Chavez, populism and inevitable confrontationist

Mar 06, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Hugo Chavez is dead. What is his legacy? Chavez’s approach to power and economics is nothing new. In political theory, he came within the tradition that is known as populism. The list of populists is long. Populism has its roots in late 19th century Europe.
Its most infamous practitioner was Benito Mussolini. In the group are some famous names including Nasser from Egypt and Peron from Argentina.
In the scholarly literature, populism is benign dictatorship. It is essentially a politico-economic programme in which the State uses an extensive welfare system to benefit the poor, but the leader encapsulates himself in the clothes of the Roman emperor where he adopts messianic postures.
As the funds of the State dry up so do the benefits to the poor. As dissent emerges, so does dictatorship. The leader refuses to concede changes.
He refuses to tolerate an open society. The result is dictatorship which in some cases is mild (Nasser and Peron), in others, weird (Gaddafi) while in others, it is very violent (Cuba).
Populism inevitably ends up being more morbidly unfree than the capitalist system it removes, of which Chavez and Castro are egregious examples. Castro attempted a coup against Batista and failed. He was jailed for a few years. When he became President of Cuba, he executed countless persons who attempted to overthrow him. Chavez tried a coup against a legally elected government and it didn’t succeed. He was placed under house arrest, not executed.
Since he became President, Chavez arrested dozens, including top level army officers who are still languishing in jail without trial.
Populism’s main strength lies in its criticism of existing capitalism. Mainstream right-wing pro-business governments seldom withstand the onslaught of populist campaigns. Hugo Chavez literally had it made. He rallied against modern capitalist oligarchy in oil-rich Venezuela where petro-dollars benefited the wealthy classes only.
Under the oligarchic party system in Venezuela, every five years the traditional parties changed hands, but the economic system remained the same. In pre-Chavez Venezuela, statistics showed a yearly deterioration in the distribution system of wealth that negatively impacted the poor. In other words, the rich got richer the poor got poorer.
In campaigning for the presidency, Chavez was the rebirth of Peron, Castro, Nasser, Nkrumah and the long line of populist 20th century leaders who came to power in order to rid their country of poverty. He was virtually unbeatable and handsomely won the election.
Not surprisingly, his first major political act was to abolish the term limit on the presidency. It is really sickening how these populist leaders denigrate their capitalist opponents who hold free elections and vanish into history after they lose, but the populist dictators are literally intoxicated with prospects of permanent reign.
Castro fell just months short of attaining fifty years in power.
The balance sheet of Chavez is hardly impressive and that is because his approach to development was fundamentally patriarchal and clientelistic (clientilism has a long history in Latin American politics). He used oil money to fund programmes for the poor and build an international image for himself. But like most of his predecessors development suffered, because there were no structural changes in the economy, no industrialisation.
When balance of payments problems step in, poverty alleviation is the first casualty. Chavez learnt nothing from the fifty-year-old mess that is Cuba today. After fifty years in power, the Castro brothers in 2012 discovered that the economy can’t spend what it does not earn. If you keep sharing out money without more coming in, it will dry up one day. This is not how development works.
Chavez learnt nothing from the mistakes of Cuba, in that after fifty years, Cuba still remains a poor, Third World state that is millions of years behind Singapore and Malaysia.
In the last parliamentary elections, his party lost the popular vote, though he retained a majority in the National Assembly because of the ‘First Past the Post’ system. It was a rude awakening for him because populists are messianic dreamers who believe their population will always be in love with them.
On the political front, Venezuela under Chavez resembled any authoritarian country. The private media has been devastated. Trade union rights have been curtailed and a gamut of freedoms that the Venezuela people enjoyed under the oligarchic system, including (and particularly) judicial independence, have been destroyed by this tropical Mussolini.
The most unpleasant thing about populist leaders is the huge contempt they have for poor people – give them bread and milk and they will gladly take them in exchange for freedom. For people like Castro and Chavez, the poor want food not freedom.

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