Quico says: Political common sense is a bit like atmospheric pressure - omnipresent, terrifically important, but normally imperceptible to us. Political common sense is an implicit set of beliefs that sets the boundaries between views we need to defend and those so obvious they "go without saying." It structures the limits of what's politically conceivable to us, it defines what seems obviously right and obviously wrong. Its power is all the greater because it feels so natural, so self-evident to us that when we use it, we don't realize that we're using it.
After arguing in circles for eight years, I think it's pretty clear that what we have in Venezuela these days are two fundamentally opposed sets of political common senses; what critical theorists would call parallel discourses. For almost a decade, the two have been battling to establish themselves as the political common sense in Venezuela. "A symbolic struggle to re-signify democracy," was the way Oscar Schemel put it.
The funny thing about this struggle is that its taken place in a theoretical vacuum. We don't often wonder about underpinnings of our our own common sense, to say nothing of our opponents'. The outcome is a lot of confusion, and a fundamental misapprehension about what is at stake.
Constitutional Liberalism
The standard rap against chavismo is pretty straight-forward: chavismo is undemocratic. It's a charge we've repeated again and again in every forum available to us; it encapsulates what we find unacceptable about his way of government. It's also, on its face, absurd.
After all, Chavez has won election after election. According to a bare-bones, etymological understanding of democracy, it's just an oxymoron to call an elected leader undemocratic.
"Not so fast," we usually respond, "he might be a 'democrat' in some ridiculously reductionist sense of the word, but he doesn't respect the separation of powers, doesn't tolerate dissent, doesn't grasp that the republic's money is not his money, can't grasp that 'state' 'government' and 'Chavez' are not synonyms, violates the constitution every other day, etc. etc."
Turns out that what we mean when we charge chavismo of being undemocratic is a bit more complex than we realize. None of the objections we commonly level at chavismo points to a lack of democracy, understood as the legitimacy you get from winning an election. What we're really saying is that Chavez doesn't respect the arrangements we associate democracy.
When we say Chavez is undemocratic, what we really mean is that he doesn't practice Constitutional Liberalism, a specific institutional system that developed in a specific point in time in a specific part of the world. It's just that, in our common-sense usage, we see that system as synonymous with democracy. Our political discourse sees the two as self-evidently inseparable.
Now, the charge that Chavez doesn't practice constitutional liberalism shouldn't even controversial: after all, Chávez has explicitly distanced himself from constitutional liberalism ("representative democracy" as it's called in official phraseology) pretty much from day one. He threw a monumental hissy-fit at the Quebec City Summit of the Americas in 2001 when the rest of the hemisphere's leaders proposed to include a commitment to "representative democracy" in their declaration of principles. Rejections don't get much more explicit than that.
But what is constitutional liberalism? And what is it that rankles us so much about Chavez's rejection of it?
On one level, it's a system of institutions: a way of organizing the state and its relationship with society. On another level, it's the system of values necessary to make those institutions meaningful. But deep down, it's a view of humanity - or rather, human-ness. A political philosophy based on a given understanding of where human dignity resides.
The most basic institution of constitutional liberalism is the Constitution itself: an explicit set of rules that constitute and delimit the state, defining what it is and what it is not, what it can do and what it can't do.
The most basic value of constitutional liberalism is the commitment to the rule of law as such, the basic belief that, as Santos Luzardo puts it, "la ley obliga de por si" - "the law is binding in and of itself."
It's clear that, without a commitment to the principle of the rule of law, it doesn't do much good to have a liberal constitution. Surely, Venezuela's 1999 constitution is basically a liberal document, but chavismo's cavalier attitude towards the rule of law - its practice of behaving as though the constitution and the laws were compendia of helpful tips to be followed or ignored according to convenience - negates the values that make liberal institutions meaningful.
It's clear to us, and it's been repeated ad nauseam, that without a commitment to the rule of law, a formal constitution becomes "dead letter" - that evocative phrase, conjuring the helplessness of the written word in the face of the contempt of the powerful.
Beyond constitutional liberalism
So far, so banal: just a recapitulation of a thousand anti-Chavez screeds you've read here and elsewhere time and time and time again. Antichavista common-sense distilled. The relevant question is why does Chavez's contempt for the rule of law rankle so much?
The answer might seem obvious, but asking why things that seem obvious to us seem obvious to us is what this is about. Digging a bit deeper, what is it about chavista attitudes that so offends our political common sense, our notions of dignity and freedom and human-ness?
To answer this question, I think, you need to appreciate that constitutional liberalism is a political philosophy built on a particular moral philosophy, a specific understanding of human dignity.
Rooted in eighteenth century thinking, constitutional liberalism is the political expression of enlightenment rationalism. It's an attempt to give institutional form to an understanding of people as rational agents, beings who are free in the sense that we can apply reason to the problems of society.
It's not only that people can think; it's that we can also talk. Because we have the capacity to communicate as well as the capacity to reason, constitutional liberalism sees human beings as able to deliberate, to reason collectively, on the basis of arguments, as a means of reaching agreements on how to further our collective interest.
What happens when we deliberate? What happens when we argue about political matters?
Ideally, it goes something like this: one side puts forward a claim about the world, a view about how it works and how we can make it better. If the other side is not persuaded, he can challenge it logically, by noting contradictions between the claim and reality, for instance, or by exposing logical flaws in it. The other side takes these objections and, once again, subjects them to critical scrutiny. Both sides continue in this way, advancing towards a common understanding.
With each iteration, this process allows the sides to come to new understandings of what is true, of what is in their interests both individually and collectively, and of how best to further those interests. Ideally, deliberation leads to agreement. When it doesn't, the two sides can settle the matter by recourse to a previously agreed decision-making procedure - majority voting, for instance. The key is that, by deliberating, participants aggregate their capacity to reason through communication.
Now, for an argument to count as a real deliberation and not just a shouting match, some conditions are necessary. We have to agree to see debate as a confrontation of ideas, not of personalities. We have be equal, in the sense that anyone must be able to put forward a claim, or to rebut one, and that both proposals and rebuttals must be judged on their own merits, not on the merits of the person putting them forward. We have to seek to persuade the other side, but we must also be persuadable if we find, after critical scrutiny, that the other side has the better argument. We have to treat public engagement over political matters as a co-operative exercise where our common goal is to reach reasoned agreement on our response to our collective problems.
Of course, we all know that this is a highly idealized representation of what goes on in the real world. (In fact Jürgen Habermas, the German philosopher whose argument I'm following here, called it an "ideal speech situation.") We all know that parliamentarians, judges and voters have particular interests, we know people are often corruptible, pig-headed or just plain stupid. Still, when we argue, we implicitly act as if we believe these conditions hold. Arguing would be a meaningless pantomime if it didn't envisage, on some level, the possibility of an ideal speech situation, where claims are put forward and rebutted as if the only thing that matters is who has the better, clearer, more persuasive argument.
The political institutions of liberal constitutionalism make sense only in this context. Having a parliament only makes sense so long as we see its members as thinking agents, able to engage in reasoned deliberations as a means of arriving at reasoned outcomes. Elections make sense only insofar as voters are seen as thinking agents, able to engage in reasoned deliberation on their way to reasoned voting decisions. The decisions of juries are legitimate precisely they are the outcome of reasoned deliberation based on evidence, the decisions of judges are legitimate because they are the outcome of explicitly reasoned engagement with precedent and the law. It's people's capacity to reason collectively in this way that gives legitimacy to the outcomes of the institutional structures of liberal constitutionalism.
Here, I think, we start to get closer to the underlying reasons chavismo provokes such virulent rejection from its critics. On its own, chavismo's rejection of a liberal institutional order would not provoke the intense reactions it does. It's chavismo's rejection of liberal institutional values, and of the understanding of human-ness that they are built on, that so deeply offends us.
This is most visible, I think, in chavismo's principled rejection of deliberation as a method for reaching political decisions. As we have seen with the enabling law, Fonden's unwillingness to share its accounts with the Central Bank, or any of the dozens of little outrages detailed on this blog over the years, the problem is not merely that Chavez rejects deliberation with his opponents, it's that he will not even deliberate about the nation's future with his supporters. He refuses even to couch the decisions he makes unilaterally within the frame of reasoned argumentation, opting for emotive speech again and again. Since 1998, chavistas have systematically responded to criticisms by disqualifying those who make them (viudas del puntofijismo! oligarchs! escuálidos! Gringo imperialists! etc. etc.) rather than by reasoned engagement with the critical ideas. In fact, the refusal to engage with criticism on its merits is one of the discursive hallmarks of chavismo, a kind of ideological badge of honor government supporters use to bolster their revolutionary credentials.
Chavez plainly does not see deliberation as a reliable basis for political decision-making: another point that, when you think about it, shouldn't actually be controversial at all.
Our political common-sense can scarcely imagine a more ominous situation. From our point of view, deliberation and argument are the collective forms our individual capacity to reason takes, and our individual capacity to reason is the basis of our human dignity, the decisive dividing line between human beings and animals. But more than this argument or that argument, it's the practice of arguing itself that chavismo rejects. By systematically refusing to talk to us by reference to an ideal speech situation, by consistently attacking the messenger rather than refuting the message, chavismo strips us of what enlightenment rationalism takes as the basis of our humanity and our dignity.
This, I think, is the underlying reason for the sense of urgency many of us feel in speaking out against the government. Our passions would not be so roused if Chavez's was merely a bad government, or a corrupt government, or an incompetent government. What riles is that Chavez treats us like animals.
Quico says: Pretty much everything you need to know about Chávez's economic model you can learn from this chart. It's an economic model of crushing simplicity:
Quico says: Another hat tip to Miguel for pointing out this hallucinatory interview with Central Bank director Domingo Maza Zavala in yesterday's El Universal.
Katy says: This note from Spain's EFE news service is sure to make some waves. Costa Rican President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Arias made an unusually bold, scathing assessment of Chávez, chavismo and the hemisphere's current ideological battles.Costa Rican President Oscar Arias said today that the new special powers given by the Venezuelan Congress (sic) to President Hugo Chavez constitute “a negation of democracy.”Chávez will surely unleash all his verbal and diplomatic demons on the Costa Rican president, but fear not, for mild-mannered Arias has tackled worse thugs before. Arias is the first Latin American head of state to call Chávez a dictator, and for that we applaud him.
“There is a simple difference between a dictator and a democrat: if the democrat has no opposition, it’s his job to create it, but the dream of the dictator is to eliminate all opposition”, said the Head of State and winner of the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize in an interview with Costa Rican radio station Columbia.
Arias criticized that Chavez can now rule by decree for the next 18 months.
For a dictator, he said, “the most important thing is not to have opposition but to have absolute power. A democrat believes only power stops power and, therefore, believes there has to be a division of powers, because society works better with those checks and balances.”
Arias said that “we’ve had a revolt in South America in the last few years” because the continent is in a period where “the strongman system, caudillismo, and populism, Latin American diseases inherent to our culture, our history and our essence,” are “back in vogue.”
“The fundamental difference in Latin America is between governments that believe in the need to insert their small economies into the world and those that do not; the latter group can afford to be protectionist and do not believe you need to look for markets, preferring alliances of another sort, such as the alliances between Venezuela and Cuba or Nicaragua and Cuba, that are certainly not commercial in nature,” said the Costa Rican President.
“What can Nicaragua sell to Cuba? Nicaragua can sell much more to the United States, to China or the European Union. I don’t know what this bolivarian alliance is about other than the wish to remain in power permanently, for life if possible ,” said the Costa Rican President.
Arias emphasized that Latin America should follow the road paved by Chile, which has signed more than 50 free trade agreements with countries all over the world, allowing it to become the most developed country in the region.
Mr. Arias said he was not in favor of either the policies of Mr. Chávez nor US President George W. Bush, because his political “preferences” in the US “lie with the Democratic Party.”
“Bush is too much of a warmonger for my taste,” said the President.
Katy says: This fawning BBC photo essay about a Chávez-sponsored organic farm in the middle of Caracas is not to be missed.
...as the ratio of circulating-bolivars-to-reserve-dollars rises, BCV realizes it has to do something to counter the trend...
If totalitarianism takes its own claim seriously, it must finish once and for all with 'the neutrality of baseball,' that is, with the autonomous existence of any activity whatsoever. From the point of view of totalitarian rulers, a society devoted to baseball for the sake of baseball is only in degree different and less dangerous than a class of farmers for the sake of farming.
Quico says: It's a sad day for me: Ryszard Kapuscinski passed away in Warsaw yesterday.
Quico says: Miguel points to this lovely Chávez quote..."A President shouldn't listen to economists."A fine sentiment, no doubt, as long as you can get away with it. If 100,000,000 dollars just happen to gush out of the ground beneath you every day, say. Yes, I agree, economists are pretty superfluous then.
Katy says: Ever since his convincing victory at the polls last December, President Lt. Crnel. Chávez has been claiming a mandate for implementing "XXIst Century Socialism." The main problem with this claim is that nobody can define it. The President did not explain this in the campaign, and there is certainly not a government program nor a platform where the details of this little "adventure" are laid out.
If approved, this Enabling Law will make Chávez a dictator. I don't mean that in some fuzzy, propagandistic way, I mean it in the original Roman sense of the term: an official legally empowered to do anything he wants without being accountable to anyone. Hell, at least the Romans were frank enough to call their dictators dictators, and had the common sense to give them unlimited powers for 6 months only. Chávez? He wants three times that.
But the tragedy goes even deeper than that. The notion of legislating at all has become weirdly senseless in Venezuela given the current climate. With all oversight institutions, all courts, all prosecutions, in fact, the entire state system run by Chávez yes-men, the government long ago lost any incentive to pay attention to laws in the first place. And they don't...
Katy says: One thing I learned during the past year is that writing regularly can be a chore. The best posts are the ones that combine insight, common sense and plain old human emotion. But it's not always easy to tap into that emotion, what with all those bills that need to be paid and diapers waiting to be to changed.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Coronel Chávez insults our intelligence by claiming that nobody in the opposition is worth talking to because we don't reason, because we don't provide constructive criticism. If Chávez had enjoyed the benefits of formal university education, if he were anything more than a stupid "cadetico", this wouldn't ring so hollow. What "argument" can be made when Telecoms Minister Chacón (another "cadetico") says that the reason behind CANTV's nationalization is to make sure rural areas get more phone coverage?
The most commonly cited statistic in defense of the Chávez-helps-the-poor hypothesis is the decrease in poverty rates, from 42.8 percent when he took office in 1999 to 33.9 percent in 2006. But this decrease is neither unprecedented nor surprising, given that the Venezuelan economy is in the midst of an economic expansion fueled by a five-fold increase in global oil prices since his first term began. Historically, drastic declines in poverty in Venezuela are associated with periods of substantial real exchange appreciation similar to the current one. The last such episode, which lasted from 1996 to 1998, coincided with an even larger decline in the poverty rate, from 64.3 percent to 43.9 percent. The fact that Venezuela is presently running a fiscal deficit despite unprecedented global oil prices signals that the current improvement, just like previous ones, will sooner or later be reversed.I find it oddly reassuring that somebody is doing this kind of work, and doing it competently, despite all the obstacles. But I do think the piece shows the limits of economic analysis. Whether or not Chávez's policies have actually helped the poor, what's relevant is that the poor attribute the improvement in their living standards to what Chavez has done. That's a fundamentally political fact based on a series of complex cultural phenomena: no amount of economic data is likely to clarify it.
Quico says: Thinking through JVR's exit from the vice-presidency (cuz, lets be real, that's the only part of the cabinet shake-up that matters) I was reminded of an annecdote I heard from a fellow journo in Caracas back in 2003. The guy had to go cover a press conference at the Vice-presidency, but of course those were the days of the daily mini-riot downtown, as government hoodlums took pock-shots at the then oppo-mayor of Caracas offices and Metropolitan cops tried to hold them back with water cannon and tear gas.
Nobody, I would argue, could really fill JVR's shockingly Macchiavellian shoes. The one regime operative who comes closest is, predictably enough, the one who got the nod. Jorge Rodriguez got his start in chavista lackeying as Rangel's protege, which tells you nearly as much as you need to know about him. A psychiatrist in the same sense Mengele was a doctor, Rodríguez cut his teeth running the electoral arm of the Chavez-los-tiene-locos strategy with sublime effectiveness. Certainly a member of the top five as far as toxic regime personalities go, Rodríguez in the vicepresidency will be no bed of roses. I'm confident, though, that nobody but nobody could match Rangel's evil genius. One for the record books, really.
