Venezuela Is the Eerie Endgame of Modern Politics
Summary
The Venezuelan writer Moisés Naím has described his country’s political system as a “loose confederation of foreign and domestic criminal enterprises with the president in the role of mafia boss,” which makes it sound very much like Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Among other things, the two strongmen have made it almost impossible for the independent press to function, undermined the credibility of experts, and distracted supporters, both domestic and foreign, with a combination of fairy tales—how wonderful were the lives of the poor!—and conspiracy theories. Polarization adds to this cynicism by creating suspicion and mistrust on both sides; people hear politicians shouting diametrically opposing slogans or presenting contradictory facts, and their instinct is to cover their ears. We were sitting in a community kitchen created by a group called Alimenta la Solidaridad (a name that translates loosely to “food solidarity”), which serves regular meals to children in poor neighborhoods. The Jesuit fathers in Caracas—I met several—reminded me of the kinds of priests who used to work in Polish working-class neighborhoods in the 1980s, when the Catholic Church was a unifying national institution in Poland and not part, as it is now, of a divisive war over modern culture.