The final domino has been toppled.
The last time that Latin America swung to the populist Left, Colombia alone defied the trend. Hugo Chavez’s victory in Venezuela paved the way for victories by allies and mimics around the region. By 2008, every other Latin American state was in the hands of the radicals — even square, bourgeois Uruguay, after 175 years of alternating Blanco and Colorado governments, elected a socialist-communist coalition. Colombia alone held out, sticking loyally to the conservatives who had defeated the narco-terrorists and delivered strong economic growth.
Not any more. Colombians have just voted, for the first time in their history, for an avowedly leftist government. Gustavo Petro is a former urban guerrilla who promises to end the alliance with the United States, block oil exploration, and redistribute land. Latin America’s anti-yanquistas are delirious, confident that Bogota will join the Havana-Managua-Caracas axis.
Although commentators speak of a “pink tide,” I think “scarlet tsunami” would be more apt. Tides rise slowly. What we are seeing is a burst of anger that has swept away pluralist structures in country after country.
Delivering competent government turns out to be no defense against the floodwaters. Colombia, under successive center-right leaders, had done extraordinarily well. The civil war was brought to an end, encouraging a rush of inward investment. While other countries in the region messed around with ineffective Chinese vaccines, Colombia’s program was a model of efficiency, and in consequence, it was the first South American nation to come properly out of the COVID-19 recession. So far this year, its economy has been on track for 7.5% growth — a figure neighboring states can only dream of.
But Colombians were not thinking of neighboring states. Even the presence of 1.7 million Venezuelans among them, refugees from the economic calamity of chavismo, did not focus their minds. Petro claimed throughout that young voters would push him over the top — perhaps because young voters are the least likely to apply perspective, the readiest to become indignant at injustices without asking whether things were worse before or continue to be worse in nearby countries.
All of which raises an uncomfortable question. What does an incumbent government have to do to get reelected at a time like this? Voters don’t buy the argument that the pandemic created long-term costs. Nor do they care that the Ukrainian war has exacerbated the global economic crisis. All they notice is that their own standards of living have suffered.
The underlying problem is a refusal to understand the concept of trade-offs. Around the world, governments sprayed money about during the lockdowns without explaining that the debts would have to be paid. Voters now gravitate naturally to candidates who deny the need for belt-tightening, who claim that the money can somehow be raised from “the rich,” and who imply that austerity is a deliberate choice inflicted by sadistic politicians rather than the natural consequence of the money running out.
It won’t do to claim that Colombia is an underdeveloped democracy. It simply isn’t true. On basic measures such as literacy and infant mortality, Colombia has long since ceased to be poor. And even the wealthiest and most educated nations are prone to the same tendency. One of the first pieces I wrote for this newspaper was about how Canadians rejected Stephen Harper’s Conservatives in 2015 despite his having brought them through the financial crisis as the only major nation that suffered no downturn.
No, we are dealing with traits that are near-universal among human beings: a yearning for the perfect rather than the adequate, an unwillingness to consider context, a readiness to blame politicians for things that are beyond their control, and, at root, a refusal to consider the possibility that we might be partly responsible for our own dissatisfaction. As the great 18th century Tory Dr. Johnson put it: “How small, of all that human hearts endure, that part which laws or kings can cause or cure.”
Colombia will now follow the same path as other countries that preferred imagined utopias to realistic and accretive improvements. The money will run out, the poor will be the hardest hit, the government will be blamed for breaking its promises, and with a bit of luck, a new administration will be brought in to clean up the mess.
That administration will do what conservative administrations always do, arduously restoring order to public finances. And then, when its work is reaching fruition, voters will decide that they can afford to binge again and will send for a new set of socialists to blow it all away. And so the cycle continues.
