ON JULY 1st Mexicans are set to elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador as their next president. Since they twice rejected him, in 2006 and 2012, by coalescing behind the opponent with the best chance of winning, that requires some explanation. Mr López Obrador is of the left, but he is a would-be saviour rather than a social democrat. Instead of a better future, he promises to return Mexico to a better, safer past of strong, paternalist government. He invites voters to trust in him, rather than in democratic institutions. As the last two contests showed, in normal circumstances he would not win.
.. But Mexicans are not looking for politics as usual. Under the outgoing president, Enrique Peña Nieto, they suffer rampant crime and corruption, and mediocre economic growth. Each day 85 people are murdered. Voters “want blood”, in the form of systematic punishment of corrupt politicians
.. Many think that centrist politicians have failed them and that things cannot get any worse.
.. Brazilians are in a similar mood ahead of their election in October.
.. one of the front-runners in the opinion polls is Jair Bolsonaro, a crudely authoritarian, misogynistic and homophobic former army officer. Brazil, unlike Mexico, has a run-off vote; Mr Bolsonaro may well figure in it but is unlikely to win it.
.. A recent poll found that 62% of respondents aged 16-24 would leave if they could.
.. It is not the first time Latin Americans have turned, in an emergency, to would-be saviours. In 1990 voters in Peru found one in Alberto Fujimori, an obscure former university rector. A political outsider, he was elected when his country faced a terrorist insurgency, hyperinflation and economic meltdown. When he sent tanks to shut down the congress two years later, polite society was appalled but ordinary Peruvians cheered. Mr Fujimori won a second term in 1995.
..Or take Venezuela. The collapse of the oil price in the 1980s and 1990s weakened a stable social democracy, hollowing out its welfare state, causing bank failures and exposing corruption. In anger, Venezuelans turned to an army lieutenant-colonel, Hugo Chávez, who had led a failed coup ..
.. As the oil price surged again, he became a popular hero. But long before his death in 2013 he had propelled his country towards its current feral state of corruption, brutality and penury.
.. Colombians in 2002 were suffering the tightening grip of the FARC guerrillas over much of the national territory as well as a recession and a banking crisis. They normally chose moderate presidents, but they elected Álvaro Uribe, an intense conservative who promised to be “the first soldier of Colombia” and to double the size of the security forces.
Mr Fujimori and Mr Uribe saved their countries, but in both cases there was a dark side. Mr Fujimori governed as a dictator and resorted to systematic bribery. Mr Uribe appointed officials with links to right-wing death squads.
.. When voters choose candidates they normally wouldn’t, the negative consequences are long-lasting. In Venezuela, Colombia and Peru these include political polarisation.
.. This lasting polarisation is what may face Mexico and Brazil. It is the high price that countries pay when the political establishment fails in its most basic functions of protecting the lives of citizens or preventing the pilfering of public money. When that happens, it is hardly surprising that voters look elsewhere. But the problem with saviours is that, sooner or later, countries have to try to save themselves from them.
Venezuela’s Future — and Ours
I have long argued that about half of our political disagreements are simply cases of failing to agree about the meaning of a word. By “capitalism” libertarians mean the free enterprise of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman, while our friends on the left mean by “capitalism” the shenanigans of the United Fruit Company in Guatemala (it’s always the United Fruit Company!), the crimes of Enron, the purported misdeeds of Halliburton, etc.
.. the conversation rarely advances much beyond that, in part because of the emotional resonances of certain words, e.g. “neocon,” “corporation,” “exploitation,” etc.
.. Venezuela is what we mean by socialism.
.. those welfare states are attached to largely free economies. Sweden arguably has a more liberal trade regime than does the United States, and most of the Nordic countries had lower corporate tax rates than did the United States until the 2018 tax reform... effectiveness of government and public institutions (which is one place where the Swiss, Canadians, and Germans really outperform the United States).. the debate about whether the top U.S. personal-income-tax rate is going to be 39 percent or 33 percent is not about taking a step toward socialism or a step away from socialism... say that the problem with those countries is not socialism but a lack of democracy, political violence and instability, etc. But repression on the Venezuelan model is not extraneous to socialism — it is baked into the socialist cake... While the Soviets and the Maoists had intricate five-year plans, Venezuela had essentially one big plan: Use the profits from state-run oil companies to fund a massive welfare state, and use the leverage thus gained to fortify support for Hugo Chàvez and his political party until they achieved power sufficient to move Venezuela’s assets and its people around like pawns on a chessboard... Economies cannot in fact be controlled and managed in the way that socialists imagine.. The central planners in Venezuela were arrogant and hubristic, as they always are. (As, indeed, the entire concept of central planning is.)
- When oil revenues proved insufficient to sustain their program, they printed money;
- when the foreign-exchange markets responded by devaluing Venezuela’s currency, they enacted controls on foreign exchange;
- when prices rocketed out of control (Venezuela’s inflation rate is difficult to calculate, but it is estimated to have been around 18,000 percent a month in April), they enacted price controls;
- when producers declined to produce at those artificially low prices, they seized their assets.
- .. Venezuelans are not fools — they noticed that this wasn’t working as advertised.
- When the critics began to say so, their newspapers and broadcast facilities were shut down;
- when they protested individually, they were jailed or assassinated;
- when they protested en masse, they were massacred.
When central planning fails — and it always fails — the result is almost never the relaxation of political regimentation but the redoubling of efforts to impose the plan by increasingly brutal application of force.
.. it is a fact that children are starving to death in what was, not so long ago, South America’s wealthiest country.
The Flaw in Trump’s National Security Tariffs Logic
Levies don’t go far enough to eliminate reliance on foreign steel and aluminum, suggesting what’s really at work is plain old trade protectionism
.. You can’t make aluminum without bauxite, yet the U.S. is completely dependent on imports for bauxite; the last domestic mine closed nearly 30 years ago.
the U.S. has less than half the iron ore reserves of Russia and China “since we have been using up our iron ore at a substantial rate for more than 100 years” and U.S. ore has a much lower iron content than theirs. Stimulating domestic production via import tariffs, he said, will speed up the depletion of those reserves.
.. In fact, punishing trading partners can increase national security risk, which Mr. Horlick considers another lesson of the oil saga. After Eisenhower exempted Canada and Mexico from the quotas, Venezuela asked for the same, noting it had been a reliable supplier during World War II and hadn’t nationalized its industry, as Mexico had.
.. Venezuela’s oil minister went to Washington to propose a Western Hemisphere system under which Venezuela would be guaranteed a share of the U.S. market.
When he got nowhere, he traveled to the Middle East and helped found OPEC, which embargoed the U.S. in 1973.
Trump’s Threat to Democracy
four warning signs to determine if a political leader is a dangerous authoritarian:
- The leader shows only a weak commitment to democratic rules.
- He or she denies the legitimacy of opponents.
- He or she tolerates violence.
- He or she shows some willingness to curb civil liberties or the media.
.. “With the exception of Richard Nixon, no major-party presidential candidate met even one of these four criteria over the last century,” they say, which sounds reassuring. Unfortunately, they have one update: “Donald Trump met them all.”
.. democracies are more likely to wither at the hands of insiders who gain power initially through elections. That’s what happened, to one degree or another, in
- Russia, the
- Philippines,
- Turkey,
- Venezuela,
- Ecuador,
- Hungary,
- Nicaragua,
- Sri Lanka,
- Ukraine,
- Poland and
- Peru.
.. Venezuela was a relatively prosperous democracy, for example, when the populist demagogue Hugo Chávez tapped the frustrations of ordinary citizens to be elected president in 1998.
.. the Venezuelan public overwhelmingly believed that “democracy is always the best form of government,” with only one-quarter saying that authoritarianism is sometimes preferable. Yet against their will, Venezuelans slid into autocracy.
“This is how democracies now die,” Levitsky and Ziblatt write. “Democratic backsliding today begins at the ballot box.”
.. he has tried to undermine institutions and referees of our political system: judges, the Justice Department, law enforcement agencies like the F.B.I., the intelligence community, the news media, the opposition party and Congress. But to his great frustration, American institutions have mostly passed the stress test with flying colors... Levitsky and Ziblatt warn of the unraveling of democratic norms — norms such as treating the other side as rivals rather than as enemies, condemning violence and bigotry, and so on. This unraveling was underway long before Trump (Newt Gingrich nudged it along in the 1990s), but Trump accelerated it... It matters when Trump
- denounces the “deep state Justice Department,”
- calls Hillary Clinton a “criminal” and
- urges “jail” for Huma Abedin,
- denounces journalists as the “enemy of the American people” and
- promises to pay the legal fees of supporters who “beat the crap” out of protesters.
.. The answer, they said, is not for Trump opponents to demonize the other side or to adopt scorched-earth tactics, for this can result in “a death spiral in which rule-breaking becomes pandemic.” It’s also not terribly effective, as we’ve seen in Venezuela... they suggested protesting vigorously — but above all, in defense of rights and institutions, not just against the ruler... build coalitions, even if that means making painful compromises, so that protests are very broadly based.