How did Venezuela go from Latin America’s richest economy to an impoverished basket case where food is so hard to come by that the average citizen has lost some 20 pounds? The answer would seem to be obvious—so obvious that it could be captured in a single word. But The Scrapbook gets ahead of itself. For this is a story not about a single word, but about its absence.
The New York Times took on, this month, the question of Venezuela’s ruin. It was a very serious, erudite piece, more than 1,800 words, with no shortage of quotations from Ivy League professors of political science.
Much of the analysis was put in terms that might seem to describe a certain president of a country that will go unmentioned. Venezuela had suffered a “collapse into authoritarianism.” The strongman Hugo Chávez “ran for president in 1998. His populist message of returning power to the people won him victory.” Chávez polarized because “populism describes a world divided between the righteous people and the corrupt elite.” Now, under the late Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, “The political system, after years of erosion, has become a hybrid of democratic and authoritarian features.”
The Scrapbook gets it: Venezuela was brought down by a toxic mix of democratic populism and authoritarianism. One wonders, is it meant to sound familiar? Are we supposed to look at Venezuela and see it as a cautionary tale of what could happen here?
For all his faults, Trump is no Chávez, and the polarization in U.S. society is nothing compared to the street battles in Caracas. Americans, it has been noticed, are well-fed. No, there is something else going on that explains what’s wrong with Venezuela, and that something is described clearly and well in the New York Times article. The authors explain Maduro’s predicament:
Quite right—that’s exactly what so often happens under governments that practice socialism. And that, of course, is the magic word—”socialism”—that answers the question of how Venezuela was brought so low. And yet somehow, that term never appears in nearly 2,000 words of careful New York Times explanation of the Venezuelan crisis. Nor “socialist,” either. We hear a lot about the ravages of “populism,” but Chávez didn’t lead the Venezuelan Populist Party, he was the head of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela—the party under whose banner Maduro is currently starving his country’s people.
After a decade and a half of socialist rule, Venezuela is collapsing. Why is it so hard for the New York Times to admit that socialism just might have something to do with it?
