Latin American keeps electing self-styled radical leftists. The new Chilean president is Gabriel Boric. Notable quotes: “I come from the Chilean libertarian socialist tradition, that is my ideological space of reference” and “if Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave.” The new Peruvian president,
Seems like you also need to figure that there's a roughly equal chance that the right wing opponent of the left wing guy will catastrophically damage the country in a different but similarly catastrophic right-wing way.
Iran doesn't seem to have done very well with its right-wing revolution, and they've held on for over 40 years. We will see how Poland, Hungary, and Turkey fare.
This is kind of an over-simplification; in international politics the Iranian regime has often aligned with left wingers (like the Sandinistas or the PLO). Also, the economic policies of the Iranian regime are hard to place on a conventional left/right axis.
Certainly the Iranian regime is socially conservative, but it is very different from the style of Latin American right wing politics that is the relevant comparison for Boric etc.
You seem to forget that the iranian revoluton was looked with great hope and supported by the progressive west, since they were toppling the hated Shah.
Next you are telling me Daniel Ortega, another darling of the left wing revolutionaries with a return ticket, is also a right winger.
Yes. There are also people who call themselves leftists who support Putin and Xi, even though they really aren’t “left” in any meaningful way. These people treat “left” as “anti-America”.
The term right-wing can generally refer to the section of a political party or system that advocates free enterprise and private ownership, and typically favours socially traditional ideas.
Left-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy.
Theocracy is a system of government in which priests rule in the name of God or a god.
Most people would call the Nazi's far right, but they didn't believe in free enterprise or private ownership (at best they let industrialist retain formal ownership of their capital, but told them exactly what to make, what prices to charge, who to hire, what level of profit and dividends were allowed, and how to allocate capital).
I think the aesthetics of right/left have more staying power then particular policy ideas, which change with context and political coalition building. Right is hierarchical and left is egalitarian. Right is masculine and left is feminine. Right tends to represent normality and left tends to represent abnormals. Right tends to have more status quo bias than left.
Take something like meritocracy. In the 18th/19th century the egalitarian left was pro meritocracy as it allowed a broader class of people to participate in climbing the hierarchy. But in the modern context the left is anti-meritocracy because it leads to unequal outcomes.
The hierarchy/egalitarian aesthetic is there throughout, but the stance toward meritocracy is different.
Classically "right wing" just means "traditional" or "status quo bias".
Which could mean religious but doesn't have to. The Nazi's are considered as far right as possible and they were fervently anti-tradition and anti-religion (at least Christianity).
There is a lot of context to this stuff.
For instance the right in America is a lot more likely to be anti-tradition and status quo as relates to the administrative state and leftist cultural hegemony, but pro traditionalist in the sense that they like nuclear families with a mom and a dad and 2.5 kids.
Five minutes ago Ukrainian neo-Nazies loved Hitler. Now they are rebranding as football hooligans that like it up the butt as much as Ernst Rohm did.
Right and left is all context my boy. Who is the friend right now. Who is the enemy right now.
The closest thing I've ever seen to a permanent dichotomy is that right wing is more masculine and left wing is more feminine.
No, there isn't. Even Hitler didn't have a long-term effect as bad as your typical Chaves-style dictator: Nazi regime collapsed quickly and Germany did great in the long term.
In Latin America there were many dictatorial regimes set up in the 1960s and 1970s but only one remains today: Cuba.
Pinochet regime did not last even 20 years, while at this rate, Castro's regime will last at least a hundred years.
The worst thing that radical right wing can do is start wars that they lose, but that just doesn't happen that often after 1945. And when they do its usually not some total war where all the cities get destroyed.
East Asia had a lot of authoritarian right wing regimes, they were called the Asian Tigers.
If you have to pick your poison, always bet against socialists.
If Chavez had tried to invade half of South America 5 years after he was elected his regime would have collapsed quickly too. The Nazi regime collapsed because they pissed off half the world not because it was right wing.
Germany (and its predecessors) was great for hundreds of years before the Nazis. While Venezuela (or other SA countries) had some periods of economic success, it was never at the same level as Germany.
Venezuelan GDP per capita in 1980 was higher than Germany's. ($16,000 USD per person vs $12,000 USD per perosn, if the charts off Google aren't lying).
Argentina in 1913 had a GDP per capita that was higher than France or Germany, twice as high as Spain, and about on a level with Canada.
I'm confused; you say that you would NOT bet 10:1 that any of those three countries would become Venezuela, which implies the probability is <10% (or <3-4% per country). But then in the next paragraph you say the odds are at least 15%.
The thing is, one must understand the South/Latin American mindset.
The Left, in all its forms (socialists, communists, trotskyists, Peronists, etc) have a very, very powerful grip on that mindset. The Left, in all its forms, has an allure that captivates millions of South/Latin Americans.
I am not surprised that Colombia, Peru and Chile went that way. It was bound to happen, especially when the the violent years of the late 60s and early 70s fade into a distant memory, and the young voters have not seen the destruction, moral and physical, it caused.
Chile's president, Gabriel Boric, is 36 years old - a useless community organizer who knows nothing about nothing. He became president via cheap demagogue promises, he simply cannot keep.
In any country, there is a meaningful probability it's leadership will turn it into a socialist or fascist hellhole. Narcissistic and sociopathic leaders are attracted to power, voters and politicians alike are ignorant, which combined with half-baked ideology results in a potent prosperity poison. Democratic countries succeed not because we elect enlightened leaders, but because we have institutions whose survival depends on restraining said leaders from doing destructive things. Elections are the most visible and symbolic check on state power, but certainly not the only one.
As a Chilean, I can thankfully attest, that Boric definitely won't be the next Maduro. He has been somewhat consistent on his criticism of left wing dictatorships. That being said, many people in the government coalition are friends of Maduro, mainly the communist party members. I think the main fear here, and I do not know if in other countries in the continent they share this fear, is to become the next Argentina. Argentina more so than Venezuela, is what (sane) Latin-Americans fear they will become, not a dictatorship, but a republic in which every two years there's an economic crisis, with galloping inflation, and all of this almost constantly for 70 years. Avoiding a Maduro seems kind of easy, but avoiding the argentine bureaucratic nightmare it has become seems less straight forward. In this sense, I fear that the chance that Chile, Peru or Colombia become a new Argentina is something like 70%.
Lorenzo, I may not be Chilean, but I am Uruguayan. Sorry to disagree, but I can smell left wing progressives from hundreds of miles, and Gabriel Boric is exactly that. He is a left wing progressive community organizer, who knows nothing about nothing. And he supports approving the new Constitution that Chileans wrote for themselves - a complete piece of garbage (basura), which if it passes, will make Chile another Venezuela.
You claim there is a difference between becoming "Argentina" and becoming another "Venezuela". It is a distinction without a difference. Peronism is Chavismo light, but still Chavismo. And Chile will become another poor mismanaged country.
Why? Because Chileans fell under the spell of the gigantic demagoguery of the "almuerzo gratis", the free lunch. The young voters want everything free (free education, free social security, free health care, free public transportation, etc). Chileans believed this, and so it will end - in chaos, in mayhem and mismanagement.
Let me tell you another story, from Chile none the less. On september 4th 1970 a plurality of chileans (36%) elected Salvador Allende as the President of Chile. Since he did not get a majority of the popular vote, the election went to the Congress of Deputies who would elect the succesor. The next one was the candidate of the centre right and the third place went to a Christian Democrat who wanted to continue wiht marxist reforms and got 18%. So more than half of chileans wanted to go marxist.
In any case, the Congress elected Allende only after he pledged to sign a statute of Constitutional Gurantees, so he would respect the Rule of Law and the Constitution. Early in 1971 Regis Debray, darling of the left and comrade of the late Che Guevara did an interview with then President Allende. There, Debray asked Allende why he accepted the Presidency on those terms, since he was clearly a marxist. Allende said that the signing was a mere tactical maneouver. He would continue with the transformation of the hated burgoise democracy that Chile had.
And so, Allende went on to destroy Chile's democracy. And 3 weeks before the coup of 11-9-1973 the same Congress that elected him deemed him to have broken the Constitutional order and accused him of trying to institute a dictatorship, calling on the ARmed Forces to recover the constitutional order. Which they proceeded to do.
So yes, we live in countries that take very stupid risks.
Venezuela is a deliberate hellhole. It was planned to one and will remain one as long as possible so that the rest of Latin America can stagnate with their relatively moderate flavor of socialism without the visible stigma of being impoverished. They can always point at Venezuela as evidence that they're not so bad-off.
Ruling a dystopia is lots of fun but you don't want to rule the worst dystopia on the block. I can imagine leftists in Detroit wouldn't mind if, say, Illinois became the next North Korea.
We've gotten enough time with enough Latin American countries to know that this is how it is. They vacillate between mediocre middle income resources extractors and socialist hellhole with a certain rhythmic regularity. It is the only thing people with their demographics are capable of, and they will never escape it. Their people lack the intelligence to avoid using the state to consume whatever excess capital their societies might build up.
If the USA ever has Latin American demographics, it will have the same pattern. The more Latin American's we have, not more like it we will be. You can already see it in national politics.
A thought provoking post. But a stochastic differential equation with negative drift will eventually hit the lower boundary with probability one, no matter what happens in the short run. The long run trend in Latin America is negative. You are fascinated by the randomness and miss the drift, which is unmistakably down. In the long run, if you play Russian roulette you do die.
There are several reasons for the trend to be downward. For example, one is that the progressive left has managed to destroy the army in these countries, which were the last resort in the past. This is not a chance, it was an explicit plan after the 70’s, particularly after September 11, 1973. Something similar has been done to the police. Another is the demographic transformation of these countries. Does it seem strangely similar to current events in the USA? Of course it does, the overall plan is the same. In fact, an additional factor in the long run trend of Latin America is that the US has changed sides in the perennial conflict there.
To illustrate, consider Argentina. This poor country has moments in which it goes precipitously down (Alfonsin) and in which it painfully manages to pick up a little (Menem, Macri). Today even a leftist such as Martin ``Ticho’’ Guzman, is too much to the right for the Kirchner clique, so again down we go, full speed. Is there any scenario in which Argentina recovers the old level of wealth? If you do, please email me and we can work out a bet.
Yes but the left has deluded itself into thinking that the socialist policies of Chavez had nothing to do with Venezuela's disaster: https://www.ozy.com/true-and-stories/venezuelas-downfall-isnt-about-socialism-its-about-oil/92669/ That considered I don't suppose any of you know of any peer reviewed compiled statistics that could be used to shame them outside of the free market index's? Something attributing causality to it directly?
Seems like you also need to figure that there's a roughly equal chance that the right wing opponent of the left wing guy will catastrophically damage the country in a different but similarly catastrophic right-wing way.
A bad right wing government will lose power but a bad left wing government will retain power and destroy a country.
Iran doesn't seem to have done very well with its right-wing revolution, and they've held on for over 40 years. We will see how Poland, Hungary, and Turkey fare.
This is kind of an over-simplification; in international politics the Iranian regime has often aligned with left wingers (like the Sandinistas or the PLO). Also, the economic policies of the Iranian regime are hard to place on a conventional left/right axis.
Certainly the Iranian regime is socially conservative, but it is very different from the style of Latin American right wing politics that is the relevant comparison for Boric etc.
You seem to forget that the iranian revoluton was looked with great hope and supported by the progressive west, since they were toppling the hated Shah.
Next you are telling me Daniel Ortega, another darling of the left wing revolutionaries with a return ticket, is also a right winger.
Yes. There are also people who call themselves leftists who support Putin and Xi, even though they really aren’t “left” in any meaningful way. These people treat “left” as “anti-America”.
Iran didn't have a right wing revolution, they imposed a theocracy of Islamic law.
Is a theocracy not a paradigmatic right-wing government?
The term right-wing can generally refer to the section of a political party or system that advocates free enterprise and private ownership, and typically favours socially traditional ideas.
Left-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy.
Theocracy is a system of government in which priests rule in the name of God or a god.
Most people would call the Nazi's far right, but they didn't believe in free enterprise or private ownership (at best they let industrialist retain formal ownership of their capital, but told them exactly what to make, what prices to charge, who to hire, what level of profit and dividends were allowed, and how to allocate capital).
I think the aesthetics of right/left have more staying power then particular policy ideas, which change with context and political coalition building. Right is hierarchical and left is egalitarian. Right is masculine and left is feminine. Right tends to represent normality and left tends to represent abnormals. Right tends to have more status quo bias than left.
Take something like meritocracy. In the 18th/19th century the egalitarian left was pro meritocracy as it allowed a broader class of people to participate in climbing the hierarchy. But in the modern context the left is anti-meritocracy because it leads to unequal outcomes.
The hierarchy/egalitarian aesthetic is there throughout, but the stance toward meritocracy is different.
I don't think of free enterprise and private ownership as "right wing" outside the United States. Socially traditionalist is for sure right wing.
Classically "right wing" just means "traditional" or "status quo bias".
Which could mean religious but doesn't have to. The Nazi's are considered as far right as possible and they were fervently anti-tradition and anti-religion (at least Christianity).
There is a lot of context to this stuff.
For instance the right in America is a lot more likely to be anti-tradition and status quo as relates to the administrative state and leftist cultural hegemony, but pro traditionalist in the sense that they like nuclear families with a mom and a dad and 2.5 kids.
Five minutes ago Ukrainian neo-Nazies loved Hitler. Now they are rebranding as football hooligans that like it up the butt as much as Ernst Rohm did.
Right and left is all context my boy. Who is the friend right now. Who is the enemy right now.
The closest thing I've ever seen to a permanent dichotomy is that right wing is more masculine and left wing is more feminine.
No, there isn't. Even Hitler didn't have a long-term effect as bad as your typical Chaves-style dictator: Nazi regime collapsed quickly and Germany did great in the long term.
In Latin America there were many dictatorial regimes set up in the 1960s and 1970s but only one remains today: Cuba.
Pinochet regime did not last even 20 years, while at this rate, Castro's regime will last at least a hundred years.
The worst thing that radical right wing can do is start wars that they lose, but that just doesn't happen that often after 1945. And when they do its usually not some total war where all the cities get destroyed.
East Asia had a lot of authoritarian right wing regimes, they were called the Asian Tigers.
If you have to pick your poison, always bet against socialists.
Franco's Spain stayed out of WW2, but his regime didn't last beyond his death (rather than Cromwell's Protectorate).
If Chavez had tried to invade half of South America 5 years after he was elected his regime would have collapsed quickly too. The Nazi regime collapsed because they pissed off half the world not because it was right wing.
Germany (and its predecessors) was great for hundreds of years before the Nazis. While Venezuela (or other SA countries) had some periods of economic success, it was never at the same level as Germany.
Venezuelan GDP per capita in 1980 was higher than Germany's. ($16,000 USD per person vs $12,000 USD per perosn, if the charts off Google aren't lying).
Argentina in 1913 had a GDP per capita that was higher than France or Germany, twice as high as Spain, and about on a level with Canada.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiN4buv9Ob4AhXUGVkFHYxbAxkQFnoECB0QAw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.hbs.edu%2Fris%2FPublication%2520Files%2FLAER%2520Introduction%2520to%2520Argentine%2520Exceptionalism_3c49e7ee-4f31-49a0-ba21-6e2b726cd7c5.pdf&usg=AOvVaw0tkhpsV-95Q-kmukZfaz8c
Can you elaborate what that would be?
Better wingless, but right is generally better: more prosperity and fewer murders.
I'm confused; you say that you would NOT bet 10:1 that any of those three countries would become Venezuela, which implies the probability is <10% (or <3-4% per country). But then in the next paragraph you say the odds are at least 15%.
I second that confusion. That bit could use editing for clarity.
Yeah, he clearly meant that he wouldn't LAY 10:1 odds.
My interpretation of that was that he thinks the chance is <90%, not <10%.
The thing is, one must understand the South/Latin American mindset.
The Left, in all its forms (socialists, communists, trotskyists, Peronists, etc) have a very, very powerful grip on that mindset. The Left, in all its forms, has an allure that captivates millions of South/Latin Americans.
I am not surprised that Colombia, Peru and Chile went that way. It was bound to happen, especially when the the violent years of the late 60s and early 70s fade into a distant memory, and the young voters have not seen the destruction, moral and physical, it caused.
Chile's president, Gabriel Boric, is 36 years old - a useless community organizer who knows nothing about nothing. He became president via cheap demagogue promises, he simply cannot keep.
Classics of "but it was not real socialism" and "neoliberalism is dead" since 1970s x)
In any country, there is a meaningful probability it's leadership will turn it into a socialist or fascist hellhole. Narcissistic and sociopathic leaders are attracted to power, voters and politicians alike are ignorant, which combined with half-baked ideology results in a potent prosperity poison. Democratic countries succeed not because we elect enlightened leaders, but because we have institutions whose survival depends on restraining said leaders from doing destructive things. Elections are the most visible and symbolic check on state power, but certainly not the only one.
Bryan underestimates the thrill value. I MIGHT HAVE DIED!!
As a Chilean, I can thankfully attest, that Boric definitely won't be the next Maduro. He has been somewhat consistent on his criticism of left wing dictatorships. That being said, many people in the government coalition are friends of Maduro, mainly the communist party members. I think the main fear here, and I do not know if in other countries in the continent they share this fear, is to become the next Argentina. Argentina more so than Venezuela, is what (sane) Latin-Americans fear they will become, not a dictatorship, but a republic in which every two years there's an economic crisis, with galloping inflation, and all of this almost constantly for 70 years. Avoiding a Maduro seems kind of easy, but avoiding the argentine bureaucratic nightmare it has become seems less straight forward. In this sense, I fear that the chance that Chile, Peru or Colombia become a new Argentina is something like 70%.
Lorenzo, I may not be Chilean, but I am Uruguayan. Sorry to disagree, but I can smell left wing progressives from hundreds of miles, and Gabriel Boric is exactly that. He is a left wing progressive community organizer, who knows nothing about nothing. And he supports approving the new Constitution that Chileans wrote for themselves - a complete piece of garbage (basura), which if it passes, will make Chile another Venezuela.
You claim there is a difference between becoming "Argentina" and becoming another "Venezuela". It is a distinction without a difference. Peronism is Chavismo light, but still Chavismo. And Chile will become another poor mismanaged country.
Why? Because Chileans fell under the spell of the gigantic demagoguery of the "almuerzo gratis", the free lunch. The young voters want everything free (free education, free social security, free health care, free public transportation, etc). Chileans believed this, and so it will end - in chaos, in mayhem and mismanagement.
Let me tell you another story, from Chile none the less. On september 4th 1970 a plurality of chileans (36%) elected Salvador Allende as the President of Chile. Since he did not get a majority of the popular vote, the election went to the Congress of Deputies who would elect the succesor. The next one was the candidate of the centre right and the third place went to a Christian Democrat who wanted to continue wiht marxist reforms and got 18%. So more than half of chileans wanted to go marxist.
In any case, the Congress elected Allende only after he pledged to sign a statute of Constitutional Gurantees, so he would respect the Rule of Law and the Constitution. Early in 1971 Regis Debray, darling of the left and comrade of the late Che Guevara did an interview with then President Allende. There, Debray asked Allende why he accepted the Presidency on those terms, since he was clearly a marxist. Allende said that the signing was a mere tactical maneouver. He would continue with the transformation of the hated burgoise democracy that Chile had.
And so, Allende went on to destroy Chile's democracy. And 3 weeks before the coup of 11-9-1973 the same Congress that elected him deemed him to have broken the Constitutional order and accused him of trying to institute a dictatorship, calling on the ARmed Forces to recover the constitutional order. Which they proceeded to do.
So yes, we live in countries that take very stupid risks.
The horrors of left-wing collectivism
OK, but you can't really say how bad electing Gabriel Boric is without considering what the alternatives were.
Sometimes, as Americans well know, there are only bad choices on the ballot.
A conspiracy theory:
Venezuela is a deliberate hellhole. It was planned to one and will remain one as long as possible so that the rest of Latin America can stagnate with their relatively moderate flavor of socialism without the visible stigma of being impoverished. They can always point at Venezuela as evidence that they're not so bad-off.
Ruling a dystopia is lots of fun but you don't want to rule the worst dystopia on the block. I can imagine leftists in Detroit wouldn't mind if, say, Illinois became the next North Korea.
Planned by whom?
You know, the shadowy people in smoky back rooms. I said this was a conspiracy theory, did I not? The theory is unfalsifiable, by design. :-)
We've gotten enough time with enough Latin American countries to know that this is how it is. They vacillate between mediocre middle income resources extractors and socialist hellhole with a certain rhythmic regularity. It is the only thing people with their demographics are capable of, and they will never escape it. Their people lack the intelligence to avoid using the state to consume whatever excess capital their societies might build up.
If the USA ever has Latin American demographics, it will have the same pattern. The more Latin American's we have, not more like it we will be. You can already see it in national politics.
A thought provoking post. But a stochastic differential equation with negative drift will eventually hit the lower boundary with probability one, no matter what happens in the short run. The long run trend in Latin America is negative. You are fascinated by the randomness and miss the drift, which is unmistakably down. In the long run, if you play Russian roulette you do die.
There are several reasons for the trend to be downward. For example, one is that the progressive left has managed to destroy the army in these countries, which were the last resort in the past. This is not a chance, it was an explicit plan after the 70’s, particularly after September 11, 1973. Something similar has been done to the police. Another is the demographic transformation of these countries. Does it seem strangely similar to current events in the USA? Of course it does, the overall plan is the same. In fact, an additional factor in the long run trend of Latin America is that the US has changed sides in the perennial conflict there.
To illustrate, consider Argentina. This poor country has moments in which it goes precipitously down (Alfonsin) and in which it painfully manages to pick up a little (Menem, Macri). Today even a leftist such as Martin ``Ticho’’ Guzman, is too much to the right for the Kirchner clique, so again down we go, full speed. Is there any scenario in which Argentina recovers the old level of wealth? If you do, please email me and we can work out a bet.
Yes but the left has deluded itself into thinking that the socialist policies of Chavez had nothing to do with Venezuela's disaster: https://www.ozy.com/true-and-stories/venezuelas-downfall-isnt-about-socialism-its-about-oil/92669/ That considered I don't suppose any of you know of any peer reviewed compiled statistics that could be used to shame them outside of the free market index's? Something attributing causality to it directly?
I'm not sure where I read about it, but the most obvious cause of the malaise in Venezuela is the Chavez nepotistic nationalization of the already nationalized PDVSA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDVSA The dismissal of about half of the workforce resulting in declining production since 2005. https://www.as-coa.org/articles/chart-collapse-venezuelas-oil-production
You didn't mention Xiomara Castro in Honduras.