You’re Either with Maduro, or You’re against Him

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, July 06, 2021

 

To what standard should Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her socialist colleagues in the Democratic Party be held when it comes to the matter of the Democratic Socialists of America and its unwavering support for the brutal dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela?

 

A word about these socialists: There’s a certain kind of talk-radio knucklehead who insists that every member of the Democratic Party — and about 80 percent of Republicans — is a socialist or a Marxist or a communist. That is nonsense. I am not even convinced that all of the Democrats who call themselves “socialists” are socialists. But we are not in this case talking about a subjective evaluation: We are talking about people who are members of a particular organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, who support that organization and who are supported by it in their pursuit of political power. And, as it happens, the DSA has for a long time — and quite recently — reiterated its support for the Maduro dictatorship, under which the people of Venezuela have been reduced to eating zoo animals and worse. Before that, the DSA supported his predecessor, the murderer and torturer Hugo Chávez, who bought progressive Democrats such as Chaka Fattah on the cheap, with a few stirring words and a couple of barrels of heating oil.

 

So, what standard applies?

 

Should we apply the Ibram X. Kendi standard? Kendi, who in our irredeemably racist society makes a pretty good living as a professional anti-racist, insists that it is not enough for people of goodwill to be non-racist — in order to cut the moral mustard, they must be actively anti-racist. From this point of view, everybody is either an activist — an activist who supports Kendi’s work and his agenda — or a collaborator: It’s Team Ibram Kendi or Team David Duke. Racism is morally repugnant and it is a terrible way to organize a society — and surely the same can be said of dictatorship. Surely the same can be said of starving people for political purposes, locking up political prisoners, murdering political dissidents, etc. So if we embrace the Kendi standard, then it is not enough to simply forgo the practice of dictatorship oneself or to oppose it in principle. Given the opportunity to oppose a savage dictatorship in a practical way, it would follow, one has a moral obligation to do so. So when Representative Ocasio-Cortez can manage nothing more than “it’s a complex issue” in the face of Maduro’s murder and torture and repression, and when she remains in good standing with the DSA and its constant support of Maduro, then, surely, according to this standard, she must be condemned as well.

 

But the Kendi standard isn’t the only possible standard. There is the Democratic Party standard, under which any number of workaday conservative congressional Republicans have been condemned for having “voted with Trump” in some large share of their votes. This line of criticism has been applied even to such unrelenting Trump critics as Senator Mitt Romney (R., Utah by way of La Jolla). This is, by any intelligent standard, a nonsensical way of evaluating a member of Congress — there were many Republicans who were going to vote for tax cuts and Amy Coney Barrett even if Donald Trump had remained a second-rate game-show host — but Democrats invoke it constantly in their rhetoric and campaign ads. Relying on the Democratic standard is going to be hard on so-called moderate Democrats such as Elissa Slotkin (D., Mich.), who, according to ProPublica, has voted with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a little more often than Nancy Pelosi has: 89 percent of the time, in fact — that’s more than Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has voted with Matt Gaetz.

 

By the standard of her party, Representative Slotkin must be considered an adjunct to the Venezuelan junta and its apologists. So must Representative Colin Allred, who must positively rejoice in that surname, given the fact that he has voted with the dictator-enabling Representative Ocasio-Cortez 93 percent of the time. There are more than 10,000 Venezuelans living in and around Representative Allred’s north Texas district, many because they have been obliged to flee their homeland. I’m sure they’ll understand.

 

Maybe we should apply the Twitter-Peon standard. This is the standard under which every member of an institution is held personally responsible for every opinion held by every other member of that institution. We get this a lot around National Review. Often, it is framed as an opportunistic change of heart: “Well, here’s National Review saying x, and here, just a few months later, is National Review arguing not-x! Harrumph!” National Review of course publishes a great many writers who disagree about a great many things: I could spend a month doing nothing but relitigating my many disagreements with Charlie Cooke, Michael Brendan Dougherty, or Ramesh Ponnuru. I even disagree with Jay Nordlinger sometimes: He is way more liberal on the question of James Taylor than I think is defensible! There isn’t a party-line imposed.

 

I assume there is similar internal disagreement in the DSA. But if we take this as our standard — and it is a standard applied to all sorts of institutions and individuals — then we have to assume that Representatives Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman are all hunky-dory with the dictatorship in Venezuela, as indeed must be such lesser-known figures as state senators Julie Gonzales of Colorado and Sam Bell of Rhode Island, state house member Mike Connolly of Massachusetts, mayor-elect India Walton of Buffalo, etc. If any of them takes a dissenting view, they are keeping quiet about it.

 

So, what’s it going to be, progressives? Democracy or dictatorship? Are you with Maduro or against him?