On Venezuela, Where Are Liberals?
Students at the University of Michigan have staged a rare protest against the brutal dictatorship of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. According to The Michigan Daily, more than 100 people joined a rally less than 24 hours after two students created an “SOS Venezuela” Facebook event.
“I think the event created a lot of awareness, not just for the University students, but in general,” The Daily quoted a sophomore as saying. “I think these voices that were heard today are going to keep carrying on; people are going to keep talking about this for a while.”
Go Blue, for raising awareness of the worst humanitarian disaster to befall the Western Hemisphere in decades. Just one problem: The protest took place four years ago.
Scour the Web and you’ll find a handful of reports of anti-Maduro protestsor teach-ins at universities in recent years, usually organized by Venezuelans living in the U.S. And most politically informed people are more-or-less aware of Venezuela’s political and economic disorders. No doubt they don’t like what they see, and no doubt they wish it were otherwise.
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They just don’t seem to care that much.
Every generation of campus activists embraces a worthy foreign-policy cause: Ending apartheid in South Africa; stopping ethnic cleansing in the Balkans; rescuing Darfur from starvation and genocide. And then there’s the perennial — and perennially unworthy — cause of “freeing” Palestine, for which there never is a shortage of credulous campus zealots.
Then there are the humanitarian causes young activists generally don’tembrace, at least not in a big way. Cuba’s political prisoners. Islamist violence against Christians in the Middle East. The vast and terrifying concentration camp that is North Korea. Where are the campus protests over any of that?
The case of Venezuela ought to be an especially worthy one for college students. It is urgent. It is close by. Its victims are fighting for democracy, for human rights, for the ability to feed their children.
Nor is the outrage in any way obscure. The Times’s Nicholas Casey has for years provided an unforgettable chronicle of human tragedy in the form of Venezuelan parents burying their starving children, of hospital patients dying for lack of basics such as antibiotics or oxygen tanks, of yet another generation of boat people risking their lives on the high seas to flee their socialist paradise. Nearly three million Venezuelans — one-tenth of the total population — have now fled the country, according to The Wall Street Journal, creating a refugee crisis comparable to that of the Rohingya in Myanmar.
So why the relative silence? Part of the reason is that campus activism is a left-wing phenomenon, making it awkward to target left-wing villains.
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A larger reason is that, until a few years ago, the Venezuelan regime was acause of the left, cheered by people like Naomi Klein, Sean Penn and Danny Glover. Left-wing publications such as Glenn Greenwald’s “The Intercept” have gone out of their way to make excuses for the regime andtreat its critics as Washington stooges. Jeremy Corbyn, who could yet be Britain’s next prime minister, memorialized the late dictator Hugo Chávez in 2013 for his “massive contributions to Venezuela & a very wide world.”
Even today, the criticism is amazingly muted. If Klein has seriously come to terms with Maduro’s tyranny or Venezuela’s catastrophe, she has not done it in The Nation, The Guardian, or anywhere indexed by LexisNexis or Factiva. Corbyn’s response to Maduro’s repression has been to voice his condemnation of “the violence that’s been done by any side, by all sides” — a piece of obfuscatory equivalence worthy of Donald Trump’s Charlottesville remark. Penn and Glover seem to have moved on to other causes, like bashing Trump. Such courage.
That leaves the cause of Venezuela’s deliverance from evil in the hands of … Mike Pence. The vice president may not be the ideal spokesman for the rights of a Latin American country, at least in the eyes of the typical undergraduate political activist. And some of the Trump administration’s policy prescriptions, such as broad sanctions on the Venezuelan economy, may do more to tighten Maduro’s grip than to crush it. (More effective are U.S. sanctions on Venezuelan government officials, which target the guilty and spare the innocent.)
Still, it says something about the moral dereliction of too many liberals that Pence has been a clarion voice of attention and outrage at the unfolding catastrophe, while they mostly remain silent. When you’ve ceded the moral high ground to the Trump administration, you’ve ceded a piece of your soul.
It would be nice to suppose that Venezuela’s agonies will soon be at an end, on the theory that it can’t go on like this much longer. People said that about Syria several years ago, too. How many more Venezuelans have to starve or drown before Western liberals do something more than merely shake their heads?
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Raindog63 commented February 16, 2018
The center-left embraced the free trade deals that Trump used to bludgeon his opponents over the head with. The center-left embraced the intervention in Iraq, which, again, Trump used to his advantage against both Hillary and the neo-conservatives. The center-left touted welfare reform and turned a blind eye to right-to-work laws which did more to harm working-class Americans than they helped. Finally, the center-left advocated virtually no serious action be taken to hold the corporate establishment responsible for virtually destroying our capitalist society a decade ago. The reason the center-left is disappearing before our eyes is because they've managed to lose all credibility in the eyes of the majority of Americans over the past couple of decades, and, for that, they have no one to blame but themselves.
Rosalie Lieberman commented February 16, 2018
Goodness. Stephens isn't asking for direct U.S. intervention. He's correctly asking why college campuses show no interest in the Venezuelan tragedy, masterminded by its tyrant whose army keeps him going. Nor do campuses care about the fate of millions of Kurds, innocent Syrians being gassed, etc. Can/should our govt. get involved in every fiasco across the world? How could it? But, the academic left shows little to no interest. Traditionally, Republicans haven't shown much humanitarian concern. Both sides are wrong. Yet, the campus left, including some professors, remains actively vocal against Israel. It's not mere criticism of Israel coupled with intelligent alternatives of how Israel can handle the Palestinian issue. It has become total opposition to a Jewish state, while ignoring the raging anti-Semitism and brutal terrorism of the Palestinian street, or how this effects Jews in Israel and abroad. Sorry, but if this is the # 1 international problem that bothers college students who fancy themselves as liberal, there is a moral dilemma many don't wish to see.
Meas commented February 16, 2018
Hear Hear! As a liberal and the daughter of a Venezuelan, I applaud the truths expressed here. One of my Venezuelan cousins sent me a video yesterday of Trump making a speech, actually, reading a speech, saying the same things Bret Stephens says in this piece. A dictator is a dictator, except that "socialist" dictators often seem to be so much more thorough in their oppression. Liberals should be ashamed to leave the defense of the Venezuelan people to the likes of Trump and Pence. I have noticed that this newspaper shares in this fault - there is almost never anything actually criticizing the Castros, for example, or their like printed here. This piece is the exception.
Jack commented February 16, 2018
Your column shows why the Democrats are an inadequate alternative to the party of the Southern Strategy. They’ve made a home for the sort of behavior pattern you’re criticizing on the left.
That behavior pattern is as tribal in its emotional and intellectual reflexes as its counterpart on the right. And it’s as post-modern, if that’s the right term, about creating perceived reality and defining truth by means of repetition and force of will, with insufficient ties to reason and empiricism, as the infamous remarks about the reality-based community attributed to Karl Rove.
This is not a false equivalence. A person who claims it is a false equivalence should explain why. Otherwise, there’s no reason to think that uttering the phrase “false equivalence” is not a self-calming device that depends on repetition and force of will to establish its own truth.
The great thing about the deep logic of part of MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech is that it took a general principle that we say underlies American democracy, all are created equal with equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and urged us to address right now a screamingly obvious way that that principle had long been violated with tremendous harm and injustice.
If neither the Democrats nor the Republicans can wrench themselves back to that way of thinking and feeling then in my view we need a viable third party to reconnect with that sort of practical reason.
Durhamite commented February 16, 2018
Wow. Just wow. Naomi Klein, Sean Penn, and Danny Glover - yes, the triumvirate of powerful policy-setting liberals. Right. Stephens takes aim at a Canadian activist, two Hollywood actors (not exactly the intellectual bastion of the party) and college undergrads, and holds them up as examples of the thought leaders of all liberals. Talk about cheap shots.
"Where is the liberal outrage on college campuses?" Uh, where is the conservative outrage? Conservatives care even less, but that's okay! Conservatives aren't supposed to care - liberals are. Liberals are suffering from moral dereliction, but the fact that no conservatives care either is fine. Just fine.
Conservatives do care! "Only Mike Pence has stepped up!" Mike Pence is Vice President. Reacting to humanitarian disasters around the world is HIS JOB, which he performs poorly.
As for a few Hollywood actors praising a socialist dictatorship in Venezuela, we now have a President, unchecked by his party, praising right-wing strongmen around the world. Can you see which one is worse?
Michael Miller commented February 16, 2018
This is some epically weak trolling. The Republicans control the federal government. They have already proved multiple times over that they don't care a whit about other viewpoints than their own. As far as I can tell nobody is stopping them from doing whatever in response to the Maduro regime's awfulness.
What I don't see here is any suggestion of the form any such policy would take. You're so smart and informed, surely you have a simple solution. Maybe if Trump just asks nicely (or spews a couple of name-calling tweets about him in between today's laundry list of lies), Maduro will see the error of his ways and either reform Venezuela, or magnanimously step aside for another to do so. I'm not exactly holding my breath.
I'm not even a leftie, at least by historical standards, but the Republicans have disowned my old Rockefeller wing so thoroughly that I don't know where else to go.
Please try a bit harder next time, Mr. Stephens.
Hugh Massengill commented February 15, 2018
Geez Bret, you sure had to go a long ways to find a way to mock liberals. Really, we get it, you are a conservative, you hate the left, and you are just making temporary partnerships with them to hasten Trump's fall.
It is a favorite tactic of the cheap shot right to hate on colleges, and this is kind of a cheap shot. The Republican own both houses of Congress and the White House, so appealing to them might make some sense. What on earth can a simple college student do in a country that is led by the far right...your party. Take the Senate to task, take the House to task, but mocking simple college students for not enmeshing themselves in a miserable situation they have no control over...
Hugh Massengill, Eugene Oregon
Cathy commented February 15, 2018
I don't know why others are not going nuts over Venezuela, but I'll tell you why I am not. It isn't because the left wing government was ever the darling of anybody.
It is because there is just too much to do right here at home. Clean up your own mess first, then worry about everyone else's mess.
I am outraged by the plight of Venezuelans. I am outraged about the ethnic cleansing of the Yazidi; about the starvation of the people in South Sudan who are sitting atop oil; about the Rohinga; about people in warm climes here in the western hemisphere not having help to reduce Zika damage; about teh abject horror in Syria, and te return of th Taliban in Afghanistan.
But I am more outraged by my own people not having healthcare and good jobs. I am outraged that my own people have almost no rights in the face of corporate malfeasance, and less and less recourse. Equifax, anyone? I am outraged by a government that is targeting the elderly - who will be me - and looking to cut Social Security, even as they eliminated my pension, and left me at the mercy of a market designed for instability. And i am outraged by having a President who seems to really want to push the big red button.
Give us credit. We are just tired. We'll get to Venezuela when we make headway here.
marilyn commented February 15, 2018
On America's murdering of it own children, where are liberals? Where are conservatives? Where is the president? Before we attempt to meddle in Venezuela's problem again let us help our own children. Perhaps it's time for us to ask some other country, a NATO country, perhaps, or China or Russia, even, to help us get our priorities in order and save our own children. We have famously preached our vision of the world to others. Maybe it is time for us to let them help us. We have failed our children. The most unsafe place in this country is a school.
J. Clarence commented February 15, 2018
How can the Left criticize Maduro's economic policies that has brought Venezuela, a country with vast natural resources, to its knees?! All of Maduro's economic policies is right out of the standard Left playbook, of more government controls and intervention in the economy. Sure, I think everyone deplores the violent and corrupt political actions Maduro has adopted, but the problem is the solutions that will bring Venezuela back to prosperity is for the country to liberalize their economy, privatize nationalized businesses, reduce the burden of the state. There's no way Jeremy Corbyn can say that, because those are the exact opposite of things he wants to do.
It's easy to cheer the initial periods of great socialist expansion, which is what Klein, Penn, Greenwald, and the like have done, but Thatcher predicted what would happen to Venezuela and all countries that go down this path when she said, “The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money.”
Asher B commented February 15, 2018
Many American liberals, especially on the hard left, are very critical of American values and institutions. Therefore they admire the anti-American regimes in Cuba and Venezuela. Cuba especially has been a darling of the left for decades. No matter that it is a repressive military regime with a terrible human rights record, no freedom of expression, no freedom of movement, no economy to speak of, those are details -and besides, they are mostly America's fault! It's all about beating up on capitalism and the US, the real world plight of the Cubans and Venezuelans are of little or no interest.
J. commented February 15, 2018
Stephens nails it again. What's especially sad is that there used be to a strong faction of center-left liberals, exemplified by Marty Peretz's New Republic, that were willing to turn a critical eye towards the excesses of the radical left, in particular its disastrous embrace of socialism.
Alas, as the American left has become increasingly radicalized (John Kennedy would be turning in his grave if he knew Democrats nearly nominated for president a pro-Castro socialist) that more moderate element has nearly disappeared.
Of course the radical left (which increasingly just means the left period) doesn't want anyone paying attention to Venezuela. The debacle in Venezuela shows the bankruptcy of the fundamental tenet of the radical left's ideology, i.e. that capitalism is the source of all evil, and socialism is the solution.
Paul Davis commented February 15, 2018
What is in common between the list of causes that Stephens says that "young activists" generally do embrace, and differentiates them from those which that they do not embrace?
The embraced causes involve scenarios in which said activists see a clear path to exert leverage without the use of major military force, typically in the form of utilizing US economic power or the encouraging of a UN peace-keeping mission (however misguided that may be).
The unembraced causes (particularly the ones that Stephens lists) all involve countries where the US has no major economic leverage (or has already been using sanctions and embargos for years or decades) and/or any intervention would necessarily amount to war.
Nobody has a particularly clear idea of what should happen in Venezuela. Whether you support the ideology that Maduro claims to represent, or whether you consider him and his regime to be ruthless despots indifferent to the suffering of their country, you almost certainly have no idea precisely what Venezuela should do. The situation there is complex, a confluence of politics, corruption, bad management and global petro-markets.
Instead of chastizing liberals for not embracing causes that are not amenable to simple, non-violent interventions, why don't you suggest precisely what YOUR plan for Venezuela is? As you note yourself, sanctions are not a sure fire approach here. So what is?
Ric Grefé commented February 15, 2018
"How many more Venezuelans have to starve or drown before Western liberals do something more than merely shake their heads?" Given your position as a voice of the right, why would you not take a stronger stand about the lack of outrage from the Republican leadership of the House, Senate, White House? IT seems this is a means of protecting your political colleagues from moral responsibility.
Alex Kent commented February 15, 2018
Fair points. The reason for Chavez primarily lies in the oligarchical structure of Venezuelan society. A few immensely wealthy families controlled most of the money and made sure they kept it. The great mass of people had no opportunity to do better. It was foreseeable that someone like Chavez would get control and start giving things away. “Good” revolutions have started this way. It’s understandable that champions of democracy would have had hope for the future of the country. This one went completely off the rails by eating its own productive capacity. Chavez was smart, determined, and lucky, and never relented. The result is total disaster.
Mark Carolla commented February 15, 2018
Sad to say that it's difficult for us to have moral outrage for Venezuela, or any other crisis situation around the world, when we're fighting against becoming a third world dictatorship ourselves. Trump and the gop has provided so much outrage in this country that we have none leftover for others.
Look at how the Trump administration has eroded our trust and standing in the world... who are we to take the moral high ground and dictate policy to any other country? Maybe at one time, but not now.
Btw... why is it that only liberals need to be outraged over Venezuela? Are conservatives too busy spending their money from tax cuts and deporting dreamers (some to Venezuela)?
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