What is to be done about Venezuela?
Hello friends! This week’s newsletter is jam-packed! I’ve got an essay I wrote for Esquire about what’s wrong with the Best Picture-nominated film Vice; an exclusive newsletter Q&A with a historian of Latin America about the crisis unfolding in Venezuela; a reader comment from a constituent of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about her blindspot; some short notes on Astra Taylor’s documentary “What is Democracy?” and Howard Schultz; and reading recommendations.
Also: Going forward I’m going to be publishing this newsletter on Tuesdays in an effort to keep a more regular schedule. Unless something major pops up for me, expect this in your inbox on Tuesdays!
What Vice gets wrong about Dick Cheney
In January I wrote an essay for Esquire critiquing the movie Vice. Here's an excerpt:
Vice, the lively Dick Cheney biopic that racked up eight Oscar nominations this week, certainly has its virtues. In this era of ill-advised Bush nostalgia, writer-director Adam McKay’s ambition to chronicle the misdeeds of the most powerful and villainous vice president that the nation has ever seen provides a much needed dose of historical perspective. Building upon the infotainment model that he pioneered with The Big Short, McKay uses extensive voiceovers, playful editing, and fourth wall-breaking sketches to shine a light on Cheney’s covert role in the horrors of the War on Terror and the Iraq War—and remind the public that great darkness can lie beneath the appearance of civility.
But Vice’s research-packed portrait has one big, gaping hole in it. Despite Christian Bale’s spellbinding impression of Cheney (in which he captures his crooked smile and his growling diction with eerie precision), there is simply no insight into the man’s mind or heart. The viewer is given little to work with in understanding what fueled the rise and the work of Bush’s ventriloquist—and the little that is offered is deeply misleading.
Vice portrays Cheney’s long ascent—from congressional fellow to Gerald Ford’s White House chief of staff to Wyoming congressman to George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense to W.’s veep—through the prism of what could be called the House of Cards theory of politics. Cheney and his inner crew are power-obsessed, profit-hungry climbers with no values other than a commitment to advancing their self-interest. McKay has said as much in discussion of his film, describing Cheney as bereft of an “operating belief system.” One of Vice’s few attempts to probe at his inner life is its overt suggestion that his lifelong struggle with heart disease is a metaphor for his heartlessness. Put it all together, and Cheney’s story is apparently that of a cold man whose calling was simply to endlessly accumulate personal power.
But in reality, Cheney was deeply conservative, and driven throughout his career by an ideological mission to protect traditional American life and empire from its challengers. He despised ’60s counterculture, toiled to dismantle the welfare state, always played the hawk, and commissioned a strategy document in the 1990s that plainly predicted the Iraq War. This ideology underpinned Cheney’s quiet crusade for state-backed Islamophobia and endless war under Bush.
This isn’t pedantry. A deeper reckoning with Cheney’s ideology would’ve not only made for better history, it also would have improved the political and artistic sophistication of the film. It would have imposed coherence and purpose on Vice’s tedious and sometimes-confusing catalogue of Cheney hijinks and allowed viewers to absorb and critique the true meaning of the Bush era. It wasn’t Cheney’s dexterity as a tactician, but rather his draconian vision for what the world should look like, that should linger for the viewer. Ironically, in its failure to get that, Vice reproduces the kind of misdirection that Cheney pulled on the American public.
Read the rest here.
Q&A with Alejandro Velasco
On January 23rd, Juan Guaidó, the head of Venezuela's opposition-controlled legislative branch, declared himself president of Venezuela. Within minutes, the US and several Latin American countries recognized him as Venezuela’s interim president and simultaneously rejected the legitimacy of Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s sitting president who had been sworn into office for his second term earlier in the month. Since then, tensions have escalated as the US has imposed harsh new sanctions on Caracas and has boasted that military intervention is on the table.
As with all news related to Venezuela in the West, there's a ton of glib analysis out there tainted by a reflex to treat the country as a battleground for narratives on socialism or foreign intervention, and there's a scarcity of specific engagement with the Venezuelan experience. To cut through the noise last week I called up Alejandro Velasco, a Venezuelan historian of Latin America at NYU, to get his perspective on what’s driving this extraordinary turn of events, how the US left should be positioning itself on the issue, and why he feels overwhelmed by pessimism about his home country.
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity. This is an excerpt — the full thing can be found here.
ZA: How does someone who hasn't been a presidential candidate simply declare himself president?
Alejandro Velasco: That has to do with a particular reading of the Venezuelan constitution that says when there's a vacuum in the executive power, then it falls upon the president of the National Assembly, Venezuela's legislative branch, to assume those duties.
The legitimacy at the international level is being claimed upon by appealing to Article 233 of the constitution. They claim, not without reason, that the elections that brought Maduro last year into office were highly irregular, were fraudulent, and so therefore he is not a legitimate president as of January 10th, when he swore himself into a new term of office.
It's a legal argument that Guaidó's banking on to assert legitimacy. The problem is that same Article 233 of the constitution also says new elections need to be held within 30 days. Even though Guaidó has said the plan is to hold elections, it's been very vague. In fact it's the third of 3 plans that he's announced. (The first one is seizing the usurpation, the second one is establishing an interim governments.) The argument makes sense insofar as you won't be able to call new elections with the existing institutional apparatus, which is controlled by chavistas. But the second you say that then you get into all sorts of legal confusion as to why are you calling upon this article in order to assert the legitimacy of rule.
Which is why it's important to understand that what's happening in Venezuela isn't actually a matter of legality, it's a matter of who can claim legitimacy of rule.
What are the US and the other countries that instantly recognized Guaidó trying to accomplish?
What they're trying to accomplish is a very quick resolution to what they see as a power struggle. I personally was extremely surprised; this was kind of the nuclear option. By announcing this, there's really no way back, there's only escalation that's possible. You can't imagine someone like Mike Pompeo or John Bolton or Marco Rubio or Elliott Abrams suddenly saying, “What we really need to do now is negotiate with the government.”
So, this really sets up only one outcome of increased escalation in order to try to break the stalemate — which ultimately benefits Maduro. Maduro is basically seeing things like this: all he has to do is win this day. He's not seeing things in terms of six months, a year, two years. All he has to do is win this day, because each day he wakes up in the presidential palace is a day that Guaidó and his international supporters need to force an outcome in short order, and that increasingly becomes something that's more outside of any kind of constitutional framework.
What does seem to be clear is that [Guaidó/the international coalition] expected that the military would turn on Maduro much more quickly — that there would be a lot more fracturing and splintering within the upper echelons of the military, and that would lead to a kind of rapid cascade. I think to some extent they've been kind of caught off guard by how little of that we've seen. If that continues to be the case, if the military continues to be behind Maduro, then we're in this upward spiral of escalation.
The military took a little bit of time before announcing that it was backing Maduro. What are the odds that the military turns on him, and what factors are most likely to cause it?
I think everybody in the government was caught off guard — that was part of the orchestration behind the scenes. What does that mean in terms of the military? Why did they take hours, as opposed to immediately announcing their support for Maduro?
There are fissures within the military, but those fissures aren't actually on the part of the higher ranks. The middle layers are the ones we usually see lead small scale insurrections. If there's going to be any fracturing, it's going to be from there. What I'm looking for is not at the upper echelons — they're so tied to the fortunes of Maduro that they have much more to lose without him than with him.
[It's worth noting that after this interview was conducted early last week there was at least one major military defection.]
The Trump administration’s stated rationale for its support — to restore democracy in Venezuela — rings hollow, given the way it's dealt with authoritarians like MBS, Erdogan, Putin, Duterte, Putin etc. What’s really driving this?
You don't have even to go to MBS, just go to Honduras and Guatemala. Certainly Honduras is another illegitimate government that stages fraudulent elections. We know that democracy and human rights is not what's driving this. I don’t think you have to be a leftist to recognize that. So what is driving it?
I think it's a little bit silly for folks on the left to say that it's about oil — it's a much larger thing. It's about reasserting control over the agenda in Latin America, which had been lost in the context of the left turn and the pink tide. Now the US sees the regional geopolitical landscape shifting in its favor. They’re saying, “We're reclaiming hegemony over Latin America, this is in fact our backyard.” In that sense it's a much bigger play than Venezuela itself.
Find the rest of the Q&A, which includes Alejandro's thoughts on what the US left's position on Venezuela should be, on my website. (I'd include it here but I fear it's getting too long.)
A reader from AOC's district on her blindspot
A reader of the newsletter urged a level-headed perspective on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in response to my past comments.
"I am still concerned about the left actually delivering results rather than just a compelling narrative.
One issue that brought that concern literally close to home with AOC was this Target that's coming to my neighborhood.
They were planning to put some housing on top of the Target. Rep. Joe Crowley, the "establishment" Democrat, was negotiating with them to increase the level of affordable housing, as well as include union construction jobs and higher wages on the long-term ones. During her campaign, AOC vocally opposed the development entirely, and it was her outspokenness on the issue that endeared her to many voters in the district.
But when Crowley lost, AOC hadn't been in touch with the developers of the Target at all, and evidently hasn't been since. Now it's likely that the Target will move ahead anyway, but with no new affordability or community benefits. AOC's resonance and impact is admittedly more profound and potentially meaningful than something this physically parochial. And indeed, talking about something is an important part of mainstreaming it and bringing it to life. But this experience is an analogy for my concern about leftists' ability to push 'correct' narratives, but fail to actually deliver on them. And though he's always been centrist, [NY Mayor Bill] De Blasio's record — initially seen as a pinko commie, but mostly just coming up with headlines — is another example of my concern. Before I extrapolate from this Target incident, I'll see what she does tangibly in Congress."
- A reader from Queens
Short notes
I recently saw Astra Taylor's provocative documentary “What is Democracy?” and found that the title truly channels the spirit of the film. Unlike most documentaries, this isn’t a narrative history or an expose or a manifesto, but instead a fiercely curious, open-ended inquiry into one of the most essential ideas in existence for advancing human civilization.
There are two exceptional qualities of the movie that I want to point out. First, “What is Democracy?” is not just a film about democracy, it’s also a film that seeks to embody democratic values. It engages in serious and (sometimes discursive) conversations with interesting scholars and politicians, but the beating heart of the movie is its interviews with people from all walks of life who hail from across the globe — students, refugees, doctors, activists, a barber, immigrants, tailors who own a workers’ cooperative, old people, young people, rich people, poor people, people from the Global North, people from the Global South, and people caught in the spaces in between. Over the course of the movie it becomes clear that the viewer is not meant to select one of their ideas to champion, but rather to to see their collective answers as illuminating the path (and pitfalls) ahead, to see truth in pluralistic terms.
The other thing is Taylor brings a rigorous and refreshing leftist perspective to bear on what modern democracies’ greatest woes are. The standard liberal fare about what ails democracy in the Trump era involves worrying about polarization and often attributes it to cultural tribalism. This analysis has led to about ten thousand Let’s Sit in a Diner in Trump Country to Understand What’s Dividing America pieces of reportage. But “What is Democracy?” digs deeper. It sees the biggest threats to democracy as emanating from a capitalist political economy, long histories of racism, and the Global North’s heads-I-win-tails-you-lose attitude when it comes to respecting borders (capital moves freely and foreign intervention is acceptable; refugees aren’t welcome). Grappling with the way that social inequality undermines democracy naturally leads Taylor to engage with people who live on the margins of society, people who have not seen democracy deliver to them its promise of self-rule. It’s pretty captivating to watch a poetic Syrian refugee share what she thinks democracy should look like, to hear a felon talk about how he had to go on a hunger strike to keep the library in his prison open.
At a time when countless political observers see the resumption of a pre-Trump “normality” as key to restoring democracy, it’s crucial to have more recognition of the reality that what came before wasn’t a foundation for freedom either.
*****
The blackhole vacuousness of Howard Schultz's potential bid for the White House is a soul-sucking spectacle. This guy is considerably worse than a Third Way policy paper come to life. When asked what's unique about his candidacy on Good Morning America, he said his "big idea" is to "unite the country." When told that every presidential candidate aspires to do that, he said that only he can do it since Dems and Republicans are caught in "revenge politics."
Schultz is not alone in holding the naive belief by many across the political spectrum that a kind of mindless "tribalism" is tearing the country apart rather than, you know, clashing values and interests. But he is pretty singular in thinking that the way to resolve that is by running as an independent.
Third-party bids are always going to exist, quixotic as they are in presidential elections. But I at least get why libertarians and, at least prior to 2016, green party supporters feel entirely disenfranchised by our two party system. And there's always a bit of a market for third party candidates because there's always going to be a small fraction of the electorate that will simply look to register their discontent with the stifling restrictions of our system. (Consider that Ralph Nader garnered the votes of a non-trivial number of conservatives in 2000, for example.)
But Schultz doesn't have idiosyncratic politics. He's a cookie cutter corporate Democrat who doesn't hate minorities but is worried about commoners getting greedy enough to demand universal access to quality health care. In fact he's so worried about it he's willing to risk tipping the election in favor of Trump. Capital, seeing Trump as unreliable and anxious that Democrats might just grow a spine, is rearing its head in increasingly desperate ways. It ain't pretty.
What I'm reading
The case for a negotiated transition in Venezuela
Are we living through climate change's worst-case scenario?
The use of "tribal" to describe our politics is based on racial stereotypes — and it gets tribe behavior wrong.
Top Nancy Pelosi aide tells health care execs that Dem leadership isn't behind Medicare-for-all
Americans overwhelmingly want to soak the rich.
Some Iowa polling shows "socialism" has a net positive rating and "capitalism" has a net negative rating. That's in Iowa. Data like that is making some moderate Dems rethink running for 2020.
Chart: Roughly 60% of America's wealth is inherited, meaning most of America's riches are owned by people who didn't work for them.
Gorillas hum and sing when they eat, and it could shed light on how language evolved in humans.
Can stoicism make us happy?
Video: In a post-Parkland America, teens talk about gun culture.
A pair of identical twins used five DNA testing kits and got five different sets of results.
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