly huge magnitude.
So, on the rhetorical side, I think the main problem swith your first description were that it elided the role of pressure behind terms like "semi independently" and "happened" and "voluntary", and that there was a stark difference between the places where you used nuanced language and the place where you just said something as if it were universally true ("intelligent", "educated", "all kinds", "on their own", "voluntary"). I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt because I assume you're coming up with this spontaneously in a conversation, and there's only so much nuance that can be packed into a sentence before it becomes unreadable, and it makes sense to focus the nuance on the aspects that the conversation appears to need. But if I were to encounter this in the wild, only the reference to "market" would make me think it wasn't about Mao's Cultural Revolution.
I do agree that there is no action that is completely free of pressure, but... let's just say I'm coming at this from a different perspective where the norms of discourse are vastly different, and it is very unusual for someone to come right out and say it like you did, for very good reasons that are, ironically, in fact due to social pressure. :-)
While I agree in general with your hierarchy of coercion, four big caveats come to mind. First, violence should be added, probably as a 2nd dimension rather than another level. (Although obviously political engagement is implicitly backed by state violence.) Second, those levels bleed into each other. The case with the bakery that wanted to refuse to make a cake is a good example - social bleeds into economic, bringing in politics, and not simply because of wealth or social support. Nighttime marches with burning torches to houses of politicians are another example. Third, social coercion can be seriously psychologically damaging, in ways that the other types are not. We are social apes. Fourth, your descriptions are value-neutral, so I'm assuming that you realize that these things can be applied for bad ends as well as good ends, and that good and bad are subjective. "The Scarlet Letter" comes to mind. In this case, I'm kind of taking a gun-control stance, saying that the weapons should be avoided on principle because people can't be trusted with them, while you appear to be implying that the solution to bad people with weapons is good people with weapons. I think that leads to an arms race and the collapse of civil society.
Regarding your final paragraph, I do think that most people complaining about cancel culture are primarily upset that it's being done to them, and wouldn't complain if it were the other way around. "Who, whom", and all that. When I was growing up, the main example was people being blacklisted for having communist connections. Also, I think "organically" is a very misleading term: not only is this the result of human action, but it imports a positive value association that is unwarranted. Calling it a "monoculture" might be a word with an equivalent negative association.
> I think the main problem swith your first description were that it elided the role of pressure behind terms like "semi independently" and "happened" and "voluntary", and that there was a stark difference between the places where you used nuanced language and the place where you just said something as if it were universally true ("intelligent", "educated", "all kinds", "on their own", "voluntary").
I have troubles understanding what you mean here. How is saying "semi independantly" elides the pressure? The "semi" part is specifically about that. Also you used "voluntary" as an example of both "nuansed" and "universally true" language.
Okay, I suppose you mean that when people are coercing others in a very strong meaning of the word, they may use euphemisms to make this coercion appear less severe? And it creates an implicit associations, that whoever says "semi independantly" actually means something more akin to "at a gun point"? That's true and that sucks. Still we need a way to talk about situations where there is nearly no coercion, where "semi independantly" is not an euphemism but an actual state of affairs, don't you agree?
> let's just say I'm coming at this from a different perspective where the norms of discourse are vastly different, and it is very unusual for someone to come right out and say it like you did, for very good reasons that are, ironically, in fact due to social pressure. :-)
I'll just put this into "non-autistic people are crazy and it's a miracle human society managed to come this far with them in charge" category.
> those levels bleed into each other. The case with the bakery that wanted to refuse to make a cake is a good example - social bleeds into economic, bringing in politics, and not simply because of wealth or social support.
Yes they do, but they are still distinguishable. Imagine if a bakery couldn't possibly afford not to make a cake? Or if it was literraly illegal to refuse to serve a customer. And I'd say that the bleeding in your example does happen due to social support. If al lot of people didn't care about the issue - nothing would happen.
> social coercion can be seriously psychologically damaging, in ways that the other types are not. We are social apes.
I think this is wrong. Not in a sense that social coercion can't be psychologically damaging but because other ways of coercion are damaging in a same and even more severe ways. I'm not sure how to put it into the words, so that a person who didn't experience real authoritarian regimes could understand but living under strong political coercion, where you do not have any power whatsoever - it just sucks your soul away. It turns people into little frightened, and pathetic creatures. Learned helplessness can't even begin to described this state. Everything good and true is twisted into evil and ugly parody of itself and the most horrific thing, is that with time people begin to break, to persuade themselves that this is how things are supposed to be, that they even enjoy it this way. You see the shell of your own mother tearfully ask you not to strip her from the doublethough she put herself into in order not to get crazy with horror. And you oblige, silently mourning her death as a subject of cognition.
I didn't live in real poverty, or, rather, I do not remember it, because being born in the 90s in Russia probably counts, but anyway, I heard that the psychological effects of continious exposure to it are somewhat resembling.
> Fourth, your descriptions are value-neutral, so I'm assuming that you realize that these things can be applied for bad ends as well as good ends, and that good and bad are subjective.
I don't think there is a universal answer here. We need forms of coordination inside society so that it worked at all. Some of them may include some forms of coercion which are actually working as intended for the greater good of all. Consider the fact that a person whose business plan is to sell terrible product that noone wants at huge prices is likely going out of business. Is it a form of economic coercion? Sure. Is it working as intended? Also true.
> Also, I think "organically" is a very misleading term: not only is this the result of human action, but it imports a positive value association that is unwarranted. Calling it a "monoculture" might be a word with an equivalent negative association.
I think that this is likely one of "working as intended with very little coercion" cases, hence the organically label. Look at, say, gay rights. Hundred years ago the mainstream media attitude was not supportive to them. And now it is. How comes? Was there a gay dictator who took controll over the media? Or was it a gradual proccess of more and more people changing their minds based on evidence who managed to appear despite the opposite bias?
It seems to me that Scott is using "cancel culture" here to refer to removing individuals from their jobs and preventing their use of the media (ie, platforming) as punishment, as opposed to throwing them in jail, torturing them, or murdering them in their beds. I don't think he's saying that the people on the list were persecuted for culture war reasons!
Perhaps. it's still not cancel culture, though.
It still boggles my mind that people passed laws to ban plastic straws.
I still miss my plastic shopping bags.
With regulating the broadcasters, there are laws on the books saying that radio and TV frequency allocations have to be "in the public interest" and every so often people float the idea of getting the FCC to rule that stations that carry Alex Jones and company aren't in the public interest. The FCC, even under Democratic presidents, has been extremely reluctant to go down that road, as they don't want to engage in political censorship and the bureaucrats involved would probably receive death threats.
Sounds like sending death threats to bureaucrats was the answer to avoiding dictatorship all along!
People in favor of a strong right to keep and bear arms often see it as an implicit threat to government officials.
And sometimes rather explicit threats too. Almost entirely empty though.
The last serious domestic paramilitary threat in the US from what I've seen was the Rajneeshis. We got very lucky there wasn't an insurgency in Oregon, but even they could only have done so much damage, and they were running practice drills for their terror campaign every day. They weren't close to an existential threat, and they were significantly more dangerous than even the Oath Keepers, who've thankfully been hit with a strong decapitory blow from Uncle Sam, and all without any national terror campaign flaring up.
I cried reading this. I am Venezuelan, and this review describes my memories of Chavismo quite well.
Are you still in Venezuela or did you get out?
I think this is one of those comparisons that illustrates a frequent phenomenon: it's not confusing that Chavez is "left wing" and Trump is "right wing.
In both cases, and many others, people's stated political beliefs (and especially how they're categorized based on a simplistic system with two categories) are not in fact part of any coherent belief system. In a sort of long-running game of Improv, hucksters develop a political persona associated with groups that use certain kinds of buzzwords as a rallying cry, but the thing they're doing is manipulating (or perhaps riding the wave of) those groups, not actually reasoning about the meaning of the political theories associated with the terminology, or how to apply them.
It's similar to how dictatorships will name themselves things like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Trying to figure out why they're so bad at actually being democratic or a republic is missing the point: they're not actually trying, they're just using the words as idk maybe something like a form of attempted mass hypnosis and ritualized conformity system.
From 'Yes, Prime Minister':
Sir Richard Wharton: Its full name is the People's Democratic Republic of East Yemen, sir. Humphrey Appleby: Ah, I see. So it's a communist dictatorship.
I also like this comic, with the same joke: https://www.sandraandwoo.com/2019/08/22/1108-republics/.
I can't tell what's happening in that last panel, and it just makes me think of the closing sequence of Paranoia Agent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5LKs6LlsPQ
Sandra (the girl) is holding a picture of Cloud (the boy), implying that he's dead (likely at the hands of the government).
Oh, I see. Thought that was a picture of her mom or something.
It's not that simple. And as awful as Trump was, it was actually advantageous that he had even fewer deep-seated convictions than Chavez. Comrade Hugo's sincere commitment to socialism turned what should be the dynamo of the Hispanosphere into what may be the only country in the Americas shittier than Haiti.
Dictators, and the dictatorially inclined, also don't favor systems at equal rates. They overwhelmingly prefer systems -- whether outright socialism, or whatever else moves away from capitalism -- that centralize and increase government control of the economy. Trump did as well, but he thankfully lacked the patience, the energy, and moral conviction to go all the way with it.
I'm struggling to see what the specific problem with Trump's tariffs were supposed to be, given that the Biden administration is currently locked in a trade war with China over their potential invasion of Taiwan and has either retained or doubled down on all the Trump-era policies formulated in that regard. And in the wake of the latest crisis in Israel and massive pro-palestine/hamas protests across western nations it seems likely there's going to be a crackdown on either muslim migration specifically or *all* migration in general.
Even if Trump himself is precisely the kind of erratic obligate narcissist ruling through Reality TV engagement metrics described when talking about Chavez, Trump's basic policy platform looks less crazy every year.
I don't think "the Biden administration has retained or doubled all the Trump era policies" entails "it is not bad economic policy"
The point of the policy is not to maximise short-term economic returns (we have far too much of that kind of thinking already.) The point is to minimise industrial supply-chain dependency on a genocidal totalitarian state doomed to collapse thanks to the world's worst fertility crisis and a housing bubble orders of magnitude worse than subprime. Just as the point of migration restrictions is not to provide low-cost labour, but to ensure your country isn't flooded with an easily-radicalised helot population that could murder you over real or imagined historical grievances.
But it does strongly contradict the idea that Trump was acting like a dictator (in this regard), if we're suggesting that Biden is not.
I searched to see if anyone else made this comment. The comparison to tariffs also doesn't make any sense to me.
Trump's tariffs are surely the opposite of Chavez's economics. They raised prices domestically which caused immediate hurt to the poor (short term cost), in order to build up the economy by generating jobs, expertise and national resilience against a potential foreign enemy (long term benefit).
Chavez's policies were the opposite of that: they reduced prices and gave handouts to the poor (short term benefit), whilst trashing the local economy (long term cost).
That argument felt unsupported and just like generic lazy "everyone bad is Trump" pattern matching.
Agreed. There's actually been a huge build-out of manufacturing capacity in the US over the past couple of years, especially in response to COVID and with the Biden administration's blessing, which I guess they deserve some credit for. A lot of the new factories are so heavily automated that the working class see virtually no benefit, though, except in the construction sector.
A lot of this was already baked into the system because Chinese labor costs have been increasing as their demographics turn sour, and there aren't enough other places with the combination cost-effective infrastructure and transport, ultra-low wages, and sufficient security/political stability to replace it. Plus, there's just enough geopolitical craziness going around that business has been concerned about overstretched supply chains and willing to spend a bit more to buy a bit of resilience.
I agree. My point is just that Trump (or maybe Bannon?) was not crazy for wanting to bring back manufacturing jobs.
I've seen some indications that Maduro has, in recent year, actually wound back some Chavista policies and made a "right turn". Mostly this is accusations by left-wingers (ie. https://mronline.org/2021/06/29/turning-right-repressing-left-how-venezuelas-maduro-shifted-course/ or https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/split-between-venezuelas-communists-and-maduros-ruling-party-deepens/) but also from more neutral (https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/venezuela-puts-state-food-firms-private-hands-socialist-policies-recede-2021-09-13/) or even right-wing (https://fee.org/articles/bloomberg-venezuela-turns-to-privatization-after-being-bankrupted-by-socialism/).
Can any Venezuelan readers confirm?
This is just bullshit revisionism by Trotskyist psychopaths who don't want to accept Venezuela's problems were primarily because of socialism, and that the only way to rectify things is to move away from socialism.
In terms of dictators* this is interestingly the opposite of Lee Kuan Yew, who used his power to force through (mostly) technocratic anti-populist measures and then survived long term because they actually worked really well.
*Or, well, leaders that seems undemocratic, ymmv on whether LKY was a dictator
Or Park Chung Hee in South Korea. He was secure in power, cracked down on opposition violently, but seemed to be generally interested in making Korea powerful and rich. Even more surprising, he did a good job of it. The dictator who followed managed to not kill the golden goose, and now they're a rich democracy...talk about a lucky path! I wonder if being a United States vassal state is what made the difference for them. We let Park and his successor get away with quite a bit (since we needed them to Hold the Line against North Korea) but they still needed to keep us happy.
I knew a Singaporean who called him a dictator, but not with any negative connotation. It was just factually true, but also largely irrelevant considering their strong rule of law.
The chewing gum ban did get some mockery, though.
My impression reading this is that Scott's pushing a version of the standard narrative on Venezuela's, that leftism and illiberalism are dangerous for the economy (apologies if that's not the case).
I won't argue Chavez wasn't an incompetent manager, although it's not clear how many of Venezuela's problems stem from mismanagement vs the drop in oil prices or American sanctions, I would have liked more discussion on that issue.
If the main issue with Chavez was that he relied on popular appeal through policies that sounded good but weren't prudent. In way it's a problem that comes from not being doctorial enough and relying on popular support to stay in power.
Maybe that kind of populism is usually associated with the left, but there's also a symmetric tendency for rightists elected leaders to push policies that sound prudent but aren't actually. Austerity has been was electorally popular in the 2010s in the UK, but a lot of Keynesians will say it's responsible for the stagnation we've experienced.
This essay seemed to link leftism and illiberalism with economic mismanagement, but I'm not sure that's a fair association. China is an obvious example of effective economic interventionism married with a suppressed civil society.
Couldn't the conclusion just as easily be that populism was one reason for Venezuela's decline (alongside external shocks) and leftism and illiberalism were only incidental.
I might just be jaded from all the arguments ad-Venezuela from 5-10 years ago, but holding leftism accountable for whatever a half-dictator, half-reality-tv-star is doing in the third world (even a left-wing one) feels a lot like asking the Chicago school to apologise for Trump.
Similarly, I was left wondering whether I'd missed a semantic shift a few years ago that had made "populist" a term that could only be applied to nominal right-wingers. Chavez seems like the epitome of a populist, which according to Oxford via Google is "a person, especially a politician, who strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.". So I can't figure out why the book review only applies the term to not-Chavez nominal conservatives.
BTW, since nobody has mentioned it, the documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised is an amazing inside view pro-Chavez of the 2002 coup-countercoup. Easy to see why people would like Chavez at the time.
Part of running a country is ensuring that long term effects, including the extremely obvious reality of fluctuating oil prices, will not crash the economy. If oil has to be at unusually high prices for an indefinite period of time to survive, then it's not a good system.
I don't get the impression that American sanctions made that much of a difference, and I understand that the US actually imports oil from Venezuela. Even if American sanctions were drastic, that's something that a country seeking to nationalize foreign assets should really consider. Should America ignore that their citizen's investments in foreign countries were stolen? I get that a sovereign country has the right and power to do so, but they don't have the right and especially not the power to prevent other countries from reacting in ways to protect their own interests or the interests of their citizens.
> Austerity was electorally popular in the 2010s in the UK, but a lot of Keynesians will say it's responsible for the stagnation we've experienced.
Despite all the Tories' trumpeting of austerity, attempting to gain kudos from their supporters and hopefully attract some more for Doing the Right Thing even if unpopular, in practice there never really was any austerity! In other words, it was all a big dog whistle, with very little substance.
Also, the UK has been treading water economically for a good twenty years or more, before this so called austerity was even stated Tory policy, and Gordon Brown (Labour PM until 2010) was spending like a drunken sailor on shore leave. Remember that note the outgoing Treasury minister left his Tory successor? "Sorry, the money's all gone!" :-)
FWIW, I reckon most of the reason for the UK's stagnation is that Labour and Tory politicians for many years have been ever more desperately gaming the GDP growth figure by increasing public spending. This has been in part to prevent foreign investors from panicking at a temporary decline in GDP (which would have been a likely consequence of genuine austerity!) and moving their funds elsewhere. It also reduces unemployment, which admittedly isn't entirely a bad thing, but at the cost of locking more of the workforce in mostly unproductive low-skilled make-work public sector jobs, mooching around Government offices clutching important looking papers but achieving little else!
Nah, this type of economic collapse is pretty much always under leftist governments.
Shri Lanka and Lebanon are examples of currently ongoing crisis under what look like pretty rightist governments. And what about historical cases like 90s Russia or the Great Depression?
I would say that 1) I did not say all economic collapses of this sort are leftist; it's only the overwhelming majority, and 2) the Great Depression is absolutely nothing like what happened in Venezuela.
Banning agrochemicals to promote organic farming, and diversity quotas in government are "leftist" in modern American English.
And the prolongation of the economic downturn of 1929 into the decade-long Great Depression WAS due to Franklin Roosevelt's decidedly non-"rightist" policies.
I don't think Lebanon is a good example; I would bet that it would be having a crisis no matter what the politics of its government. And I don't think "left" and "right" are good descriptions for Lebanon's politics. The third largest party in parliament is literally Hezbollah, and if you define them as "left", pretty much anything else will be "right".
I wouldn't bother.
Anything bad happening to right-wing governments is explained away as the result of external factors, as an inevitable price for future good things happening later down the line, as a result of the policies of a previous left-wing government, or as a result of the policy or government secretly being left-wing. In this they ironically mirror the most ardent of unreconstructed communists.
Name any non-socialist economies that have fucked themselves as much as socialist ones.
Socialism is a poverty machine.
I’ve also read Rory Carroll’s book, which is excellent, and I wrote myself a (Spanish-language) book about Chávez and “Chavismo,” after I spent years covering the subject for the Wall Street Journal and got to meet Chavez himself. So I have a small explainer on the mall incident referred to early in the review.
I talked to people involved in that situation, because Venezuela is full of ex officials who quarreled with the regime and are willing to spill the beans. They told me the whole mall thing (which is in Youtube and has become legendary as the “exprópiese” incident all over the Spanish-speaking world) was well-planned in advance. Chavez knew that he was going to take over the mall, and the people with businesses in the mall (many of them jewelers) knew it too, so they arranged a degree of state compensation for losing their stores days before.
Let me say that the day when I met Chávez was also very illustrative about his ways with power. I was covering a three-day visit he did to Beijing in late 2008, as the only WSJ reporter who spoke Spanish in all of Asia at the time (I actually lived in Singapore then) and Chávez at one point noticed that the Spanish-speaking media contingent included attractive young women eager to talk to him. So he invited us reporters to the embassy for drinks and pizza that night.
The night at the embassy was chaotic, as everything about Chávez was, to the point that when the time arrived to order pizza, it turned out that nobody in the embassy, or among the traveling group of reporters, spoke Mandarin Chinese other than myself. So I had to take an embassy van with a very friendly embassy official to buy the pizza and deliver it in the building. Chávez ended up speaking a lot and eating no pizza. About a decade later, the helpful embassy official ended up in Madrid, broke and asking her LinkedIn acquaintances for a job to pay the rent.
thanks for sharing!
These are the anecdotes I come hunting for in the darkest depths of the comment threads, thanks for sharing!
The thing I learned from this is that oil wealth needs to be shared, preferably the Norwegian way and within the democratic system. Unlike other forms of industries where businesses can say they are wealth creators - oil firms are wealth extractors. Obviously there is value in the extraction of the oil from the ground but any company with a license can do that. The license creates the monopoly. Excluding the bottom 99% here ensures a revolution.
Norway is obviously the poster child for how to do it right. In the US the state that most resembles a petrostate*, Alaska, cuts every citizen a check each fall for "their share" of the oil money. It certianly helps make up for the higher cost of living. One weird effect is that it allows a proportion of the population to effectively live as subsistence hunters, since the oil money acts as a cash infusion for things like snowmobiles and heating oil. I mean, that and the dividends Native Corporations give out to their members, but that's another story altogether.
*Oil makes up something like 20% of Alaska's GDP and oil taxes supply 90% of the State's budget. Federal and State spending makes up another 18% or so of Alaska's GDP. So even though Alaska is only the 4th largest producer of oil in the US, it's economy is by far the most oil dependent (with the possible exception of North Dakota after the recent oil boom. But North Dakota's agricultural industries are ar larger piece of their GDP than oil, and Alaska has no industries even close to oil. Seafood is the next biggest, and it's something like 1/5th the size of oil).
That is interesting. Almost a UBI system.
Saudi Arabia seems to be working OK:
https://mattlakeman.org/2022/11/22/notes-on-saudi-arabia/
> The other smart Saudi move was the decision to never fully nationalize Aramco… or rather, to fail to nationalize Aramco.
> Iraq, Iran, and Venezuela all nationalized their foreign-built and operated oil companies, and all three predictably produced extremely corrupt and inefficient oil industries. Saudi Arabia actually had the stupid idea to do the same thing, and even created a parallel state-run company known as Petromin which handled all non-oil aspects of petroleum operations. Despite Petromin’s reputation for being extremely corrupt and inefficient, the Saudi government tried to subsume Aramco under its operations after it bought out the Americans. But the legitimately heroic Aramco board of directors revolted, and threatened to resign en masse along with most of the executive staff, so the Saudi government backed down. Aramco absorbed Petromin in 2005 and remains a technically private company to this day (the second largest on earth at time of writing).
On the other hand, Nigeria appears to have found a completely different way to fail:
https://mattlakeman.org/2023/05/09/notes-on-nigeria/
> In 2005, a bunch of vaguely aligned but disparate mafia groups masquerading as liberation movements consolidated into the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND). Recall, virtually all of Nigeria’s oil is in the Igbo-dominated Niger Delta. From the onset of independence, a lot of Niger Delta locals resented foreign oil corporations and Lagos politicians getting rich off their oil. Plus, given that environmental regulations were not exactly a priority in post-colonial Nigeria, the delta was turning into a toxic wasteland and many of the fishing and agriculture industries of the region were dying. MEND brought together numerous groups that ostensibly fought for the independence of the Niger Delta, but more accurately excelled at setting up fiefdoms, stealing oil, and extorting locals, all for personal enrichment.
> The result was a lot of clashes between mercenaries hired by Western oil companies and rag-tag militias launching ambushes. The actual death toll was never too high, but plenty of engineers and oilmen were captured and held for ransom. Meanwhile, MEND made serious inroads tapping into Western-built infrastructure. They started by literally poking holes into pipelines to siphon off oil, and eventually graduated to building entire refineries and an entire off-shore oil terminal for illicit exports.
About short-termism: One interesting factor here could be whether the individual or the party (at least if it's a stable party) is the main driver. The party is in some ways like a monarchy - it's not just here for the term of one guy. For instance, the Swedish Social Democratic Party (that I don't sympathize with) doesn't just want power this term or even this decade - they want it _forever_ but within the democratic system, which means that at least some of the time, they operate at a horizon of literally several decades (this includes training their own future politicians from their teens in a plethora of systems). It also means that they _will_ ditch a sufficiently unpopular idea once it starts to hurt them (be it the socialization of all companies, resistance to the EU, extremely liberal refugee migration, resistance to NATO, resistance to nuclear power) even when this means taking a 180 ideological turn.
Meanwhile, an individual might not care one whiff what happens the day after the term ends.
So in summary: Chavez was a dictator-lite who ruled via being democratically elected, repeatedly, and who did not kill his opponents but did jail them ineffectively.
Well ok then.
At least there is a sentence noting that Venezuela was a nation of massive inequality when oil prices fell and Chavez came to power.
What is notably missing is any description of what Chavez' policies did for Venezuelans overall - was it positive? negative?
Other notable omissions or oversights:
What was the role of the entrenched opposition? Was it purely because they hated Chavez' populist methods, or because he took away control of their golden geese, or because he was a dictator(lite), or because he was a bad manager of the nationalized golden geese or something else or all of the above? Given the many public and certainly more private actions which were taken in opposition to Chavez, this seems a significant gap.
What was the role of foreign powers during Chavez' rule? It is notable that sanctions were not enacted until Chavez passed away. Does this mean Chavez was a Latin Erdogan - able to skillfully dance between superpowers to get the most for Venezuela, to the annoyance of all? This also seems a significant oversight.
I think the note about the list of party supporters/opponents effectively determining whether you had a livelihood or not, plus emergency overrides of every news station and checks/balances in office, meant that elections were hollow even if they were conducted fairly on paper.
Let me put it this way: it isn't clear that this list is much different than the wholesale job changes during a party switchover of the White House. The scale is likely bigger, but then again these people were not voting for Chavez to start with.
Or put another way: the implicit assumption you make that most people signing the original petition (the source of the list) was an undecided or neutral voter is probably not a good one. I'm sure some were, but I am even more sure most didn't like Chavez to start with.
Secondly, the article itself notes the haphazard and mild ways with which Chavez executed on his repression (or incompetent, YMMV). This was not remotely an East Germany Stasi situation.
Wholesale job changes during a party switchover, are a classic sign of gross corruption. Which isn't quite the same thing as dictatorship, but they are correlated. In the United States, and I'm pretty sure almost every other Western industrial democracy, the only people who lose their jobs during a party switchover are the <<1% of civil servants with high-level policymaking responsibilities. It's actually illegal for a US President to fire anyone else, except with the most meticulously documented and litigated proof of cause. And job turnover in the private sector as a result of party turnover, is absolutely not a thing.
If there are enough people scheduled to be "changed" out of a job that you need a secret master list or computer program to keep track of them, then what you are seeing is *very* different than what happens when the White House changes hands. And a pretty good warning sign that it's time to grab your go bag and passport.
AFAIK this is precisely what some people call "the deep state" -- the unfireable mass of unelected bureaucrats who actually run the day-to-day life in regimes which are Officially "not corrupt" and "truly democratic" on account of NYT, WP, et al saying so.
Exactly. To be specific: the unelected bureaucrats who set national policy via action or inaction regardless of executive direction.
How very insultingly presumptuous of you. Some of us prefer this system, not because the newspapers you hate tell us to, but because we've actually studied American history and know how horribly corrupt the civil service was when we ran it your way.
It's quite clear to the naked eye that many people actually like the system precisely as it is, and not because told to by the NYT, but on their own steam, and cheer when the NYT justifies it. And perhaps even subscribe to it for that reason. And it's no mystery that people who win from a system will prefer it.
What I don't grasp is, why call it "democracy", when it's the unelected, permanent apparatchiks who actually rule? In what role does the "demos" appear, other than as spectator?
I think it is simplistic to say that the ten thousand or so jobs that incoming new Presidents need to fill, are the full extent of personnel changes. Among other things, the people brought in themselves hire and fire.
As for "secret master list or computer program" - actually, the political parties do this. A major reason why Trump's tenure was dysfunctional was that the Republican party either didn't do this or Trump didn't automatically accept all Republican party bureaucrat recommendations, or more likely both.
The very possibly overegged point is that the extent of government or government controlled jobs in Venezuela's economy vs. all the rest of the jobs. Venezuela is not a full on Communist economy and there is a very well documented class of wealthy and middle class individuals who are not working for government. According to Wiki: PDVSA - the Venezuelan national oil company, has all of 70,000 employees. The percentage of workforce that is government or government related in Venezuela is high - 24% according to Wiki but the US has 13.4% - also pretty high.
Chavez at one point was inviting poor Colombians to come, and giving them the immediate right to vote, in order to boost his election results.
As for whether or not it was good for the country, just look around South America right now - over 7 million have left. The wealthy ones were often American citizens, by virtue of their fathers arriving to help with the oil, and marrying a senorita. Now they're mostly in Miami, and a huge voting block which is going to make it very hard for any candidate who smells even vaguely socialist to get elected.
Tho poor ones left on foot - there's something like 4 million in Colombia alone (a nation with 50 million). To imagine the effect, think about how crappy things get in the USA when unemployment goes up to 8%. Now imagine it nearly doubling (since the baseline rate in Colombia was already something like 8% before they arrived, and reached ~15% in 2020). If you want to know what Colombians think about Venezuelans, you can basically take what Americans say about Mexicans. Not to say all those things are TRUE, but they're widely perceived.
South America is a very large area. While Venezuela's conditions are terrible - the country has also been under the US sanctions hammer since 2014.
But more importantly - there are masses of South and Central Americans leaving for greener pastures from all manner of causes: Honduras after the Clinton sponsored coup, the ongoing shitshow of Guatemala, the ongoing shitshow of Argentina, etc etc. Not obvious to me that Venezuela is really an exception given sanctions plus immigration comparables.
I think you're drastically overestimating the effect of sanctions - imports of food and medicine had fallen by ~70% before the sanctions started (in 2017, not 2014, unless you're counting sanctions on individuals). The Brookings Institute doesn't think the sanctions caused the problems: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/revisiting-the-evidence-impact-of-the-2017-sanctions-on-venezuela/
I'm not aware of 25% of the population leaving either Argentina, which strikes me as a pretty dramatic difference. Not sure what you mean by "immigration comparables", but otherwise you don't seem to have either data, or an argument. Happy to revisit if you do.
Given that oil prices fell first, then had sanctions added on - not the least bit clear that your point is as strong as stated.
Do you really require data for this straightforward logic exercise?
As for Brookings: can't say that I am particularly impressed by neocon publications saying that sanctions are not that bad particularly given neocon use of it against any and all nations perceived to be contra-US interests. Here is an example of Brookings neocon publishing: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/neocon-lessons-for-democrats/
Robert Kagan is among the Brookings peeps.
If you're genuinely stupid enough to think sanctions are the reason the country with the largest proven oil reserves in the world, which was in living memory one of the richest countries anywhere on Earth, is now as poor as Haiti, you vastly overestimate American power, and are unlikely to be persuaded by anything resembling facts.
But then again, you probably would've also figured out socialism is a bad idea by now.
If you're genuinely stupid enough to think that sanctions don't hurt a country, then you are welcome to argue with the US and European governments.
Nor is your assertion that "[Venezuela] was in living memory one of the richest countries anywhere on Earth" the least bit accurate.
Have you ever been in Venezuela?
It looks nothing whatsoever like Abu Dhabi or Riyadh or Geneva.
Venezuela has, by some accounts, the largest oil *reserves* of any country but this is not the same thing as actual wealth. Nigeria, for example, is the 9th largest oil exporter but not a "rich" country except compared to its African neighbors. Venezuela, by comparison, is 22nd in rank of countries that export oil.
Your fixation with socialism is not my problem, but your lack of grasp of ground facts is.
Of course they hurt a country! But sanctions don't turn what was, and should be, one of the world's wealthiest countries into one of the world's poorest.
"Now is your assertion... the least bit accurate?"
Yes!
In 1960, Venezuela had a per-capita GDP comparable to Western Europe; higher than Italy, Ireland, or Austria; and higher than anywhere in the Hispanosphere, with the second-highest country of Uruguay at half their level:
https://countryeconomy.com/gdp?year=1960
In 1970, after a decade of Franco moving away from his self-destructive autarchic policies, Venezuela was now behind Spain, but still ahead of anywhere else in the Hispanosphere aside from them and Argentina, ahead of most everyone in the Americas aside from the US, Canada, the Bahamas, and Argentina:
https://countryeconomy.com/gdp?year=1970
This held true in 1980:
https://countryeconomy.com/gdp?year=1980
However, you'll notice their trend's still downward. That's because Chavez wasn't the first socialist asshole to fuck up the country's economy. That would be the socialist assholes in Acción Democrática, whose boneheaded bungling of the country's economy was already paving the way for the boneheaded bungling of Cokey Gonzales and the fucking Bus Driver's cratering of the nation.
Given that Venezuela's oil production fell precipitously after sanctions started (https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/venezuela/crude-oil-production), your assertions are highly suspect particularly since most oil exporting nations suffer from the "resource curse".
Not the least bit clear that having dictators or multinationals or an elite class hogging all the profits is much different than socialists.
All the ills you describe for 1960 vs. 1980 or whatever can equally describe Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, etc.
I am quite certain you don't have any real idea what the real drivers are for Venezuela's present situation.
For foreign powers, I remember the news talking about Chavez rattling sabers against the US, and Obama talking about shaking hands with Chavez as a way of undermining Chavez's claims that he was opposing US suppression. That's all I know about the role of foreign powers.
I did not study Venezuela and Chavez, but I distinctly remember Chavez doing things like giving cheap gasoline to Cuba. This kind of thing likely did not endear him to American neocons and what not. Chavez also gave free gasoline to Nicaragua and likely other fellow traveler Central/South American nations.
I also distinctly remember Venezuela having military exercises with Russia although I'm not sure this was during Chavez' era - but it probably was.
As such, foreign powers is definitely a relevant issue.
This was the first article I really read about Venezuela and it's fascinating: https://web.archive.org/web/20180826152045/https://quillette.com/2018/08/26/the-man-who-predicted-the-venezuelan-catastrophe-in-1893/
"He continued to hold mostly fair elections throughout his reign. His party even lost some of them!"
That's why I think "but this country holds democratic elections!" means nothing as to whether it's really a democracy.
Though by this account, it's debatable how much of a dictator Chavez really was; if he didn't engage in 'disappearing' his enemies or an equivalent of Argentina's Dirty War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_War, and if a political opponent could keep their phone to engage in criticisms from prison instead of being tortured and/or murdered, then maybe he did have some lingering shreds of "there's things you don't do in a democracy" remaining.
As South American dictators go, he's a lot better on that scale, at least. Maybe he was more of a Frederick the Great style enlightened despot, who wanted things to go better for the people, but wasn't able to run the country effectively:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightened_absolutism
"Partly you hope that the country has enough non-elected elites that they can stop this kind of thing."
Here's where I shout NO NO NO! Even in this review, Venezuela *had* non-elected elites, that's *how* Chavez was able to appeal to the people. The elites were quite happy living in their little bubble, creaming off the wealth that they felt was their due, and who cares about the rest of the nation, we're all right Jack:
"The oil company was an island of relative competence, run by technocrats, oligarchs, and economists. They fancied themselves above the civilian government, and although they would graciously share revenue with the state, they weren’t going to play by its rules."
Now, *that's* a dictatorship. We're not elected, we're not accountable to anyone, we hold the wealth and the productivity, we do as we please and nobody can tell us what to do.
Ordinary people will look around and go "Hang on a minute, who are all these guys telling us how to live our lives? Who voted for them - nobody? How did they get power? Isn't the government *supposed* to be the boss of them?" and that's how you get a populist like Chavez, and the burping general, gaining support and approval. The stuck-up blue-bloods who think you're not fit for them to wipe their feet on? Yeah, belch in their faces!
This is part of why Dominic Cummings downfall delighted a lot of ordinary people. He was unelected, relied on pull and influence to get where he got, clearly didn't hold himself accountable to the rules that he imposed on the 'little people' - and so when he was thrown under the bus by Boris, very few wept salt tears.
Unelected elites will always engender suspicion and resentment, which leads to revolutions. If you don't want dictators, make sure that your elites *are* accountable to someone.
Can you give an example of elites who aren't subject to the vagaries of politics enough to become populist, but are also accountable?
US Senators before the 17th Amendment.
Repeal the 17th!
One or the unremarked legacies of Hitler is the poisoning of the term "national socialism", so it is inextricably linked to fanatical racism. Thus blinds us to the fact that it is absolutely possible to marry Big Government with Nationalism under a big mouth grandstanding winding.
This isn't just the usual form of fascism, it's the original kind. Trump & Chavez are much closer to Mussolini than to a fanatical idealist like Hitler (yes, Hitler had ideals: horrible, horrible ideals, but ideals nonetheless).
My point is that just because these yahoos fall well short of Hitlerian evil, does not mean they aren't bad and don't deserve to be opposed. And it's a shame that we can't call their antics by the right name: national socialism.
You actually don’t make a persuasive case. Calling names is what we have too much of anyway. With everyone using a different definition.
I suggest "social nationalism."
Many of Latin America's problems are caused because it's far, FAR too easy to amend the constitution. One of the advantages of federalism may be that it keeps enough internal opposition to prevent the true momentary cohesion necessary to destroy a country's institutions.
You spend the first part of the review telling stories about how he unilaterally dictated things, and everyone did those things or was fired, so it seems odd to then question whether "dictator" applies. Maybe you have some connotation of dictator in your head that excludes a guy who wins multiple popular elections, but by denotation he surely was. He had absolute authority. A monarchy would still be a monarchy even if we had term limits on them and selected the monarch by voting (a bizarre system that only George Lucas, for some reason, seems invested in.)
One could argue that if the dictator was still subject to democratic elections, that ultimately the authority remained with the people. But the guy was never tested with a scenario in which the rule of law clearly demanded he abdicate power, it's hard to say whether he remained subject to a power that was never exerted. The two main descriptors of any government are "who makes the decisions" and "what powers does it have", and a government where one guy makes the decisions and the government power is unlimited is clearly an authoritarian dictatorship no matter what window dressing you put on it.
That describes every UK Prime Minister pre-2005 (unrestricted power to appoint judges and members of the upper house, only constraint in passing laws is maintaining the support of their own party in the lower house), and to some extent Lincoln and FDR. Elective dictatorship is a concept, but most people associate modern dictatorships with the fact that they don't have to win free and fair elections to stay in power.
Ah, Elective Monarchy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elective_monarchy). Biggest name in the business is Poland (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_elections_in_Poland).
Yeah, I never really got the whole "hurr durr, queens aren't elected, Lucas dum" complaint. Naboo's youth fetish is much weirder than their elected monarchy.
Perhaps it keeps the tabloids busy covering her latest hairstyle and outfit, thus providing cover for the rest of the government to be quietly competent?
"All dictators get their start by discovering some loophole in the democratic process."
By no means all. Some seize power at gunpoint.
Sometimes the loophole is guns!
"Seize power at gunpoint" arguably comes in two fundamentally different flavours -- "with help from foreigners" and "without help from foreigners". The latter is arguably as "democratic" a process as any conceivable paper election (but with "lead ballot" rather than paper.)
Doesn't seem true - one faction (the military) controls a majority of the guns, and a well-organized subfaction within the military can take power even if the rest of the military isn't necessarily on board. A well-organized 5% of the population can seize power via guns whereas it takes 50% of the electorate to do so democratically.
In countries with universal conscription, the army is usually a representative sample of the population. And civil war, while obviously unpleasant process, accounts for and rewards individual engagement level "for/against" arguably more than dropping a ballot in a ballot urn does. Without intervention by foreigners, the side that can muster more people willing to fight/die, or at least to provide materiel support -- typically wins. I find it hard to see what is less than fully democratic about the process, if the word indeed has any meaning.
AFAIK the "small faction in the military takes it all" scenario almost always involves foreign support (or at least promises thereof.)
>In countries with universal conscription, the army is usually a representative sample of the population.
Is it? Generals are not elected: even if most of the country is technically "in the army" the army itself is run by officers who are not chosen based on the wishes of the enlisted, nor are they supposed to represent them.
Officers (in particular, in the field, when bullets are flying) ultimately live & die at the pleasure of their subordinates. (See e.g. the Russian army & navy in 1917; or recall "fragging" in the American war in Vietnam, for illustrative if extreme examples of "they failed to represent the wishes of the enlisted".)
The fact that it is easier for members of the army to murder their superiors than in other industries does not make the military a representative democracy where the leadership represents the interests of the enlisted.
Yet another great post of this series. I have no knowledge on Latin American politics, and I don't understand Spanish at all, but I remember in early 2000s in university I came accross Chavez's videos online and it was so captivating. Not a studio but somewhere open air shooting ad hoc, he is kind of holding court with his ministers and other bigwigs around him, he receives a random phone call from a citizen complaining from something and he fires a minister as a result on the spot there. It was hilarious and great TV. If it was so captivating for me even though I don't understand the language and know nothing of the culture, I cannot imagine how it was for the locals.
All of South American politics is a expression of one dynamic - a battle for control between the rich whiter people and the poorer browner people. Most of the time, the latter are more popular, so the United States inevitably assassinates their leaders and coups their governments. Venezuela is the one major example where that hasn't happened. That Scott falls where he does is disappointing but not remotely surprising.
As I've said many times, there's no fundamental reason that rationalists should have such a resolutely right wing, pro-American position on foreign policy. (If you care about facts and evidence you know that we have acted with deadly indifference to human rights and democracy, particularly in Latin America.) In fact, that's one of the core pieces of evidence that rationalism is simply a rebranded offshoot of contemporary American conservatism - there's no reason the default rationalist position should be neoconservative, based on rationalist principles, and yet it is.
If the consequence of failing to coup/assassinate Chavez is that Venezuela was plunged into borderline-famine conditions and the poor browns suffered far worse poverty relative to their peers in other LatAm nations, doesn't that make a kind of argument for keeping the right in power? Do you not consider the other dictators that Scott has critiqued to be 'right wing'?
I'm fairly confident the 'rich whiter people' demographic will overlap heavily with the 'knows how to actually run an oil refinery' demographic, so granting this group responsibility will be indistinguishable from handing this group power.
> Venezuela is the one major example where that hasn't happened.
Not from lack of trying! (And recall e.g. Cuba -- how many assassination attempts did F. Castro survive? IIRC the man himself once said that he had lost count.)
In the past 25 years, AFAIK there's been one successful coup in South America, which was by the left, and zero assassinations.
There have been plenty of conservative wins that AFAIK had nothing to do with the US, for example Bolsonaro in Brazil.
I am running a dictator book club. Chavez (and by extension Maduro) seems like the most interesting Latin American dictator of the past 25 years. I don't know if you want me to ignore him or pretend he was good, but I'm not going to do either. I think you're demanding I stop thinking about this issues in detail in favor of adopting your super-over-simplified-long-out-of-date conflict story, which I'm not going to do. I think trying to tar people's communities with the "right wing" slur if they talk about topics that don't fit your narrative is a bully move and not worthy of you.
Well said.
> zero assassinations
AFAIK zero successful ones (but if one were to count attempts -- Maduro repelled a US-sponsored invasion, and shortly after that, somehow dodged a professionally-built drone copter bomb.) And IIRC there are even people who consider Chavez's cancer to have been triggered by a (radiological?) assassination weapon -- but I'm not aware of any publicly-available direct evidence for this. Before replying "adjust foil hat!", recall that e.g. N. Ceaușescu is known to have ordered that certain "problem people" be "solved" in precisely this way.
I'm not trying to exculpate the US government, just saying this is not a good explanatory force for the recent course of South American history (unless you think fear of assassination has prevented people from running!)
Fear of assassination can prevent people from peacefully retiring. If they lose power they lose protection.
There is also the Palpatine gambit from the Star Wars prequels. If you survive an assassination attempt while you are still somewhat popular, the people will cut you some slack and let you do whatever you want. For example Bolsonaro got stabbed in the gut in 2018 and this made him more popular.
By the time someone qualifies as a dictator, fear of spending the rest of their life in a prison cell under the Hague is sufficient to prevent them from peacefully retiring.
25 years is an odd cutoff point. The Japanese haven't acted like irredeemable assholes towards their neighbors for way more than 25 years, but lots of people in East Asia still hate them and this hate still influences politics in the region. Humans are a social species with access to language, so people can learn to keep grudges from their parents. Not every country can be like Germany or Vietnam.
As for how long-out-of-date grudges affect politics in South America, let me give a specific example. During the global war on terror there was this controversy about the US water-boarding prisoners of war in Guantanamo Bay and it just so happened that my aunt was water-boarded by the Paraguayan police in the 80s, raising some alarming questions about the involvement of the US in developing enhanced interrogation techniques for (or from?) South American dictatorships and about how stupid did the US government think the rest of the world was if they expected us to believe that "enhanced interrogation techniques" were not torture.
Some people close to my aunt were therefore inclined to vote for whichever candidate spoke the most empty rhetoric against US imperialism. Fortunately we didn't have a charismatic potential dictator at the time in Paraguay, but if people in Venezuela had similar things happen to their aunts then I can see why they would believe Chavez.
If you care about facts and evidence, there's no way for you to end up socialist either, yet, we ostensibly have... you?
Blaming the US is popular in South America, but that thing about rich white people vs poorer browner people is not how most South Americans see their own history. Not even the left wing ones.
For starters, we don't have a miscegenation taboo. Most of the time you can't visually tell apart who is a descendant of the colonial oppressors and who is a descendant of the colonial oppressed. When you can, it's because that person is a native South American, and they are never popular and never have any real power outside of maybe Bolivia.
Your talking points are 40 years out of date.
This is highly dubious, Freddie. The '70 cou attemp, which the US had a small part in, was a complete failure that even we ourselves backed out on, but the idiot who did it rammed ahead anyway. The '73 coup against Allende had nothing to do with the US and everything to do with Allende running the country into a ditch:
https://kyleorton.substack.com/p/myth-1973-american-coup-in-chile
Nor was he the most popular. He won with less than 37% of the vote, and likely would've lost even that had the KGB not bribed a lefty opponent senator into standing down:
https://nitter.net/KyleWOrton/status/802956009450930176#m
Also, what on Earth did the likes of Castro and Ortega ever care about popular will? They came to power via violence and terror against the populous, and stayed in power in that same fashion.
This is very well-written and well reasoned; I just wanted to add that the reason why Venezuela's oil revenues are more sensitive to price fluctuations is that Venezuelan oil reserves are largely composed of heavy crude (higher molecular weight, more sulfur) resulting in higher refinement costs and lower profit margins per barrel. The breakeven price for Venezuelan crude was ~57.90 $/barrel in 2015, while the Saudi breakeven price was ~31.00 $/barrel. That's one of the core reasons why the oil market downturn in 2015 hit the Venezuelan economy so hard.
That's true. I guess that just makes it more important to squirrel away the profit in a sovereign wealth fund of some kind when times are good.
Recall what USA did to Venezuela's sovereign wealth funds. (Including the part of their gold reserve that they were foolish enough to keep in NYC)
Can you expand on this? I googled for 'Venezuela sovereign wealth fund' and can't seem to find good matches.
https://www.reuters.com/world/britains-high-court-rules-against-venezuelas-maduro-latest-gold-battle-2022-07-29/
(Apparently, London, rather than NYC)
I appreciate the link, but this seems to be a dispute related to who the legitimate leader of the country currently is, and given that Venezuela's nominal GDP is ~100 billion dollars I doubt this would make a large difference either way.
And... most of the refineries (in the world) that can use Venezuela heavy are on the US Gulf Coast.
The propositions (1) "ruler's policies wrecked $country's economy" and (2) "ruler's policies enraged international power elites and the latter punitively wrecked $country's economy" are distinct -- and distinguishable, if one is willing to admit the possibility (and FWIW they are not mutually exclusive.)
AFAIK in all cases to date where hypothesis (1) was pushed (in particular, by American/Anglo propagandists, officials, "thought leaders", etc.) there's a solid case to be made for (2).
This theory is extremely convenient for people who support policies that consistently empirically ruin economies!
But I think Venezuela is a pretty strong counterargument. Venezuela got very rich through most of Chavez's time in power. It wasn't until oil prices went down (and Venezuela lost the ability to pump oil effectively) that the country started doing badly. Anglo elites were happy to buy Chavez's oil when it benefitted them, and even widely-loathed countries like Iran and Russia can do well off oil when they've got it. Chavez's problem was that he weakened Venezuela's ability to pump oil, plus destroyed its internal economy so that it didn't have many other options. I would also recommend re-reading the section on Ciudad Guayana and on the farming co-ops - this doesn't look like foreigners wrecking an otherwise pristine economy!
> Chavez's problem was that he weakened Venezuela's ability to pump oil
This in particular IMHO seems like a confirmation of (2). Though Chavez is in no way blameless, he evidently planned to "invent the parachute while falling", having not taken care to develop the ability to pump without help from foreigners.
Chavez's predecessors had been reliant on foreign oil companies, but in the 1970s they nationalized their oil production under PDVSA, a pretty competent oil company that had some foreign partnerships but also did a lot of stuff on its own. The book suggests pre-Chavez PDVSA was competent, early-Chavez PDVSA was also competent, but Chavez specifically fired all the competent people from PDVSA in order to increase his power over it, and after that it was no longer competent. See part IV of the post.
Right -- seems that he skipped the essential "recruit competent + loyal people" step before "fire all the competent (disloyal) people".
So how is that the fault of foreigners?
Chavez's problem was that *he*, Chavez, weakened Venezuela's ability to pump oil. Not that "international power elites" did so. That's solidly (1) territory. As Scott notes, by the time Chavez took power, Venezuela's ability to pump oil was entirely in the hands of Venezuelans.
They did need foreign refineries run by "international power elites" to buy and refine the oil; Venezuela's heavy crude is notoriously difficult to refine. But those refineries consistently bought whatever oil the Venezuelans were willing and able to sell, at the same market price that they bought such oil from everybody else. Give an "international power elite" the choice between making billions of dollars in easy profits, or trying to undermine a foreign government for grins and giggles, and they're going to go for easy profits every time.
> For whatever reason, I find Chavez scarier than most of the other dictators I’ve been reading about. The others seem like aberrations of democracy. Chavez seems like its monstrous perfection: a reminder that in the absence of virtue, what appeals to the people can be the opposite of what’s good for the state.
To me, it seems like a highlight of the point you made in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bad-definitions-of-democracy-and, which some libertarians have been making for a while, and which the US Founders were very explicit about: Too much "democracy" is quite bad, and should only be used when it's actually required that the government handle some problem. Take the land appropriation example from this review--strong private property rights are important for a functioning economy, and should not be taken away simply because of a vote of the majority. Individual rights like speech and religion fall in the same bucket--even if 1 single person disagrees with everyone else, they have the right to that belief.
I think that part of the reason American democracy has been able to avoid being destroyed by populism (so far) was this conception and culture of individual rights and limitations on government power, inherited from the English tradition and pre-dating democracy as the primary form of government. The Supreme Court passed down many rulings saying "screw your majority vote, the Constitution says no." (at least prior to FDR--who might have been our Chavez if he hadn't died, and who still might be responsible for our eventual collapse). But this is a *culture* that exists in the bulk of the population, not a single policy or form of government.
Well said
>this is a *culture* that exists in the bulk of the population, not a single policy or form of government
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_World
I see Hugo Chavez took power in 1999; I remember an SNL skit from around then, A Glimpse Of Our Possible Future, in which President Al Gore constantly used the Emergency Broadcast System to monopolize Primetime Television to talk about global warming. I'm left wondering if Saturday Night Live is in fact responsible for Venezuela.
That sketch was about Al Gore generally being a national schoolmarm, it didn't mention global warming at all.
https://snltranscripts.jt.org/00/00dglimpse2.phtml
One obvious reason such dictatorship is less likely in the US is that the US is already a managed democracy in the sense that you cannot win the presidential nomination for either of the two parties which are institutionally embedded in the electoral process without the backing of at least a handful of billionaire backers.
This works as a managed democracy much in the same way that people in Iran can vote for president but only candidates that have been approved by their Guardian Council. The US doesn't have as formal of a council but the amount of political, financial, and media power that a few hundred individuals at the top of the system can generate gives them veto power if there's any candidate they all find truly unacceptable. One can argue there is no specific guideline that makes it illegal for the nominee to have no backers within the .001% of the income distribution, but the mechanisms of action are clear as are the motives. It would be irrational for them not to engage in this activity when the ROI of elite and regulatory is so favorable compared to allowing policies supported by 65-70% of the public that could harm specific interests.
The United States is one of the longest-running and most successful oligarchies in the same way that China is one of the longest and most successful one-party states. Both systems are relatively insulated from consequential populism by the simple expedient of making sure that only those who are already wealthy and represent a deep network of the ultra-wealthy owners of assets are allowed anywhere near the executive.
We aren't likely to see this scale of looting and institutionalized incompetence without the participation and consent of existing oligarchs since the public is already outside of the policy process in the economic sphere.
1. Impressive workup. 2. I don't have all day, but I wasn't seeing what strikes me as the glaring similarity to Donald Trump. - A reminder of how little left versus right matters in considering the psychology of totalitarian narcissism.
It's funny seeing Chavez again, honestly. People may not remember it, but back in the day people would not stop praising him and his policies as the Socialist wave of the future, *the* defining counterexample to the failures of Capitalism after the 2008 Crisis and Occupy Wall Street. The man's cult of personality wasn't limited to just his own country, it extended to wherever people were desperate to justify naked populism as compassion. How else would the famed Bernie Sanders quote-
"These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who's the banana republic now?"
-have come about?
(Though funnily enough, Mr. Sanders never actually said that. It was basically a 'retweet' of a newspaper editorial by the Valley News Editorial Board which he posted on his website: https://www.econlib.org/bernie-sanders-didnt-say-it/. You can see for yourself at https://web.archive.org/web/20190306014455/https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/close-the-gaps-disparities-that-threaten-america. The confusion only came about because the original version he posted and left up for years didn't clarify it was from the Valley News Editorial Board at the end: https://web.archive.org/web/20131120170952/http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/close-the-gaps-disparities-that-threaten-america)
Still, there are many, *many* more examples out there. If you start digging, it's incredible what's been memoryholed over time, there's so much 'Aged Like Milk'/'Me Sowing vs. Me Reaping' Chavez praise out there that's been quietly buried. Example:
https://www.salon.com/2013/03/06/hugo_chavezs_economic_miracle/
"HUGO CHAVEZ'S ECONOMIC MIRACLE
The Venezuelan leader was often marginalized as a radical. But his brand of socialism achieved real economic gains
By: DAVID SIROTA
TOPICS: EDITOR'S PICKS, HUGO CHAVEZ, HUMAN RIGHTS, LATIN AMERICA, POVERTY, SOCIALISM, VENEZUELA, POLITICS NEWS
...
No, Chavez became the bugaboo of American politics because his full-throated advocacy of socialism and redistributionism at once represented a fundamental critique of neoliberal economics, and also delivered some indisputably positive results. Indeed, as shown by some of the most significant indicators, Chavez racked up an economic record that a legacy-obsessed American president could only dream of achieving.
For instance, according to data compiled by the UK's Guardian newspaper (https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/oct/04/venezuela-hugo-chavez-election-data), Chavez’s first decade in office saw Venezuelan GDP more than double and both infant mortality and unemployment almost halved...
When a country goes socialist and it craters, it is laughed off as a harmless and forgettable cautionary tale about the perils of command economics. When, by contrast, a country goes socialist and its economy does what Venezuela’s did, it is not perceived to be a laughing matter – and it is not so easy to write off or to ignore..."
[Note: I am not yet aware if Mr. Sirota has ever addressed the state of the Venezuelan economy since then. He is perhaps too busy working as a senior adviser and speechwriter for Mr. Bernie Sanders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sirota
We shall have to settle for Mr. Sirota's concluding remarks, I suppose:]
"Are there any lessons to be learned from Venezuela’s decision to avoid that subsidization route and instead pursue full-on nationalization?
Likewise, in a United States whose poverty rate is skyrocketing, are there any lessons to be learned from Venezuela’s policies that so rapidly reduced poverty?
And in a United States that has become more unequal than many Latin American nations, are there any constructive lessons to be learned from Chavez’s grand experiment with more aggressive redistribution?
No doubt, there are few absolutely clear answers to those uncomfortable questions, if those questions are assessed honestly... But maybe now that the iconoclast is dead, the cartoon will end. Maybe now Chavez’s easily ridiculed bombast can no longer be used to distract from Venezuela’s record – and, thus, a more constructive, honest and critical economic conversation can finally begin."
[Overall, that's the best one I've ever found, but there are plenty of lower-grade examples out there:]
"HUGO CHÁVEZ: MAN AGAINST WORLD
As illness ends Hugo Chávez’s rule in Venezuela, what will his legacy be? Richard Gott argues he brought hope to a continent.
...
Chávez’s search for a different economic policy, with a powerful role for the state, is thought to be foolish, utopian and destined to fail. Yet with many countries in Europe in a state of economic collapse – largely the result of their long embrace of neoliberal policies – his project for Latin America may soon have wider appeal.
...
Long after successive presidents of the United States have disappeared into the obscurity of their presidential archives, the memory of Hugo Chávez will survive in Latin America..."
(From https://web.archive.org/web/20170201004012/http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/world-affairs/2013/01/hugo-chavez-man-against-world, an article that has since been taken down from the New Statesman website)
&
"Still, in the United States, the positive side of Chávez’s economic legacy is often overlooked. Ever since he was first elected President, in 1999, his critics have been predicting a collapse in the Venezuelan economy. So far, it hasn’t happened."
(From https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/venezuelas-resource-curse-will-outlive-hugo-chvez, also in 2013)
&
"JOSEPH STIGLITZ, IN CARACAS, PRAISES VENEZUELA'S ECONOMIC POLICIES
Nobel Prize winning economist and former vice-president of the World Bank, JOSEPH STIGLITZ, praised Venezuela's economic growth and "positive policies in health and education" during a visit to Caracas on Wednesday.
In his latest book "Making Globalization Work," Stiglitz argues that left governments such as in Venezuela, "have frequently been castigated and called ‘populist' because they promote the distribution of benefits of education and health to the poor."
...
In terms of economic development Stiglitz argued it was not good for the Central Bank to have "excessive" autonomy. Chavez's proposed constitutional reforms, if approved in December, will remove the autonomy of the country's Central Bank."
[Note: this was the last step to Chavez taking *full* control of the economy and crashing the value of the currency; I believe similar 'reforms' are behind Turkey's current hyperinflation under Erdogan]
(From https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/2719/)
What I'm getting from this series is
1)
If you are able to choose what type of dictator you want to live under, its best to live under either a clownish left-wing populist type who will at least make attempts to make your situation better (while being kind of clumsy and ineffective at sending your family to a reeducation camp), OR under a serious-minded technocratic type in the developmental economic school who will very efficiently give the land to the peasants and institute growth-minded economic reforms while also very efficiently locking you and your family up for speaking out against the state/littering in public.
The worst options are clownish right-wing authoritarians with romantic dreams that require enormous amounts of people to be liquidated, serious-minded left-wing authoritarians with technocratic dreams that require enormous amounts of people to be liquidated, and any flavour of religious authoritarianism (because not only are you sent to a work camp/prison colony, but you're still expected to go to church twice a day).
2)
The type of dictator a country gets seems to fit its national character, with the quirks of the particular person affecting how the whole thing is expressed. Your nation of depressive, romantic alcoholics tends to produce a depressive (or manic-depressive) romantic alcoholic, whose passion for, say, ships or judo then feeds into the particular weirdness of their reign.
Presumably American dictatorship, when it comes, will come at the hand of an optimistic, aggressive narcissist whose particular passion for anime catgirls will lead to a horrific era of neko-eugenics...
Your takeaway is that it's better to live in Venezuela under Chavez than in Turkey under Erdogan?
I'm from Venezuela and think I can answer a couple of your questions:
To start, yes Trump is EXACTLY like Maduro, and what Trump would be if the United States did not have solid institutions.
How is Maduro still in power?
Cuba, Cuba, Cuba. The influence of Cuba on Chavez himself and the Chavista governments since '98 is much stronger and more important than (based on the review) the book implies. Chavez was Fidel Castro's Manchurian Candidate. Castro had been trying to get control of Venezuela's oil wealth for decades, even training guerillas to launch an invasion in 1967.
Maduro while not being particularly competent himself is just a puppet of Cuba who have had over a half century of experience of how to stay in power (mainly elite intelligence of everything going on in the military to nip any discontent in the only people that are able to overthrow a government in the bud).
How did Chavez achieve so much power and why hasn't it happened in the US?
I don't want to get al neoliberal on you, but institutions. Between changing the constitution and then early in his rule having essentially 100% of congress after the opposition boycotted the election he just eliminated any institutional independence and prioritized a single characteristic for selecting people to every single governmental role: Loyalty to Chavez. That was the only thing that mattered, in fact people were promoted to roles BECAUSE they were not qualified for them, that put them entirely in debt to the guy who put them there.
On the other hand, the US institutions have been around for a lot longer (Venezuela really only enjoyed 40 years of democracy, from the removal of dictator Perez Jimenes in 1958 to Chavez's victory in 1998) so they were young and fragile and easy to change. Concepts like the filibuster which so many people get so much in arms about are the exact reason why it is SO much harder for something like this to happen in the US. It was institutions that prevented Trumps deranged 'stolen election' play from working. Every lawsuit and attempt got shot down. All governments suck but some suck less than others.
"This is the point where I’m supposed to explain how Chavez went from democratically-elected president to dictator. It’s tough, because it’s debatable how much of a dictator he was."
Proceeds to describe how the whims of one man decided the fate of a nation, spurred a list of untouchables, created a parallel judicial system, kill protestors, Text also omits how he illegally financed left-wing parties in LATAM via drug money.
What does it take to be a real dictator?
I volunteered three months in Venezuela right after Chavez died. I met two categories of people who most supported him: the wealthy, connected men with nice watches, and the very very poor. The poorest of the poor would say to me with such sincerity: Chavez really cared about us, no one cared about us like Chavez. It was actually beautiful, their belief, if not so creepy, given that they were still poor in part due to all that corruption and mismanagement.
Also funny: I went to a punk concert and everyone was like "Viva Chavez!" Punks were so pro government. Same with artsy theatre people.
The people most against Chavez were anyone well educated and what was left of the middle class. And there it was widespread opposition.
It's hard to argue that a man democratically elected in free elections multiple times was a 'dictator'
Also it seems like you're underplaying Chavez' economic achievements. For instance in 1999, 23.4% of the population were recorded as being in extreme poverty, this fell to 8.5% in 2011. This is quite an achievment.
Interesting choice of timing. Looks like the poverty rate went to >90% and then just came back to 50%. That's what destroying a country looks like. https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/venezuela-poverty-rate-falls-505-2022-study-2022-11-10/
Chavez died about a decade ago.
Yes, and his policies directly led to this outcome.
Maybe they did, maybe they didn't, it still doesn't alter his achievements.
Yes, he did manage to lower poverty temporarily by giving away a bunch of oil money, and in the process he almost destroyed the country and massively increased poverty in the long run. Bravo.
Well yea, a lot of politicians couldn't manage a drastic reduction like that.
It's sad that most of the attempts to provide more for the poor and to reform colonial-era land holding and similar imbalances are joined at the hip with extreme incompetence and pandering that ends up tanking the economy. What if Chavez could have put more oil money into reducing poverty without all of the other things?
On the other side, sound economic management seems to preclude enough attention to redistribution. It doesn't seem like it should fundamentally be that hard to both grow the economy and split up the proceeds in a more humane way. I guess it's partly because each of those goals is embedded in one side of a political struggle where both sides would love to run amok if given the opportunity, so balancing the seesaw is inherently hard.
I think another aspect is that managerial capability is often so closely associated with the right that in many cases the left learns to despise competence itself, not just the people on the right who display it.
That's definitely the case sometimes, but not always. For example, in the u.s., right now, the left, as it were, more or less embraces technocracy (which it equates with competence), while the right is more into gleefully smashing things in a populist manner (c.f. other comments here about Trump being like a gringo Chavez minus ideology and the ability to actually accrue power)
I agree. I was thinking more of the various developing countries where left leaning governments make bad decisions on the actual merits. In the US, the right currently sets a very low bar, and the left is relatively pragmatic. Apart from housing and energy regulation, the US does pretty well overall. Given how rich we are as a country, if anything I would like to see some more reinvestment/ redistribution.
Dictator = somebody who doesn’t let American multinationals steal all their resources and exploit their people
Typo: belnch