The year is 2027.  Three years into his third term, President Trump has just successfully pushed through a further amendment to eliminate presidential term limits.  His Supreme Court, now packed with lackeys after the retirements of Anthony Kennedy in 2018 and the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2022, offers no legal recourse.  Republicans, having grown increasingly craven with each passing year, rubber stamp his decrees.  Democrats, having boycotted the 2024 elections, hold no sway in any branch of government.  The economy is in shambles as net migration has become negative.  The brain power which once fueled American entrepreneurship and innovation has found fairer shores.  Foreign investment and Chinese loans, which once propped up the economy, have dried up and sought safer refuge.  The once mighty American empire has turned inward, its military increasingly used at home rather than abroad to quell the mounting protests and internecine violence that plague the large coastal cities where the “liberal elite” remain cloistered and intransigent.  It is a broken country, a shell of its former self.

If this scenario seems hyperbolic and preposterous, it shouldn’t.  If you’ve been paying attention to the international news, it should sound eerily and uncomfortably familiar.  Because it’s happening in Venezuela right now.

Last weekend, I visited two Venezuelan friends in Ecuador whom I had last seen in Caracas in 2011.  Having just visited their families a few months’ back, they weren’t certain when they would be able to return.  The situation was that bad, they said.  I wouldn’t recognize the country I had visited just six years before, they told me.  They described a situation in which food is increasingly hard to buy.  Basic medicines are no longer available.  Hospitals have no supplies, and even if they did, there is often not enough electricity to allow them to operate.  Prices doubled and then tripled.  People use suitcases to transport money.  They said Venezuelan Bolivars litter the shop floors of the few locales fortunate enough to have products to sell—employees don’t both to pick them up off the ground, they are that worthless.  It sounded like the inter-war Germany of the 1920s—the kind of hyperinflation we thought banished to the history books.  Crime is increasingly rampant. People don’t go out anymore.  With what money would they even do so, they said.  How could there be an energy shortage in the country with the world’s largest energy reserves, I wondered?  How did it get this bad?

In 2009, three years into his third term as Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez successfully eliminated term limits in Venezuela.  That the people approved this measure in a democratic referendum makes the situation all the more tragic.  Chavez came to power in 1999, promising to address the many social ills that had plagued Venezuela throughout the 20th century. Despite having the world’s largest oil reserves and boasting one of the higher per capita incomes in Latin America, Venezuela remained a highly unequal country in which government routinely rotated between unaccountable elites of the left and the right.

Upon his election, Chavez overturned the socio-economic apple cart and began to address these issues through his leftist brand of “Bolivarian socialism”.  He redirected the vast state oil revenues to the poor, increasing funding for long-neglected social programs including education, health, and housing.  At the same time, he attempted to promote leftist governments throughout Latin America by offering other sympathetic regimes, in countries like Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, and Nicaragua, generous subsidies and discounted oil supplies.  He bashed the United States at the United Nations and in the press, condemning the Yankee imperialists as his mentor, Fidel Castro had done before him.  Speaking after President George W. Bush in front of the UN General Assembly in New York City in 2006, Chavez called him the devil and declared that the podium “still smells of sulfur.”

And for a while, it worked.  At least, that is, while the price of oil remained high.  Poverty declined to a third of its previous level, and unemployment was halved. GDP per capita more than doubled, and inequality continued to drop.  Chavez was hailed by the Venezuelan poor as their savior.  It was a new day in Venezuela. Or so it seemed.

Chavez rode this populist wave of support, using his popularity to push through institutional changes and constitutional reforms that consolidated his authority.  He constantly attacked any media outlets that dared to speak out against him and his project of Bolivarian socialism.  In 2007, his government refused to renew the broadcast license of one of the oldest TV stations in Colombia.  Dissenters were jailed on trumped-up charges, and an anti-defamation law made it illegal to speak out against the president and the state, increasingly one and the same.  At the same time, he began to undermine various government institutions that stood in his way.  He created a National Constituent Assembly that eventually supplanted the Congress and packed the Supreme Court with loyalists.  Naturally, these sycophantic bodies were only too happy to rubber stamp any pro-government measures or policies that came their way.  Though Chavez lost a 2007 referendum to overhaul the constitution, he persisted and eventually won the passage of a referendum that eliminated the pesky term limits that could limit his mandate and hamstring the success of his progressive vision.  Nothing could stand in the way of the Bolivarian socialist ideal.  Except maybe cancer.

Now let’s be clear, before his diagnosis with cancer in 2011, Venezuela was already headed down the road to political and economic ruin.  Chavez’s illness and subsequent death merely accelerated that timetable.  While his generous spending on social programs did temporarily reduce poverty, Chavez’s programs did not address long-term development needs, nor did they build the kind of development infrastructure necessary to reduce poverty and consolidate these gains.  He also nationalized numerous international companies, driving away foreign investment.  He fired engineers and managers of the national petroleum company, PDVSA, which hamstrung its productivity and drastically reduced its output. Coupled with declining oil prices, this drop in productivity crippled Venezuela’s economy, and the government’s ability to continue its generous social spending programs.  Effectively, Chavez killed the golden goose.

If Chavez’s economic policies bankrupted the country, the designation of the wildly-unprepared and wholly-incompetent Nicolas Maduro to succeed him effectively lit a match and tossed it on the Venezuelan body politic.  Since taking over in 2013, Maduro has fiddled while his country burned.  Violent protests and clashes have become common.  The government routinely and violently uses the military to suppress these demonstrations.  Maduro continues to blame the United States for his countries problems.  Just last month, the government “won” a referendum for a new National Constituent Assembly to re-write the existing constitution in an election roundly condemned by the international community as flawed and falsified.  It is widely believed that the new constitution will be far less democratic and grant the president much broader powers.

The economic front is just as bleak.  Because Venezuela stopped publishing economic statistics in 2014 in the midst of the current crisis, it is hard to get a precise accounting of the extent of the disaster.  What economists have estimated is this: inflation is skyrocketing at rates over 1000% this year; the crime and murder rates remain at an all-time high; the economy has contracted by 32% since the beginning of 2014; and the Venezuelan Bolivar has lost 99.8% of its value in the last five years.  Venezuela, once a regional economic leader, has become a basket case and a cautionary tale.

I couldn’t help but be moved by my friends’ stories—maybe you were as well.  I related my dismay at the state of American politics, but we agreed that it wasn’t even remotely in the same ballpark.  The extent of the Venezuelan tragedy, and the very real consequences for my friends and their families, is heartbreaking.  Imagine leaving your country because you couldn’t find a job with the country and its economy disintegrating behind you.  Imagine your family still being there and not knowing when you’d be able to go back.

Examining the Venezuelan crisis, we have it really easy in the US.  Yes, we have an unqualified and incompetent president as well.  And his policies are maddening and infuriating.  But, so far at least, our institutions have been up to the task.  The judiciary has stepped up in the absence of moral leadership from the executive.  Locally, states and cities have taken the lead on immigration (see my blog on sanctuary cities) and environmental policy.  But we can’t assume that our institutions will hold without vigilance and action.  If we can learn anything from Venezuela, it’s that populism and its attendant emotions need to be checked by democratic norms, the rule of law, and robust institutions.  When the Republicans stonewall someone as qualified as Merrick Garland, there should be repercussions.  When Trump steps on the Constitution through his continuing conflicts of interest, obstruction of justice (Jackass Joe Arpaio), and illegal executive orders (the Muslim ban), we need to hold him and his lackeys accountable.  We need to make them pay a price: legally, at the voting booths, or, ideally, both.  We don’t want to be the frog in the boiling pot, allowing our institutions to die a slow death.  We should learn from the Venezuelan example while at the same time trying to help and support the country and its citizens as best we can.  An embargo of Venezuelan oil would only hurt the Venezuelan people.  But freezing Maduro and his coterie’s assets is a positive step.  So is setting a positive example by adhering to the rule of law in our own country.  Let’s support Venezuelan democracy while bolstering our own.  Maybe then my friends will be able to go back to the country they love and recognize.  And I’ll be able to do the same.