From Cathy Young, some observations occasioned by the 60th anniversary of Stalin’s death:
…there also remains, on the left, a lingering belief that Soviet communism was at least motivated by noble goals of social justice.
Vestiges of this delusion can be found in left-wing sympathy for Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, who, by startling coincidence, died exactly 60 years after Stalin. Chavez was not a mass murderer, but he was an authoritarian ruler who rigged elections, gutted judicial independence, muzzled the press, and arrested political opponents — while spouting Soviet-style rhetoric about creating “the new man and woman” and building “the socialist society.” After his death, The Nation, the premier magazine of the American left, published a long, fawning obituary by Greg Grandin, which declared that Chavez’s real fault was that “he wasn’t authoritarian enough.” Grandin acknowledged that this argument was “perverse”; one can think of a few other terms.
Perhaps it’s not just Russians who need to shake the dust of Stalinism from their boots before they can move forward.
Fascinatingly, one of the criticisms of Obama by the left is that he isn’t authoritarian enough.
Let’s hope they keep criticizing him for that.
Hard leftists are authoritarian to the core, which is why they want people to think that authoritarianism is right wing. There are authoritarians on the right, of course, but they tend to be on the statist right and not on the libertarian right. Bad as they are (and they annoy the hell out of me), their form of authoritarianism is nowhere near as all-encompassing as left wing authoritarianism. However, they draw strength from the delusion that the best way to fight authoritarianism is with authoritarianism, which keeps authoritarianism going.
Those who love freedom are kept off the authoritarian playing field as much as possible. Not a very difficult task, if you think about it.
I mean, what self-respecting freedom lover wants to be on the authoritarian playing field?
Sigh.
Politics is hell and you cannot refine it.
To hell with authority!
Comments
9 responses to “In love with authoritarianism”
Kathy K and I make some observations about the authoritarian right here:
http://classicalvalues.com/2013/03/christians-against-the-drug-war/
In the comments.
When the right can sing this song and understand it, I’ll join them. But Rushdoony and Gary North are not among those. And never will be.
[…] Classical Values » In love with authoritarianism Hard leftists are authoritarian to the core, which is why they want people to think that authoritarianism is right wing. There are authoritarians on the right, of course, but they tend to be on the statist right and not on the libertarian right. Bad as they are (and they annoy the hell out of me), their form of authoritarianism is nowhere near as all-encompassing as left wing authoritarianism. However, they draw strength from the delusion that the best way to fight authoritarianism is with authoritarianism, which keeps authoritarianism going. […]
I find the premise of “Liberal Fascism” to be odd. There are enough authoritarian personality cults on the left, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. Why does the right also want to ascribe right-wing authoritarianism, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco to the left? My thought is that the right finds it necessary to deny its own authoritarianism as it marches into radical reactionary territory.
What authoritarianism is always against is democracy or, more generally, consent of the governed.
I notice that the blockquote of Cathy Young contains exactly zero references to support her assertions. Logical fallacy much?
Whatever Chavez was, and authoritarian was part of it, why not a comparison to other leaders in Latin America over the past 30-40 years? Argument by assertion is just a tactic to avoid discussion.
Cathy Young’s quote that “he wasn’t authoritarian enough” (which occasioned this post) is accurate. I see no reason for her to have provided a link, but here it is.
http://www.thenation.com/article/173212/legacy-hugo-chavez
***QUOTE***
Chávez was a strongman. He packed the courts, hounded the corporate media, legislated by decree and pretty much did away with any effective system of institutional checks or balances. But I’ll be perverse and argue that the biggest problem Venezuela faced during his rule was not that Chávez was authoritarian but that he wasn’t authoritarian enough. It wasn’t too much control that was the problem but too little.
***END QUOTE***
nifty:
I notice that the blockquote of Cathy Young contains exactly zero references to support her assertions. Logical fallacy much?
There is plenty of evidence for what Cathy Young wrote about Chavez. However, there is a difference between an academic paper and a newspaper column.Consider one of Cathy Young’s assertions.
The 2010 legislative elections show one way that elections are rigged in Venezuela: draw up legislative districts with vastly differing number of registered voters, where oppo [MUD] districts have more registered voters than in districts won by Chávez’s PSUV. In spite of the Venezuelan Constitution’s requiring proportional representation- a Constitution rewritten at Hugo’s behest, Hugo Chávez and his minions felt no such obligation to draw up voting districts with more or less equal populations. “I am the law,” Hugo Chávez said. In Venezuela, Chávez’s PSUV won 64% of the seats in the 2010 legislative elections, even though Chavistas won only about 48% of the vote. Some PSF may claim that is an issue of “first out of the post,” but an examination of the voting districts shows that claim is nonsense.
Miranda State elections results show Chavista gerrymandering at its finest.
In Circunscripción /Circuito/voting district 3, which we will call Miranda-3, the M.P.J./MUD [oppo] candidate won with 122,847 votes, which represented 59.7% of the total. Doing the math, a total of 205,774 votes were cast in Miranda-3, a district the oppo won.
In Circunscripción/Circuito/voting district 7, which we will call Miranda-7, the PSUV [Chavista] candidate won with 54,980 votes, which represented 65.53 % of the total. Doing the math, a total of 83,901 votes were cast in Miranda-7, a district the Chavistas won.
While a PSF may claim this was due to higher voter turnout for the oppo relative to Chavistas, an examination of the number of registered voters shows this claim to be a sham. You can click on Miranda-3 and Miranda-7 to find out the number of registered voters. We find out that in Miranda-3, which went oppo, there are 321,909 registered voters. We find out that in Miranda-7, which went Chavista, there are 137,843 registered voters.
On the state level, Miranda and Carabobo states show the extent of Chavista Gerrymandering.The Circunscripción circuitos/voting districts that went for PSUV /Chavista candidates had on average about 30% fewer registered voters/Assembly seat than those that went for Oppo candidates.
Registered voters/Assembly seat
Broken down by victors in Circuitos/Circunscripciones/voting districts, not for statewide winners.
Miranda
Oppo 255,104
Chavista 170,144
Carabobo
Oppo 267,524
Chavista 179,382
That is how you get 64% of the Assembly seats with only 48% of the vote. All votes are equal, but some votes are more equal than others.
Eection results are from links from the Election Results Main Page. Click on Miranda and on Carabobo for results for those states. [M.P.J. is oppo. P.S.U.V. is Chavista. In other states, there were other oppo-coalition parties running, such as Acción Democrática.]
The Venezuelan Constitution,[ Article 293 (10)] states:
This is the Constitution that Hugo Chávez and his minions wrote. They saw no need to follow it.
Is there documentation for rigged elections? Yes there is.
¿Me entendés, pana?
More Chavista electoral fraud documentation follows. Miguel Octavio, a Physics professor turned financial analyst, has run The Devil’s Excrement blog for a decade. He has assembled an Archive of Statistical Models on the 2004 Recall Referendum. Here is his summary of the results.
Have there been rigged votes? The 2004 Recall Referendum has evidence of such.
While there is evidence for fraud in the 2004 Recall Referendum, as shown above, his winning the October 2012 Presidential election was due to other tactics, such as handing out refrigerators and pre-empting TV and radio with cadenas [chains], where media is required to carry government broadcasts. When Chavez was healthy, that would occur 3-10 hours a week.
My error: that would be milty, not nifty. My eyes are getting bad.