Check it out!

For now, the new site is at EsferaPublica.com, which we hope will be the URL of the new, Spanish version of Caracas Chronicles. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be posting in parallel here and in the new site. Early next year – once we’ve brought over the archive – we’re going to put this old blogger site to sleep.

At the heart of the new site is an innovative system for managing the comments section that, we hope, can solve the age old problem of ceaseless flame-wars in Venezuela’s political cyberspace.

The idea, basically, is that Juan and Quico don’t get to decide which comments get top billing and which comments get hidden; you do.

With this new system, the community collectively gets to decide which comments get top billing by voting.

The system asks you to vote not just on whether you agree with a given comment, but also on whether it helps drive debate forward. Read all the details in the new system’s FAQ.

Remember, you don’t have to create an account to comment on the new site, but we strongly encourage you to do so anyway. It’s free, and it only takes a minute or two.

By logging on, you allow the system to track your reputation within the community, and the better your reputation is, the more impact you’ll have on the way the forum works, the more visible your comments will be, and the more weight the system will place on your opinions. And if you’re among the top 10% of commentators in any given week, the system gives you a whole set of additional goodies regular users don’t get.

Early next year, we’ll be launching Caracas Chronicles 2.0 in full, which will include a Spanish version. This will open up CC to a whole new cast of characters, but hopefully the new software will steer the conversation away from the troll wasteland you find in places like Aporrea or Noticias24.

We look forward to your feedback, but not here.

As of today, the old comments platform on this site will be disabled.

Please comment on the new site.

(Taken 10 a.m. I’m actually a recent-enough immigrant to Quebec to get excited by this kind of thing…)

I want to be quite clear about my position here: no critical engagement with chavismo is possible. And, actually, that’s the crux of my problem with the regime.

It’s easy to mistake that for a rather shrill, impetuous stance; a kind of misplaced haughtiness masquerading as high principle. But lets be clear about this: it’s not that I reject a debate with the people I oppose. It’s that I oppose people who reject debate.

Obviously, a lot hinges on how you understand chavismo, how you interpret its discursive essence. Some people see Chávez’s tendency to respond to any and every criticism with an ad hominem attack as a kind of curiosity, one trait in a broader political philosophy. Over the years, though, I’ve come to see it as the lynchpin of the intellectual edifice that is chavismo: a defining trait and organizing principle at the center of a strategy for crafting a totalizing worldview.

For Chávez, and for the cult-like political movement he has created around himself, the world is neatly divided between two sides. The good and the bad. The key thing to grasp – and I think there’s a nearly limitless documentary evidence to illustrate this – is that for chavismo, the things that bad people believe are bad by virtue of the identity of the person believing them. Escualidos are not evil because they’re wrong; they’re wrong because they’re evil.

Take, to choose one example out of a zillion simply because the clip is conveniently in English, this interaction between Chávez and a FoxNews journalist at this year’s UN General Assembly meeting:

Notice what happens here. Chávez is asked a question that, through its own content, suggests that the questioner does not share his views. The question, in Chávez’s hands, becomes merely a mechanism for identifying the questioner as a dissenter. That Chavez will not in engage with its substance goes almost without saying. Instead, the journalist expression of dissent serves as a springboard for an attack on him, on his motives and his affiliations, all by way of explaining – apparently self-evident to Chávez – that his identity as a journalist for a conservative provides all the evidence anybody could need of the evil that lurks in his heart, and exempts Chávez from any duty to account for his actions.

You don’t have to be a fan of FoxNews to grasp the dire consequences of extending this mode of reasoning to every single interaction with a dissenting view a leader engages in.

The dirty little secret is that, within the ideology Chávez has stamped on his movement, the sorting mechanism that allows you to determine whether any thought, book, argument, documentary, bank, mural, film, newspaper, foreign leader, TV channel, multilateral institution or person is good or bad is, conveniently enough, whether he will submit to Chávez with unquestioning loyalty. In fact, from the totalizing standpoint chavista discursive standards creates, failing to snap unthinkingly into line is prima facie evidence that you belong to the Evil camp, and immediately voids your right to hold Chávez to critical scrutiny.

To take chavismo’s worldview seriously is to see dissent itself as intrinsically evil. How evil? Evil enough to imperil the possibility of life on this planet. That evil.

This absolute sorting of the world into good and evil according to the single, totalizing criterion of loyalty to the boss seems to me both irreducibly authoritarian and absolutely central to the chavista system for organizing reality and making sense of the world. Manicheanism is not “an aspect of” chavismo; it is chavismo.

That there is no serious possibility of a frank and open exchange of views with people who hold on to such an ideology seems to me perfectly self-evident.

It’s definitional, actually, because within the worldview chavismo espouses, the willingness to treat an idea that Chávez personally rejects as potentially valid is wholly incompatible with revolutionary principle. But real debate, genuine, free and open debate, can’t accept such arbitrary exclusions. If you begin by sectioning off whole provinces of reality and declaring them out of bounds before you’ve critically engage them, what you are doing is not debating. It may look and feel like a debate, but it’s not.

The hopelessly flattened discursive standards chavismo espouses – Chavista = good, dissident = evil – is not one we could engage through the practice of public reasoning, even if we were minded to. Instead, the habits of mind chavista ideology is built on are precisely that which we need to subvert through the practice of public reasoning.

When we hold the government to account, when we point out the absurdities of its exchange rate regime, when we rail against the injustice of its repressive actions, when we demand a justification of its spending priorities, we are doing it not to engage chavismo but to subvert it, because when you are facing a totalizing ideology, demanding an explanation is in itself a subversive act.

When we cultivate the habits of mind that allow people to think critically about the actions of those in power, to question them and demand they account for their decisions, we’re keeping alive the possibility of democracy for future generations, because we’re keeping alive the modes of interaction that we will need to sustain a discursive democracy at some point down the line.

The question, for me, is how we can exploit the particular characteristics of the internet to carry out this kind of subversive work. I think there’s a ton to be done in this regard. And, personally, I intend to do it.

When we talk about democracy we’re usually talking about two separate but related ideas.

On the one hand, you have the institutions of democracy. We mean parliaments and banking regulations; election day rules and procedures; habeas corpus and constitutional principles of due process; decentralization, and all that. When we say that Venezuelan democracy has died, we mean that none of these institutional mechanisms is operating the way the constitution says they ought to. This, alarming as it is, is not all there is.

There’s another level where democracy has been dying, a much more intimate level that manifests itself in the ways we communicate when political matters are at stake. I call it the “discursive level” in that it concerns itself with the kinds of arguments people in the political sphere find compelling at any given time. It’s about the habits of thought of our political actors.

This distinction is not trivial.

One thing is the National Assembly and another is the quality and style of the debates that are held within its chambers. The question, from a discursive point of view, is what constitutes a “powerful reason to act” in the eyes of its members? Alongside any abstract principle and any formal institution there are the tacit rules actual people use to apply them the world.

Political systems are democratic to the extent that they maintain possibility of holding reasoned debates in the public sphere that tend to generate consensual understandings. On the contrary, they are authoritarian to the degree that appeals to straight-out authority - jefe es jefe – are enough to secure compliance from political decision-makers.

Venezuelan intellectuals tend not to distinguish clearly enough between these two levels, the institutional and the discursive. We tend to be much clearer, more explicit, and more eloquent talking about what has gone wrong institutionally than what has gone wrong discursively.

But if our institutional democracy has died it’s because the discursive habits of mind that support it have been hunted to extinction. Chavista discourse was dictatorial long before chavista government.

In Venezuela, a return to democracy will entail much more than a return to institutional democracy. It will mean focusing on the discursive realm as well, on re-establishing a certain set of unwritten rules and expectations about what is “normal” behavior in the public sphere. These rules, which Habermas calls “discursive standards,” are the criteria people use to decide if an argument is persuasive or not. When the rules of engagement in the public sphere are democratic, what you get is what Amartya Sen calls “government by discussion.”

Discursive democracy is what you get when the main question asked of a given political argument is: “does that position make sense?” Discursive authoritarianism is what you get when the main question asked of a given political argument is: “who put that argument forward?”

An escualido?! Booooo! A chaburro?! Hisssss!!!

Democracy in Venezuela has collapsed in the face of a full frontal attack not just at the institutional level, but also in that deeper, discursive sphere. So subverting chavista hegemony requires liquidating the discursive standards that sustain its power.

Bringing discursive democracy back to life means putting in place policies hashed out in real debates, where ideas are grappled with, confronted and crafted into consensual roads forward by people more interested in the content of a position than the identity of the one expressing it.

This is not an easy thing to do. Building a discursive democracy runs counter to some very old habits. Throw yourself into a genuine discussion and, suddenly, you’ve made yourself vulnerable. In a genuine discussion, you go in without any guarantee that you’ll come out on the winning side. Discussion requires humility, flexibility, a willingness to learn and an acceptance that you may be called on to alter your positions in the light of what the other side says. This may be one of the reasons true architects of democracy have, to some degree, possessed a healthy dose of greatness.

Dictators will not subject themselves to genuine debate, because genuine debate is risky, unpredictable, dangerous. A dictator will join no communicative interaction in which he (and it’s usually a he, isn’t it?) is not guaranteed the upper hand from the start. This is why Chávez simply refuses to be questioned by journalists who will throw anything but the softest of soft balls at him.

The sad fact is that unless the opposition shows it’s better than Chávez at engaging with ideas, doing away with Hugo Chávez will do almost nothing to re-establish democracy in this deeper sense. If we fail to enshrine genuinely democratic discursive standards, the return to institutional democracy will be as shallow, fleeting, and incomplete as the system we had until 1998.

More than an adherence to constitutional standards, more than respect for the forms of the democratic game, what Venezuela’s democratic movement needs to develop is the frame of mind needed to engage with an opponent (even chavista ones) in genuine debate, in the understanding that the power of the strongest argument will carry the day.

That’s the habit of mind that creates the social underpinning of democratic government. Without that attitudinal bedrock, that basic predisposition to accept discussion as the arena where decisions are made, there is no possibility of democracy.

Faced with a government that experiences debate as a threat, merely creating spaces for genuine debate constitutes a subversive act. As long as Venezuelans sustain spaces where matters of public policy are subjected to free and open debate, chavista autocracy will never be complete and will never be secure.

The internet offers tremendous possibilities for this kind of subversion, possibilities that are not yet being fully exploited. The democratic movement needs to step up its game in this regard, creating spaces where genuine debate can take place. Who’s up for it?

(Translated from Spanish Wikipedia):

“At 12:18 AM on October 6th (the night after the Referendum, when results were trickling in), Pinochet meets his cabinet and informs them: “Gentlemen, the referendum has been lost. I want your immediate resignations. That is all.”

An hour later, he finally meets the other members of the Military Junta. On his way up the steps of La Moneda Palace, Chile’s Commander of the Air Force, General Fernando Matthei, tells journalists: “It’s pretty clear the (opposition) No has won, but we are calm.” General Matthei’s statement was transmitted by Radio Cooperativa at 1:03 AM on October 6th.

In the meeting, [Interior] Minister Sergio Fernandez recognized the government’s defeat and expressed the high percentage obtained was, in any event, a source of pride, to which General Matthei ironically replied: “Why don’t we bring in some champagne to celebrate?”

According to Matthei’s memoirs (“Matthei, my testimony”), Pinochet then handed the members of the Junta a decree through which he assumed all the country’s powers and disavowed the results of the Referendum. This threw the Junta’s members, specially Matthei, into a rage, and Matthei himself ripped the decree with his own hands.

“After that,” Matthei recalls, “and without insisting on the decree, the President informed us that he would leave Santiago for a few days to get some rest, and the meeting was adjourned.”

Right at that moment, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff suffered a heart attack, presumably caused by the heated confrontation among military leaders. After the meeting, Pinochet accepted the situation and ordered the release of the third electoral bulletin.”

Someone once said that Hugo Chávez’s support is like a three-legged stool. Those legs are

1. Popular support
2. Oil money
3. The military

Our goal, to obtain power and reinstate democracy, can only be met once all three pillars of support have worn away.

One out of three, two out of three – those don’t seem to cut it anymore.

Chavismo has engineered a state system where alternation is tantamount to regime change. Under those circumstances, consolidating a majority and winning an election are not going to be enough. Popular support is just one of the legs of the stool. Our recent history confirms this.

In April of 2002, Chávez’s popularity was waning and his oil income was shaky. With PDVSA momentarily paralysed, the military tried to overthrow him, and for a second it looked like all three legs had gone.

It turned out that his popularity was not as low as all that and, in fact, reaction to the coup quickly raised it. The popular support pillar still had some life in it.

Then it also turned out that the military leg was not broken either – the military’s unity cracked, as we all know, and a good chunk of the Armed Forces backed the President. And so, ultimately, the stool regained its balance.

Later that year, the opposition led an (ill-advised) Oil Strike. The subversive act of shutting down PDVSA entirely chopped off one of the legs for a good six or seven weeks. But by that point, the Misiones were starting to work and Chávez’s popularity was on the rise. More importantly, the military did not support the strike, and the people turned against the oil workers. A few weeks after the strike began, oil income began to recover and PDVSA was operational again.

The assault on one of the legs was over.

Fast-forward to Chávez’s shock electoral defeat December of 2007. We showed, at the ballot box, that dissent could be more popular than the chavista status quo even amidst a dizzying oil boom. Unlike in normal democracies, that reality was a subversive act – a “golpe electoral”, as José Vicente Rangel would say – surprisingly spearheaded by a group of students.

Did it work? Partially. It took considerable military pressure, spearheaded by jailbird Baduel, for Chávez to accept defeat, and then only for about two seconds. But a few days later, he appeared – not coincidentally – in front of the military high command, and practically announced to the country the referendum results did not mean anything. Two years out, most of the things he’d been denied the power to do at referendum have become law.

Why? Because after an initial wobble, military support of the regime resumed, the dissidents were purged, and the oil boom kept going for another few months.

Fast-forward to next year.

Imagine that Chávez becomes really unpopular and, by some act of God, the opposition gets its act together and manages to win a majority of seats in the AN, fair and square.

Will the CNE accept the results? Will our friend Socorro stand by and validate an opposition-controlled National Assembly, with all that entails? Maybe, maybe not.

And even if that miracle panned out, can’t you just see the AN, through an act of its outgoing majority, stripping itself of most of its powers? Do we have any doubt the almighty, reverential Constitutional Chamber of the TSJ would rubber-stamp such a monstrosity in the blink of an eye?

Some last minute re-think is not entirely impossible, but it’s looking increasingly foolhardy to gamble the country’s future on the democratic scruples of the chavista State.

Hanging on to power without regard to the majority’s rejection is the distinguishing trait of authoritarianism. Chavismo is an authoritarian regime.

And that, in the end, is what it means to come to grips with chavismo’s inherent authoritarianism: for our side, majority support is not enough.

Necessary? Yes. Sufficient? Not by a long shot.

At some point, all of this makes us very uncomfortable. We are democrats, and part of the normal game of a democracy is that you don’t tip stools over or smash them with an axe. You work with the stool you’re given and do what you can to adjust it. And certainly, the chavista Venezuelan military nomenklatur is so disgusting to some of us that the thought of accepting and even embracing them as political players is mighty unappealing.

But the reality of the chavista dictatorship is that, in the unlikely event the CNE recognized our victory in an election, we would find it all but impossible to work with the stool we’re given. By now, it’s Chávez’s stool: made to order and able to accommodate only his fat ass. The kind of 2009 Antonio Ledezma has had is living proof of that.

The upshot is that we need a three-legged strategy.

One of the legs – oil income – is pretty much beyond our control, especially after the PDVSA purge. But, despite the fantasists’ fondest daydreams, the global oil market is beyond Chávez’s control, too. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to have a strategy for countering the vast difference in disposable income between them and us. For the moment it’s enough to note that, even with oil prices well above $70/bbl, Chávez can’t raise enough cash to finance the level of public spending it would take to keep GDP growing.

What’s clear is that any serious attempt to subvert the Chávez dictatorship will require concerted action on the two other legs.

Yes, we need an effective political strategy. There’s no way out of this without people’s hearts and minds.

But given the conditions chavismo has created, there’s just no way out of this hole without a military strategy, too.

Before chavistas out there go postal and begin crying “golpista,” we should clarify. That doesn’t mean having a strategy for rebellion. A mad idea like that would only lead to a bloodbath. It means having a strategy to challenge the unconditional support the military gives Chávez, in very much the same way as the Chilean democracy movement’s rising clout created the key cracks needed at the right time to force Pinochet’s hand.

The Chilean democrats of 1988 had a political strategy that led them to a convincing electoral victory. But without a military strategy resulting in Matthei & friends willing to subvert the Pinochet regime, the Chilean stool would have been left in place.

We should be crystal clear about this: a military strategy is not a para-military strategy, and it’s not a call to golpismo. It means making sure that, when the chips are down, the military support for the dictatorship is not unconditional. It means having the guts to remind the military that the loyalty they swear is to a Constitution, not an autocrat, and that that constitution’s article 333 creates clear obligations they, sooner or later, will be held accountable for.

The Chilean democrats, Corazón Aquino, Boris Yeltsin. In key moments, they all had military strategies in place that helped propel their movements to subvert dictatorial regimes. In all three cases, the military played a fundamental role in knocking down the status quo forces.

Without it, popular support is easily mocked. The Burmese monks did not have a military strategy. They now rot in jail. Back in 1928, Venezuela’s students didn’t have one either, so they spent the next eight years in La Rotunda.

This is how it goes, folks. It sucks, but it’s how it goes.

Juan Cristóbal says: – It’s easy to forget, but before we were oligarchs, squalid ones and betrayers of the homeland, we were simply – his invisible friends.

I can’t think of a better tonic to Hugo Chávez’s vulgarity than the warm lessons of Arturo Uslar Pietri.

See you all Monday.

Chavismo has denormalized alternation, crafting a state system where the practice would imperil regime stability. Chavismo can’t be “opposed” in the normal sense of the word, because it doesn’t conceive of itself as a temporary occupant of executive branch. Instead, it claims ownership of the state as a whole.

What can you do if you dissent from a government that is not opposable in the normal democratic sense? A government that has repeatedly stressed that it does not conceive of alternation in power as a normal feature of the system, and explicitly vows never to allow it to happen?

There’s only one thing you can do if you don’t wish to submit to a government like that: subvert it.

I think Chávez himself grasped this long before those of us who disagree with him did. Maybe his obsession with plots and conspiracies all around him speak not so much of paranoïa as of a dirty conscience. A kind of “if they knew what I know, they’d be trying to subvert me.”

Me, I never set out to become a subversive. Never chose that. Doesn’t really fit my personality in any way. But like everybody else who opposes the vision of state power chavismo represents, I have now been made, effectively, into a subversive.

There is a long, deeply unsettling set of consequences that flow out of this realization. A set of consequences Venezuela’s anti-chavista establishment really hasn’t quite processed yet. It’s hard to see our movement having any success until we come to grips with our new condition, a condition that is no less ours because we never chose it.

Subversion is the game the entire anti-chavista country is now engaged in, whether consciously or unconsciously.

To dissent from the hyperleader is to subvert the state system he has crafted, a system based on mindless obedience, complicit sycophancy, and an essentially limitless willingness to lie to the public for political benefit. It’s a system you won’t find described in any official document, certainly not in the 1999 constitution. It is the state of The State in fact, not in law.

And article 333 of that same document tells you all you need to know about your duties in such an eventuality.

Subversion is not a road we’ve chosen, it’s a road that’s been chosen for us. The only question now is whether we can subvert the chavista state creatively, effectively and constructively, in a way that helps us lay out the basis for something better down the road.

I think subversion of the current regime will need to take place along many axes. Some overt, some covert. Obviously, as bloggers, we can’t do much about the latter, other than hope for their success. But we can, in our small way, contribute to the former.

Because subverting the chavista state is also about subverting the habits of mind that sustain it: the endless willingness to subjugate reality to political convenience, the mindless cult of personality that raises a single man’s will above the law. It means challenging the cognitive cornerstone of the entire chavista system: the out and out refusal to submit the leader’s dictates to critical scrutiny, to hold them up against the measuring bar of reason.

Call it cognitive subversion. That’s the business this blog is in. Time we faced up to it.

You almost have to pity the guy…the bureaucratic equivalent of a hired shopkeeper in a china shop owned by a wildebeest.

He got that right.

Quico and I have always tried to find the proverbial silver lining in current events. But lately, that’s been hard to find. I blame it on El Niño.

So, bloggerfam, this is a cry for help. We demand an intervention!

Is there any hope? And if so, where do you find it? ‘Cause the light at the end of the tunnel seems to have flickered out with the latest blackout.

I think of my friend Rafa, who years ago told me something that has stuck in my mind: “Este país es una mierda, pero como se goza!“

Maybe he’s right. I should give him a call.

PS.- Quico read the previous version of this post and hated it. He asked me for a re-write, demanding I make it short and funny. Short I can do, but it’s hard to make a post about how depressing everything is … funny!

These were the lazy, hazy days of the post-Recall Referendum. The government had consolidated power, and was fresh off a sweeping victory in the 2004 Regional Elections. In the words of then-Vice President José Vicente Rangel, chavismo had the highway “all to themselves.”

That was the moment Hugo Chávez decided to amp up the rhetoric.

It’s easy to forget, but Chávez didn’t say he was a socialist prior to then. His rhetoric was wrapped in a vague, nationalistic, state-centered, pseudo-Bolivarian, militaristic shtick that was hard to define. Only in 2005 did he reveal himself to be a socialist.

We all know what came afterward.

I started thinking about this when, today, Chávez reiterated something he has been saying a lot lately: his Revolution is about “class struggle,” about “poor versus rich.”

It seems clear this is chavismo’s new meme. This is how they will frame the next phase.

Perhaps this is the reason why they are moving against the kleptocrats within their own ranks. Perhaps this explains why Chávez has his sights set on the nations’ banks, who have, so far, escaped the wrath of the autocrat and have played silent partners to his policies.

Long gone are the days when chavismo would say there was space in his Revolution for the middle class, when he would try and forge an alliance with the business elite that was willing to work within the bounds of socialism. Will we soon long for the days when he would kid around with Juan Carlos Escotet? There is no space for these shenanigans in class warfare.

The questions Juan Carlos Zapata and others asked ourselves back in 2006 – well worth revisiting here and here - stemmed from the contradiction between the “socialist” rhetoric and the cozy government/business clique operating on the ground.

Perhaps this new meme signals chavismo’s willingness to purge this alliance.

If so, a lot of people should be shaking in their Ermenegildos.