Populism divides society into the righteous people (“Us”) and the corrupt elite (“Them”). It also promises that if “the people” stick together, they can overthrow the corrupt elite and quickly bring about a just society. Left-wing populists won’t fall for a right-wing populist trap, but they can easily be sucked in by a left-wing populist. Here’s the perfect example.
Venezuela’s former president, Hugo Chavez, was a quintessential populist who seemed to have accomplished the impossible by leading a successful left-populist revolution. Naturally, that made Chavez and Venezuela the perfect populism trap for leftists.
Hugo Chavez was elected president and took office in early 1999. Immediately, he did what political scientists predict populists always do: He attacked the checks and balances of liberal democracy.
By the end of his first year, Chavez had used a national referendum to replace the constitution with one that increased his powers, threw all national elected officials out of office, and replaced all Supreme Court justices. In the years that followed, he shut down much of the media and kept imposing new restrictions on his opposition. In 2005, tens of thousands of people who signed petitions for a recall referendum found they could not get government jobs or contracts, qualify for public assistance programs, or receive passports.
Chavez started out by making reforms that were much needed and popular but then began nationalizing industries. His approval rating dropped as low as 30% in 2005. By then the oil price boom was underway and he used the enormous profits of state-owned oil to subsidize food, gasoline, and medical care. The deep poverty rate fell dramatically and income inequality was reduced.
To suck in our radical left, he announced a program of cheap oil for poor families in the US Northeast. By the end of 2005, Chavez was delivering free oil to Joseph Kennedy II’s Citizens Energy Corporation, and by the end of 2006, Kennedy was running Chavez-friendly commercials paid for by Chavez. The oil program continued through 2014 and delivered somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million worth of free or heavily discounted oil to poor Americans in 20-plus states.
Of course, it made no sense for Chavez to take that $400 million away from Venezuela’s much-poorer poor — except as a propaganda measure. Among those sucked in by this populist “success story,” you will find Jesse Jackson, Sean Penn, Oliver Stone, Danny Glover, Michael Moore, Naomi Klein, and millions more. Of these, Bernie Sanders is the most interesting example. On February 7, 2006, at a joint press conference with Venezuelan Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez, Sanders announced that he had brokered a long-term oil deal for some of Vermont’s poor. He said it should not be viewed as political.
Then in 2011, after the UK’s highly-respected Freedom House had declared Venezuela “not an electoral democracy,” Sanders wrote an article, which was still posted on his Senate website in 2019. It drew a surprising conclusion:
These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela, and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who’s the banana republic now?
How is that? The US is more of a “banana republic” than Venezuela? That was one huge endorsement of Hugo Chavez and his populist, democratic socialism. It did not occur to Sanders that Venezuela’s reduced income inequality was thanks to an oil-price bubble that might (and did) soon burst.
On Sept 14, 2015, someone in the Clinton campaign sent an email to a Huffington Post reporter. The email quoted Sanders endorsing British populist Jeremy Corbyn and Corbyn praising Chavez as an “inspiration to all of us.” It also noted the oil deal that Bernie brokered with Venezuela.
Sanders immediately responded: “They … even tried to link me to a dead communist dictator.”
Yes, he was talking about that “dead communist dictator,” Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013. The extreme radical left went nuts. How could Sanders call their hero a “communist dictator?”
When Sanders praised Chavez in 2011, the Venezuelan economy had just reached its high point. It’s been downhill ever since. By 2015, everyone, even Bernie, could see that Chavez had crippled his country’s democracy and left its economy in shambles. So Sanders was basically right when he called Chavez a communist dictator.
Remember the third characteristic of someone who has been sucked in. “The person would regret being sucked in if they saw through the deception.” Sanders finally saw through the Chavez deception and was regretting it as he was forced to implicitly admit that he himself had unwittingly brokered a deal with a communist dictator to influence his voters.
This is not surprising. People are most easily sucked in by those who pretend to share their worldview. Populism is indeed a powerful trap for those inclined to support the concerns of ordinary people. Because they feel so strongly about their good intentions, they are the most vulnerable to being sucked in.
This is an excerpt from Ripped Apart: Why Democrats Should Fight Polarization
Ripped Apart
