By Benjamin Welton
“The desire for utopia is, arguably, as urgent and as necessary as the desire for history.”
–Eugene Thacker[1]
The problem with this desire, of course, is the unchangeable fact that utopia can never be achieved. Utopia and history are “fabrications...products of human intellectual labor, forged and re-forged with all the solidity and assurance of fact”.[1] In sum, the stupidity of trying to immanentize the eschaton will repeat itself again and again.
Mass democracy only makes this process worse. Politicians cannot reach office in the modern world without promising voters the moon, the sun, and the stars. Whereas central governments and their bureaucracies also work towards ensuring the expansion of their own power, every politician seeking to control these forces will invariably be co-opted or crushed by them. No democratic figure can stop democratic tyranny.
For instance, consider Venezuela. Once one of the most prosperous nations in Latin America, the country is now a third-world hellhole. The country's currency, the bolivar soberano, reached a peak inflation rate of over 2.5 million percent in January 2019. The socialist regime of Nicolás Maduro has become synonymous with food shortages[2], toilet paper shortages[3], and street protests that feature government troops running over protesters with armored cars. Less known, but no less important, is the fact that Venezuela is a narco state where former Vice President Tareck El Aissami was recently indicted in a New York court for being one of South America's largest dope pushers.[4] Added to this horror show is the long arm of Castroite malevolence from Cuba. Luis Miquilena, the former Minister of Justice under Hugo Chavez, described his country as being under Cuban occupation in 2016:
“[The Cubans] have introduced in Venezuela a true army of occupation. The Cubans run the maritime ports, airports, communications, the most essential issues in Venezuela. We are in the hands of a foreign country. This is the darkest period in our history!”[5]
Conditions will only get worse in Venezuela, and not just because Maduro and his United Socialist Party refuse to step down. Juan Guaidó, the leader of the opposition movement and the man favored by the Trump administration, offers Venezuela no hope and no salvation. Guaidó's attempt at a military coup against Maduro fizzled out and barely got past the planning stage.[6] Now that Russian troops are in Venezuela to prop up Maduro[7], the probability of an American-backed coup grows slimmer by the day.
Guaidó is the leader of the Popular Will party, which believes in social democracy, progress, and majoritarian democracy.[8] Therefore, if given power in Caracas, Guaidó will not solve Venezuela's problems. The country is suffering not just because it has a left-wing autocrat in power. Rather, the country's suffering stems from its belief in democracy and the republican form of governance. Unless these models are overturned, Venezuela will continue to descend into disorder and hopelessness.
From Monarchy to Tyranny
Before discussing potential alternatives to democracy in Venezuela, it is worthwhile to briefly discuss Venezuela's history in order to see how the country was doomed from the start.
Christopher Columbus became the first European to reach Venezuelan shores in 1498. A year later, the Spanish explorer Alonso de Ojeda named the area Venezuela, or “Little Venice” due to the prevalence of rivers and native huts that utilized stilts in order to keep the water at bay. The first permanent Spanish settlement in Venezuela was founded in 1521. But in the grand scheme of things, Venezuela was not a terribly important colony to the Spanish Habsburgs. Mexico was the jewel of the Castilian empire, while the Viceroyalty of Peru (which included Peru, parts of Chile, and Ecuador) was arguably the second most important possession.
Venezuela's position as an imperial afterthought became clear when Emperor Charles V sold a huge swath of Venezuela's coastline to the Welser family in 1528 in order to pay off his debt to the German bankers. Renamed Klein-Venedig (“Little Venice”), Prince Bartholomeus Welser, some industrious German miners and merchants, and 4,000 African slaves attempted to turn Klein-Venedig into a prosperous colony with abundant gold, sugar, and other resources.[9] This did not happen, and the Welser family left after twenty years. The only memorable fact about the German colony in Venezuela is the story of Ambrosius Ehinger, the Bavarian Catholic _conquistador _and colonial governor who set out to find El Dorado.
Like the other Spanish settlements in the New World, Venezuela had a hierarchical structure that reserved the highest positions for Spanish government officials, the Roman Catholic clergy, and local white landowners known as criollos. From this criollo milieu would come the nation's foremost hero, Simón Bolívar. Born in Caracas, Bolívar came from a wealthy landowning family. However, when Bolívar was just three years old, his father died. This meant that the young Bolívar was reared by an uncle and a tutor, the latter of which was a firm believer in the Enlightenment, specifically the French philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire. Rousseau articulated the idea that humanity is born as a blank slate, and it is only social influences that make humans turn to prejudice and authority. Rousseau became the celebrated philosopher of equality, even if, like British fascist Oswald Mosley once suggested, Rousseau meant “equality of opportunity” rather than the preposterous “equality of man.”[10]
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