The generalized disenchantment that led to Chávez’s victory in 1998 was nothing more than a reflex to the attempts of the elites to balance the system around a more orthodox management of the State, at times when the population was conditioned to the expectation of redistribution
“I have an intellectual taste for democratic institutions, but I am an aristocrat by instinct, that is I fear and scorn the mob. I passionately love liberty legality, the respect for rights, but not democracy. I dislike demagogy, the chaotic action of the masses, their violent and uninformed intervention in public affairs, the envious passions of the lower classes, and irreligious predilections.”
These words were written by Alexis de Tocqueville shortly before his death, on a loose sheet entitled Mon instinct, mes opinions. The French philosopher and politician, unfailingly associated with the theory of democracy, ended his days in fear of his narrow circumstances and anguished by his future. Awed by the achievements of the American Revolution, he kept finding a frustrating mediocrity in his Jacksonian democracy. Excited with the possibility of establishing a lasting constitutional system in his own country, he ended his days frustrated by a new rise of popular governments that led one more -perhaps fatally- to a personalist regime propped up by popular will: Napoleon’s second empire.
I wish to begin my reflection on populism by this point. On the one hand, I am struck by the appetite for reflection of the Norman thinker, who displays an ambiguous horror of the extremes of democracy, having declared it inevitable nearly three decades earlier. On the other hand, contemporary literature on populism regards it more as a disease that occurs in democracies -in opposition to them- rather than a phenomenon underlying their development. Liberal democracy is in the constant tension of mitigating people’s demands for its moderate aspirations, and that is why the political and social literature of the West tends to forget the conflictive origin of its own institutions.
I
Every democratic system that has existed in the world, and that we recognize today as liberal pluralism, arose from the pressures of the least advantaged members of the political community to promote the recognition or advancement of their own rights in clear tension with elitism, even the elitism typical of early liberalism. Whether the elites decided to cede to popular demands in a bid to survive or because they were imposed on their respective systems in a more or less revolutionary way. We will call this pressure the “populist moment”, to make use of the expression of Cas Mudde in The Populist Zeitgeist[1].
In general, populism was considered a ruse; a politically relevant tactic to legitimize a movement by leveraging itself on the opportunity allowed by universal suffrage and the favor of the electorate in social circumstances of inequality or accelerated social change. This was the Leninist critique of the Russian Naródniki (where the term “populist” comes from)[2], and also the academic description of popular personalist regimes in “third world” countries, typically Nasserism, Peronism and some popular-nationalist regimes. For authors like Germani, Di Tella, Worsley or Vallespín, populism has been more of a power strategy than an ideology. Controversially, Mudde differs from this tradition by defining populism as a doctrine that considers that society is ultimately divided between two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, the “pure” people and the “corrupt” elite, for which true leadership must respond to the will of the true people, which inevitably creates tension with the formal institutions because it cannot be channeled by them.
With time, the liberal-democratic institutions saw that original instinct diminished by electoral normality and the consensus on public policies. Slowly and imperceptibly, the initial concessions that forged the delicate balances between the elites were forgotten and replaced by a conviction that ran through political and intellectual elites according to which, once a certain political stability and economic development had been achieved, liberal democracy was not only unstoppable but irreversible[3]. The manifestations of populism were folkloric atavisms, useless or eccentric attempts to “return to past stages”.
Today, western political science warns of populism because it perceives the threat as close as ever before. What was considered an exotic phenomenon, typical of young or weak democracies such as those of Latin America, Africa or Asia (although sometimes Italy, Greece or Eastern European countries were also included), is now a more or less clear presence that threatens even the liberal democracies that were considered solid: Donald Trump in the United States, Boris Johnson in Great Britain, Podemos and Vox in Spain, the German AfD and the National Front in France.
Venezuela was a liberal democracy once considered solid that collapsed in the face of the emergency of populism.
II
Among Venezuelans, the term populism typically has a negative connotation. From the perspective of left-wing analysts, Acción Democrática (AD) was a “populist” party that appropriated the identity and interests of the exploited classes in favor of a “polyclass” political project led by the petite bourgeoisie and implemented “in the name of the people” without really changing their disadvantaged condition. From a more conservative perspective, Venezuelan democracy, represented by AD and to a lesser extent by COPEI, was nothing more than the manipulative stimulation of social resentment, which necessarily manifested itself in clientelism, the expansion of the State, and unbridled spending. With the Bolivarian Revolution, both lines were projected onto the new subject of power; a sector of the political left saw in Hugo Chávez the possibility of a genuine popular revolution, while for some sectors of the right, Chavismo was nothing more than the continuation of partisan politics and the AD doctrine, exacerbated in its worst instincts by the failure of the latter. These two conceptions of the term populism led to the misinterpretation of the work of Professor Juan Carlos Rey, who defined the Venezuelan democracy of the 20th century as a populist system of elite conciliation[4]. The professor did not mean that the system was manipulative and dissolute rather than having the foundation of its legitimacy in the popular mandate.
If we examine the long transition to democracy in Venezuela, professor Rey’s concept becomes crystal clear. The elites that derived from the prolonged peace of the Gomez regime aspired to eventually reach a system of political freedoms, but they feared that the majority was not yet ready for such rules, so they tried limited and paternalistic opening-ups. On the other hand, the emerging elites also originated under the economic and social stability of the Andean regime not only demanded this opening-up but also declared themselves the staunch defenders of a collective national demand towards universal suffrage. Both stances ended up colliding, and their conflict gave rise to the decades of instability that marked the fall of president Medina and the end of the Armed Struggle: three regime changes, plebiscites, assassinations, coups d’état and the first period of mass electoral mobilization in the country.
The popular and elitist aspirations, channeled through their social and political representatives, ended up contained in a mitigated way in the puntofijo rules, not only the homonymous pact but also in the concordat with the Catholic Church, the agreements with the trade unions and the professional associations, the Constitution of 1961, the social participation in the State, etc. All with the contribution and support of the electorate, resolute until the economic crisis that began in the 80s. The system was founded on populist legitimation: the granting of authority derived from the vote to the big national parties as an expression of the aspiration of the majority for a better life, achieved through different mechanisms of economic redistribution made possible by the country’s oil revenue.
When it hit a crisis, the system was accused of being statist and populist, which was only half true. Certainly, the expansion of the duties of the State was a consequence of the populist foundation of the system, but its crisis was only an expression of the corrections applied to the foundation.
The generalized disenchantment that led to Chávez’s victory in 1998 was nothing more than a reflex to the attempts of the elites to balance the system around a more orthodox management of the State, at times when the population was conditioned to the expectation of redistribution. This reflux was clearly populist, according to Mudde’s work: the appeal to a genuine Venezuelan identity in the face of the dominance of an elite defined as foreignizing, globalizing, and neoliberal. For some, this spelled demagogy, chaos and ignorance; for the revolution, it was nothing other than true democracy.
III
Liberal-democratic institutions in the West have a redistributive foundation in material resources and freedoms. Universal suffrage, economic and social rights and welfare constitutions are consequences of demands that we can describe as populist: prolonged protest movements, or cataclysms that undermined traditional legitimacies. The conviction of the elites regarding democracy and its inevitability, as Tocqueville pointed out, was based not only on the Enlightenment belief in the dignity of all members of a community but also on the resignation of the need to make concessions to appease the looming populist threat. The conviction of the majority in this new compromise rested, in turn, on the simultaneous conviction that they were getting a new deal that was going to benefit them this time, rendering a revolutionary rupture unnecessary.
At some point in its history, Venezuela was an example of those institutions. For reasons that we cannot examine right now, the implicit pact between the elites and the majority became unviable, and the results of its revolutionary reformulation are visible today in a State with a seriously compromised viability and an impoverished and increasingly unequal society. The purely populist solution has failed because its correction went alternately from abandonment to revenge, and again to abandonment.
Sometimes we say that we come from the future, and this is usually assumed as a sardonic threat. The truth is that the rise of populist anti-liberal movements has been made plausible because liberal democracy is increasingly perceived as unequal, a system of selfish elites indifferent to the changes experienced by the “true people”. For an average voter in the South of England or the American Midwest, the feeling that their prospects were not what they used to be a few decades ago or that their life is dominated by powerful and irresponsible forces that want to make them disappear, respond to some ungrounded prejudice and paranoia but also to the reality of the stagnation of their life expectations: the decrease in real wages, the change in the labor paradigm in a labor force that is poorly prepared and slowly adaptable. Amid the blurring of the ideological and public policy lines between the ordinary electoral alternatives, some political actors appeal to the “true people” with relative success as a consequence of the exhaustion of the tacit agreements that sustained liberal democracies. How much of it is the responsibility of the electorate? This can be argued for each national case, but the truth is that there are incentives at every turn: the confinement in the private sphere, the old racial and cultural resentments, the simplistic structure of our public sphere, and the difficulties of positively reinventing ourselves in the face of digital transformations are factors that stimulate populist viability in its worst face.
The world is going through a time of transition, and the threats to liberal democracy reflect this. The usual answers, however, are failing to reach the delicate balance that they should protect. We have not found the formula that contains the particular aspirations for prosperity and freedom with the shift in the climate, technological and energy paradigm. For what it’s worth, this isn’t the first time we’ve found ourselves in such a gap: the industrial revolution was slow to establish representative liberal democracy as its inherent political form; however, in the long run, Tocqueville’s pessimism was refuted. The new institutions derived from the mutual correction between liberalism and democracy emerged gracefully from the great conflicts of the last two centuries. Perhaps this populist shock is the necessary corrective to lift us from our complacency and recalibrate democratic reason with the elitist sentiment.
I am confident that Venezuela will be a pioneer in this path, as it has been before.
[1] Mudde, C. (2004). “The Populist Zeitgeist,” in Government and Opposition, 39(4), Cambridge University Press, p. 541-563; see also Mudde C. & Rovira Kaltwasser C. (2017). Populism: a very short introduction, Oxford University Press.
[2] Notably, authors like Laclau y Mouffe point out that Leninisim -and socialism in a broader sense- are the utmost expression of populism as the final realization of genuine democracy.
[3] This was argued by Runciman D. (2015) in The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present. Princeton University Press.
[4] Rey, J.C. (1972). «El Sistema de Partidos Venezolano», in Politeia, (1), Universidad Central de Venezuela, p. 175-230.
