William Finnegan's lengthy report from Venezuela in the November 14 edition of the New Yorker begs two obvious questions: Where have you guys been? And why did you wait until the wee hours on November 7, the day before Election Day in the U.S., when almost everyone's attention was on the presidential and other contests, to post it online?
The report's headline asks a question: "How did this happen?" Finnegan fails to satisfactorily answer it. Instead, he wants readers to believe that the country began an inexorable downhill slide many years before Hugo Chavez took over Venezuela's government and embarked on his Bolivarian socialist "revolution." It wasn't inevitable, but his telling of the story contains implicit warnings applicable to the U.S. which the magazine appears to have decided that its left-leaning readers didn't need to see before they voted.
The case that the New Yorker could have published Finnegan's work several weeks ago has to do with the fact that the primary political events he described occurred in September and early October. Specifically, "The Taking of Caracas" march, which took up a significant portion of his report, occurred on September 1. The fact that President Nicolas Maduro was deliberately stalling in an attempt to prevent a recall election was evident by then, and his hardening attitude was crystal clear by mid-October. Finnegan's piece also reports that Maduro suspended the recall effort in late October, but considering how long it has been since the "Taking of Caracas" march, that event shouldn't have stood in the way of earlier publication.
Even with its flaws, Finnegan's report is worth reading because of its troubling personal portrayals of intolerable and inexcusable suffering seen in everyday life in various parts of the country and sectors of the economy. One sees a land which at times seems closer to the world portrayed in Mad Max than it is to a properly functioning nation.
Venezuela is now a place where:
- Basic hospital supplies patients desperately need are "available only on the black market, at high prices."
- Hospitals are "all manned by uniformed personnel with rifles ... to keep out journalists."
"Diseases and ailments long vanquished have ... returned—malnutrition, diphtheria, plague," and malaria (over 100,000 cases per year in a nation of 30 million).- "State mental hospitals ... (are) putting emaciated, untreated patients out on the streets."
- Despite the horrors just described, current dictator Maduro claims: "I doubt that anywhere in the world, except in Cuba, there exists a better health system."
- "Robbing, disarming, even killing a cop ... (are) highly regarded feats in criminal circles."
- "Less than two per cent of reported crimes are prosecuted."
- People believe with considerable cause, including a homicide rate that is "as high as ninety per hundred thousand people," that condoning "violent crime—what everyone in Venezuela calls la inseguridad—is deliberate (government) policy."
- Polar, the company without which there would likely be virtually immediate mass starvation, operates "in an atmosphere of continual uncertainty, its planners and logistics mavens never sure what roadblock or subterfuge the government will toss up next."
- The currency is so worthless that "To pay cash for a night in a hotel requires a suitcase stuffed with bills."
- "Overgrown fields, shuttered factories, empty warehouses, and abandoned infrastructure projects litter the landscape."
- "Chávez and Maduro came to preside over a kleptocracy," where "Huge amounts of money have simply disappeared."
- "Perhaps two million" have fled to other countries.
- Environmentally disastrous oil leaks which foul the nation's waters "stem from lack of maintenance and from the depredations of thieves."
Finnegan's take on Venezuela's extremely high levels of crime is a major failing. He uses it to insist that the country is not a dictatorship because "real dictatorships impose order." What nonsense. "Real dictatorships" do whatever they can to maintain control, up to and including creating disorder and violence. It's as if he's never heard of China's Cultural Revolution. Maduro has "declared a state of emergency that allows him to rule by decree." That's a "real dictatorship," Bill.
Now let's get to some of the history Finnegan recounted. It's impossible not to see potentially eerie parallels to the situation here in the U.S., starting here:
For decades, the country had been ruled by two centrist parties that took turns winning elections but were increasingly out of touch with voters.
There's no need to dwell on that obvious parallel, is there?
The “twenty-first-century socialism” that Chavismo seeks to build has relied on electoral democracy; opinion polling and elections qualify as national obsessions. Chávez ruled in permanent campaign mode.
I wonder where Chavez might have gotten the idea in the late-1990s for being "in permanent campaign mode"? The idea of a "permanent campaign" was "first defined by journalist and later Clinton presidential senior adviser Sidney Blumenthal in his 1980 book" of that title.
Here's Finnegan's attempt at answering "How did this happen?":
In the late nineteen-seventies, Venezuela was the richest country per capita in South America. ... But the “resource curse” that afflicts many mineral-rich, particularly oil-rich, nations—reducing incentives to develop other industries, exacerbating inequality as élites hog oil rents and fail to build a strong individual-income-tax base—began to hit Venezuela hard in the eighties and nineties. The economic collapse, that is, had started long before Chávez came to power—indeed, the country’s growing desperation led to the embrace of Chávez. Oil had been nationalized in 1976, and displaced foreign owners had been compensated. Crony capitalism, irresponsible policies, and long-term looting of the country’s wealth were gathering steam.
Chávez promised to stop the looting ...
Although growth has been historically uneven, and although one could argue that the seeds for a collapse were being sewn much earlier, a genuine, protracted "economic collapse" did not occur until 2014 — and it wouldn't have been nearly as severe if Chavez and then Maduro hadn't nationalized and effectively destroyed so many industries, firms and farms.
Readers should have little problem seeing a U.S. parallel to the "Crony capitalism, irresponsible policies, and long-term looting of the country’s wealth" to which Finnegan referred, and the appeal of someone who promises to stop it. (Obviously, this isn't to say that GOP nominee Donald Trump is going to follow the path of Chavez. It is to say that someone with that message, whether his or her ultimate intentions are noble or ignoble — Chavez's weren't, and Trump's arguably are, while his main opponent's track record screamed that she would be all about business as usual — will find that it resonates with frustrated citizens.)
Finally, here is where Finnegan demonstrated that he refuses to get it:
Understanding Venezuela’s failing state as just another failure of socialism, and of statism generally, is ahistorical. Venezuela before Chávez was often extravagantly statist. Corruption has been a major problem in every era. Even dire food shortages are not new. These things happened under capitalism, too, as did intense political repression. Today’s crisis is for most people the worst in memory, but it is not all about socialism. The predatory state, the extreme insecurity, the sheer weakness of the rule of law—these are problems more profound, at this stage, than a traditional left-right analysis can clarify, let alone begin to solve.
All of those "more profound" problems came about because of the socialist regimes of Chavez and Maduro, Bill, and it's an insult to everyone's intelligence to pretend otherwise.
Even if I were to fully buy the history Finnegan is selling — and I don't — it doesn't change the fact that 17 years of steadily more repressive socialism are what has brought Venezuela to its knees. Its problems were solvable without extraordinarily heroic measures under different leadership as late as the 2013 election which Maduro narrowly won six weeks after Chavez's death.
Since the New Yorker reporter won't acknowledge that far-left policies are the answer to the "How did this happen?" question, and that far-leftists have to be excluded from any attempts to fix the ugly mess they alone have created, we're left with his necessary and well-written excursion into explaining a horribly depressing reality — but no ideas on how to halt its advance.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
