The Illiberal Left

In this week's Nation one can catch the ugly side of America's totalitarian leftists. Alexander Cockburn provides a column entitled Venezuela: The Gang's All Here! which is a nauseating little piece of anti-democratic apologetics. Cockburn, of course, is all worked about the upcoming referendum on Hugo Chavez's rule which his opponents have finally managed to get underway (provided for in the Constitution that Hugo Chavez had written, then furiously tried to undermine). As Cockburn sees it:

The minute some halfway decent government in Latin America begins to reverse the order of things and give the have-nots a break from the grind of poverty and wretchedness, the usual suspects in El Norte rouse themselves from the slumber of indifference and start barking furiously about democratic norms.

Those silly "democratic norms." You'd think somebody living under the consequences of democratic abeyance favoring the right might have a little compassion for the poor bourgeoisie of Venezuela, but Cockburn in classic paleoliberal form doesn't appear to do irony.
However, Cockburn has a soft-spot for some democracy. "Right-answer democracy." Cockburn is outraged, OUTRAGED by the April 2002 coup attempt against Hugo Chavez and all the opposition he faces in so many quarters. The coup was part of an "imperial script" and nothing more than a CIA stunt. The CIA, the Venezuelan media, millions of middle-class shopkeepers who crippled the economy with a general strike, government bureaucrats, etc., etc... all in an anti-democratic conspiracy to overthrow the popular Chavez...

Even the human-rights monitors are in collusion with the enemies! Cockburn starts to echo our own Senator Inhofe:

The imperial script calls for a human rights organization to start braying about irregularities by their intendend victim. And yes, here's Jose Miguel Vivanco of Human Rights Watch. ... This time he's holding a press conference in Caracas, hollering about he brazen way Chavez is trying to expand membership of Venezuela's Supreme Court, the same way FDR did, and for the same reason: that the Venezuelan court has been effectively packed the other way for decades, with judicial flunkies of the rich.

(emphasis added)
Well, OK then! We're all supporters of FDR's assault on the Constitutional order here, right?

Of course, Cockburn's narrative conveniently glosses over a fact or two - like the fact that some of those voters supporting the referendum are a little peeved that they voted in a President and got a new Constitution instead. A Constitution written by their current President which just coincidentally seems well-equipped to entrench him in power.

But the constitution also eliminates the Senate, reduces civilian control of the military and allows Chavez to serve up to 13 years in office and dissolve the single-house National Assembly under certain circumstances. Critics say it will allow Chavez, a former paratrooper who led a failed 1992 coup, to impose authoritarian rule.

Hugo Chavez may have a heart for the poor today. But that doesn't legitimate the destruction of democratic process. That there are STILL Americans sanctioning the establishment of a leftist autocracy because it spouts rhetoric they agree with is shameful.

One has only to look at Mugabe of Zimbabwe to see what happens when benevolent dictators go bad. A system without safeguards is a system without safeguards. There's every reason to reject Chavez's Constitution and his rule. A democracy with an escape clause isn't a democracy worthy of the having. Venezuela needs a new Constitution, preferably not one delegating untrammeled authority to the man who's authored it.