By James Kirchick
Wednesday, August 02, 2017
"Pundits should have fixed terms," left-wing
author Naomi Klein recently told the BBC. Awarded "jobs for life,"
most professional commentators — whether opining in newspaper columns like this
one or blathering on television — suffer no consequence for making predictions
that turn out "spectacularly wrong." Klein's (partly tongue-in-cheek)
solution? Hold our pundits to account by making them reapply for their
sinecures every four years, banishing those whose prognostications prove most
wide of the mark.
The socialist Klein's embrace of market forces, however
selective, is welcome. Might I offer the unfolding horror in Venezuela as the
first litmus test of her proposal?
On Sunday, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro claimed
victory in a referendum designed to rewrite the country's constitution and
confer on him dictatorial powers. The sham vote, boycotted by the opposition,
was but the latest stage in the "Bolivarian Revolution" launched by
Maduro's predecessor, the late Hugo Chavez. First elected in 1998 on a wave of
popular goodwill, Chavez's legacy is one of utter devastation.
Thanks to Chavismo's vast social welfare schemes
(initially buoyed by high oil prices), cronyism and corruption, a country that
once boasted massive budget surpluses is today the world's most indebted.
Contraction in per capita GDP is so severe that "Venezuela's economic
catastrophe dwarfs any in the history of the U.S., Western Europe or the rest
of Latin America" according to Ricardo Hausmann, former chief economist of
the Inter-American Development Bank. Transparency International lists Venezuela
as the only country in the Americas among the world's 10 most corrupt.
Socialist economic policies — price controls, factory
nationalizations, government takeovers of food distribution and the like — have
real human costs. Eighty percent of Venezuelan bakeries don't have flour.
Eleven percent of children under 5 are malnourished, infant mortality has
increased by 30% and maternal mortality is up 66%. The Maduro regime has met
protests against its misrule with violence. More than 100 people have died in
anti-government demonstrations and thousands have been arrested. Loyal police
officers are rewarded with rolls of toilet paper.
The list of Western leftists who once sang the Venezuelan
government's praises is long, and Naomi Klein figures near the top.
In 2004, she signed a petition headlined, "We would
vote for Hugo Chavez." Three years later, she lauded Venezuela as a place
where "citizens had renewed their faith in the power of democracy to
improve their lives." In her 2007 book, "The Shock Doctrine,"
she portrayed capitalism as a sort of global conspiracy that instigates
financial crises and exploits poor countries in the wake of natural disasters.
But Klein declared that Venezuela had been rendered immune to the
"shocks" administered by free market fundamentalists thanks to
Chavez's "21st Century Socialism," which had created "a zone of
relative economic calm and predictability."
Chavez's untimely death from cancer in 2013 saw an
outpouring of grief from the global left. The caudillo "demonstrated that it is possible to resist the
neo-liberal dogma that holds sway over much of humanity," wrote British
journalist Owen Jones. "I mourn a great hero to the majority of his
people," said Oliver Stone, who would go on to replace Chavez with Vladimir
Putin as the object of his twisted affection.
On the Venezuelan regime's international propaganda
channel, Telesur, American host Abby Martin — who used to ply her duplicitous
trade at Russia Today — takes credulous viewers on Potemkin tours of
supermarkets fully stocked with goods. It would be inaccurate to label the
thoroughly unconvincing Martin, who combines the journalistic ethics of Walter
Duranty with the charm of Ulrike Meinhof, a useful idiot. She's just an idiot.
Most of Chavismo's earlier adherents have maintained a
conspicuous silence in the face of the Venezuelan calamity. Those who do speak
up, rather than apologize for getting things so wrong, blame collapsing oil
prices for the country's fate. Yet the decline in the value of petroleum has
not led to rioting on the streets of Oslo. The tragedy of Venezuela is the
predictable result of what happens when a strongman wages, in Chavez's own
words, "economic war on the bourgeoisie owners," cracks down on
media, prints money with reckless abandon and implements all manner of
harebrained socialist schemes.
In the age of Trump, Brexit and a wider backlash against
globalization, left-wing economic populists are enjoying a resurgence in
mainstream credibility by railing against free trade and
"neoliberals." This is a scandal. For in the form of the Bolivarian
Republic of Venezuela, the world has a petri dish in which to judge the sort of
policies endorsed by Jones, Klein, British Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn,
homegrown socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and countless other deluded utopians.
There, the ghastly failures of their ideas are playing
out for everyone to see; a real-time rebuke, as if another were needed, to
socialism. That these people are considered authorities on anything other than
purchasing Birkenstocks, much less running a country, is absurd.
So yes, let's put term limits on pundits. And let's start
with anyone who praised the Venezuelan model.
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