Ilhan Omar, the newest Democratic member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has had a contentious first month in Washington, stumbling through multiple anti-Semitism controversies. But it was the first demonstration of the Minnesota congresswoman’s official duties on the Foreign Affairs Committee, in a hearing on Venezuela, that might be more disturbing. It certainly indicates some important lessons about the real priorities of American “democratic socialists.”
At a Feb. 13 hearing, Omar harangued Elliott Abrams, the administration’s new special envoy on Venezuela, fumbling over his name and smearing him as complicit in a 40-year-old massacre by El Salvadoran troops — something one of her staffers must have been storing away in the blame-America-first vault for a long time.
While the clip went viral, what most people didn’t notice is how she ended the exchange, when she finally returned to the current situation in Venezuela. Her chief concern was whether the United States might support acts of “genocide” by the Venezuelan opposition. This follows her declaration that the anti-regime movement there is a “U.S.-backed coup” and that the opposition is “far right” and likely to “incite violence.”
There are no hints, outside of Russian propaganda, that Venezuela’s opposition is even offering armed resistance. The thugs are all on the other side. The opposition leader is not far-right but a “social democrat.” The United States has sent millions of dollars of humanitarian aid to a country suffering from disastrous shortages of food and medicine, but it is being blocked at the Venezuelan border because dictator Nicolas Maduro fears it will be a threat to his power.
Yet to Omar, the real humanitarian threat is from the opposition and the United States.
Omar is a self-declared “democratic socialist,” along with her ally Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and the Democratic Party’s rising star and agenda-setter, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and her reaction is representative of the far Left’s response to the unfolding catastrophe in Venezuela.
The first big lesson we can learn from that reaction is that Venezuela is socialism after all. One of the techniques American socialists use to dodge responsibility for the real-world consequences of their policies is to claim that its latest failure wasn’t “real” socialism. When does a country go from being true socialism, hailed as an “economic miracle” and an embodiment of the American dream, as Sanders’ website suggests, to having nothing to do with socialism? Is it when they run out of toilet paper? This is a great setup in which socialism “works” by definition, because the moment it stops working, it is no longer “real” socialism.
But if the Maduro regime isn’t really socialist but rather capitalist and imperialist, as some apologists for socialism have been claiming, then why would a bunch of American and European socialists be so quick to defend it? Why would over 70 academics, led by leftist luminary Noam Chomsky, sign an open letter denouncing the decision of Venezuela’s own elected National Assembly as if it were a U.S.-backed coup? Why would Omar portray the popular uprising against Maduro as some kind of capitalist plot, declaring, “We cannot handpick leaders for other countries on behalf of multinational corporate interests”?
Clifton Ross, a longtime leftist writer, recently described in Quillette how he started reporting the truth about the depredations of the Maduro regime, and in response, editors of American socialist magazines stopped replying to his pitches, friends stopped returning his calls, and he was “excommunicated” by his “comrades.”
I think we’re entitled to conclude, then, that Venezuela is “real” socialism. That leads us to our second big lesson: “Democratic” socialism isn’t all that democratic.
Take all this talk about a “coup.” Maduro was re-elected last year in an election rigged by vote-buying, state support for the incumbent, and a ban on the candidacies of the two most popular opposition leaders. The only representative body left in the country, Venezuela’s National Assembly, recently declared that because the election was not free and fair, Maduro is not the legitimate leader of the country. They invoked a provision in Venezuela’s constitution that allows the National Assembly to recognize its president, Juan Guaidó, as the interim president whose job is to arrange for a new election.
This is a constitutional measure taken by a representative body to ensure a fair election, with the support of most of the free world. It is the opposite of a coup.
Note, by the way, that many of the people who denounce this decision as a “coup” have spent the past two years fantasizing about impeaching President Trump. A constitutional provision that allows the legislature to remove the president is “democratic” when it’s invoked against someone they don’t like, but it’s a “coup” when invoked against a socialist. It seems that the cause of socialism takes precedence over the cause of “democracy.”
This shouldn’t be a surprise. The essence of socialism is giving power to state officials to override the economic decisions of individual citizens — to tell them what they can and cannot make, what they can and cannot sell, what they can and cannot own. A top-down, command-and-control mentality is built in. So when the edicts of the socialist leaders meet with public resistance, when there are those who disagree with their controls, who point out the disastrous consequences, who expose the inevitable corruption, these are not mere political disagreements. They are seen as threats to the system itself. They are “sabotage” and “coup plots” that must be secretly orchestrated by capitalists and imperialists.
That is exactly how Hugo Chavez, the father of the socialist movement he bequeathed to Maduro, established dictatorship in Venezuela. He denounced independent newspapers and television stations as tools of the rich and shut them down or placed them under state control. In 2004, Chavez’s supporters passed the Law on Social Responsibility in Radio and Television, which gave the government power to censor media to “promote social justice.” When Maduro came to power, he used this law to fine the last remaining critical media organization into submission, forcing its owner to sell it to corrupt businessmen connected to the regime. This is the logical endpoint of socialism, regardless of “democratic” window dressing. If people can’t be trusted to make their own decisions about what to make and what to sell, how can they be trusted to make their own decisions about what to read and what to watch?
Socialism also makes the people themselves dependent on the state, leverage that is always used to keep the ruling regime in power. As rampant mismanagement led to worsening shortages, the Maduro regime used its control over the distribution of food to ensure political loyalty, as in last year’s election, when “poor Venezuelans were asked to scan state-issued “fatherland cards” at red tents after voting in hope of receiving a “prize” promised by Maduro, which opponents said was akin to vote-buying. The “fatherland cards” are required to receive benefits including food boxes and money transfers.”
Note how a system of government-controlled food distribution fits seamlessly with an authoritarian surveillance state.
Now compare all this to how our own “democratic socialists” look upon the legitimacy of political opposition. Anyone who advocates free markets can expect to be accused of being in the pocket of Big Business. A few years back, there were a lot of people on the Left who were convinced the small-government Tea Party movement was “astroturfed” by the libertarian Koch brothers, who advocated breaking up Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. because they didn’t like Fox News. Sanders caricatures his opponents as “Wall Street, billionaires, and large corporations” who “buy elections.” He has a history of demanding Federal Communications Commission investigations of right-leaning media, and he launched his latest presidential campaign by railing against “corporate media” — which describes all privately owned media.
The great fiction of “democratic socialism” is that socialism represents the real will of the people, whether the people know it or not, which is why the Left always dismisses political opposition as a false creation of vested financial interests.
It is natural to vilify one’s political opponents, and both sides do it. But there is always the risk that hating the other side will become more important than any positive agenda. That leads us to the last big lesson of the American Left’s reaction to Venezuela. For many, hating America has become way more important than caring about the plight of the poor and hungry.
Make no mistake, the people of Venezuela are starving. A survey last year indicated that the average Venezuelan had lost 24 pounds in 2017. Women are turning to prostitution to feed their families. Mothers abandon their children on the streets. Venezeula’s main hospital is “often without running water, medicine, and even doctors.” The stories coming out of Venezuela exceed the worst Dickensian caricatures of capitalism.
Yet when called upon to respond to this, a lot of American socialists can only think about how much they resent the United States. Ocasio-Cortez has mostly dodged the issue with a lot of wishy-washy “both sides” rhetoric. But the official statement of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which she is a member, said nothing about the regime’s arrest of dissidents and killing of protesters or about the suffering and starvation of the Venezuelan people, evasively describing the situation there as “complex.” Instead, it focused most of its ire on the “long history of U.S.-backed coups in the region.” One “anti-war” wing of the DSA was even more obsessed, railing, “We condemn today’s U.S.-engineered coup in Venezuela. We reject a return to 20-century gringo interventions and coups in Latin America. We stand against U.S. imperialism and interventionism; we stand in solidarity with the Bolivarian revolution!”
There you have it: condemning a nation of 30 million people to starvation, just so you can stick it to the gringos.
If you want to get a fuller sense of this, check out the replies to an announcement by national security adviser John Bolton that the United States was mobilizing to deliver humanitarian aid, “medicine, surgical supplies, and nutritional supplements for the people of Venezuela.” This is mostly met with gratitude from actual Venezuelans, but here’s a sampling of the replies dredged up from deep within the id of the Left: “scumbag war criminal,” “you’re not seen as humanitarian, but murdering psychopaths who will go to any lengths to achieve a dollar profit,” “The banking cartels, oil companies, deep state have no interest in the welfare of the Venezuelans. Just ask all the colonies of the US.” For all of their pretense about being motivated by love, a lot of the Left is driven more by hatred of capitalism and by hatred of America as the country of capitalism.
A more subtle version of this line was taken by Sanders, who frankly acknowledged the Maduro regime’s repression of dissent and Venezuela’s economic disaster but urged the United States to do nothing, because “we must learn the lessons of the past and not be in the business of regime change or supporting coups — as we have in Chile, Guatemala, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic. The United States has a long history of inappropriately intervening in Latin American countries; we must not go down that road again.” Whatever the sins of the Maduro regime, he cannot bring himself to admit that they might outweigh the sins of the United States.
This is, thankfully, not the approach of everyone in the Democratic Party. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, for example, wrote a heartfelt op-ed hailing Guaidó for his courage and offering America’s support. Yet it is interesting that the more “progressive” the Democrat, the more excuses they make for supporting a regressive regime.
If sincere humanitarians on the Left haven’t yet learned from history, now is a good time to start learning from the present. One lesson they can draw is to stop pursuing the fantasy of an idealized “democratic socialist” society at the expense of the misery and persecution of actual human beings. But the deeper question they need to ask themselves is whether, in signing up for socialism, they signed on to a religion of state force in which the exercise of tyrannical power was the real goal all along.
Robert Tracinski is editor of the Tracinski Letter, www.TracinskiLetter.com, and host of the podcast “Salon of the Refused.”
