Venezuela’s Descent Into Chaos Buries The Left’s Hopes Of ‘Good Socialism’

The Federalist

Venezuela’s self-destruction has embarrassed more celebrities than has National Enquirer. Our glitterati’s favorite socialist paradise has, like so many similar experiments, become a murderous den of oppression and privation, and none will speak on its behalf. However, Venezuela’s collapse has dashed fantasies far older and more sincere than Sean Penn’s.

Hugo Chávez’s election in Venezuela realized a dream that festered in left-wing hearts for decades: a revolutionary socialist regime, with the sovereignty and resources to fulfill decades’ worth of pledges from left-wing populist leaders in Latin America. During the Cold War, dictators who gained and maintained power through coup d’état and state terror, often abettedby the U.S. government, frequently thwarted such movements. The depth of evil these dictators reached and the misery they created are not to be understated. They undermined the case for capitalism and American power as positive forces in the world, giving defenders of socialism the world over something to point at and say, “But what about…?”

Men like Chávez were cast as the antidote. His triumph was a rebuke not only of Venezuela’s own ancien régime, but also of Pinochet, Rios Montt, and the rest of the Latin American tinpot rogues’ gallery. He was to avenge the sufferings of Oscar Romero and Rigoberta Menchú, fulfill the stolen potential of Jacobo Árbenz and Salvador Allende, and improve on the flawed, illiberal experiments of Fidel Castro and the Sandinistas. The constraints on civil liberties that undergirded his power were necessary evils to ward off the authoritarian specter.

We were told Central and South American nations would never choose to adopt free markets to the same extent as their individualistic northern counterpart. With communitarian traditions rooted in its Catholicism and indigenous heritage, Latin America would embrace democratic socialism. I remember sitting in college classes and learning about how Chávez and similar, though less violent populists such as Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and Brazil’s Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff were forging hope by harnessing popular energy into governments that would direct economies toward social justice.

It Wasn’t Supposed to Turn Out This Way

Fissures are forming for each of these regimes. Morales, in defiance of the constitution and a popular referendum, is moving to abrogate term limits for his office; Correa’s successors are locked in a battle over corruption that has left the government in chaos; da Silva is entering his sixth corruption trial; and Rousseff has been impeached. But it is Venezuela, the nation Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro have led into fire and ruin, which fully captures just how fatal are the conceits of democratic socialism in Latin America.

The terror and repression Chavismoswore to deposit in the dustbin of history have reemerged in its defense, with hit squads intimidating and massacring dissidents while Maduro swats down checks on his power. The equality it promised exists only in the cruelest of terms: equality of want, equality of desperation, equality of misery. A country endowed with bountiful resources has spent and collectivized its way into such abject poverty that it cannot provide its people with food and toilet paper.

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