The Chávez Comparison
Trump has something in common with Hugo Chávez.
In listening to The Daily earlier this week, I was struck by this passage describing a key moment in the regime of the late Hugo Chávez. It was in 2002 when he decided to remove a large number of skilled employees at the state-run oil company, PDVSA. This would end up being a major pivot point in the regime because it would start a long decline in the proper running of PDVSA, and therefore, in oil revenues, a major power source (in more than one way!) for the regime. It was a moment in which a strong man decided that loyalty was more important than expertise.
Remind you of anyone?
Anatoly Kurmanaev
In 2002, Chavez goes on national television, pretends to be a soccer referee, blows the whistle and fires PDVSA senior executives.
Archived recording (hugo chavez)
Offside. Offside.
Anatoly Kurmanaev
He says, “You are offside.”
Archived recording 7
When Chavez replaced the oil company’s top executives with political appointees, some of whom were radical Marxists, there was a management revolt.
Anatoly Kurmanaev
And this fuels nationwide protest that rocked the country throughout 2002. This is a crucial moment in Venezuela’s history, because many of the country’s middle class realize that this is a power grab. These people who have, for generations seen PDVSA as model of national development, they see it being taken apart for a political project without any consideration for accountability or democratic norms.
The whole referee bit also reminded me of how theatrical Chávez could be, not unlike a certain sitting US president. Chávez was also an early adopter of Twitter.
Still, what I am most struck by is how the way Chávez dealt with PDVSA is exactly how Trump has dealt with the federal government. He has appointed hacks, cronies, and loyalists instead of experts, and we are already seeing the results (e.g., in public health and global deaths due to the dismantlement of USAID).
I have no big lesson here, save that there is a clear propensity of a certain kind of centralizing leader to prefer spectacle over substance and to value loyalty over expertise (indeed, I used to work for someone who behaved similarly, which created, and continues to create damage). While I understand that experts aren’t perfect, it is axiomatic that an expert is to be preferred to a non-expert, something we all know instinctually when the power is out at our home or if the drains are clogged. I inherently do not trust leaders who value loyalty and ideology over expertise. Any healthy nation needs to understand this fact (and we are currently unhealthy).
And if you will excuse me, I have to go to the dentist, and I assure you, they are not just some guy.
(BTW, I recommended that episode of The Daily for a good basic background on Venezuela.)
It’s worse, he appoints hacks opposed to the mission of the department they are to lead, e.g. RFK Jr., many other examples. Carrying on the tradition started by Pres. Reagan appointing James Watt to Secretary of Interior.
Empty spectacle/bullshit may work well for them. It certainly did for Trump – and not just during his political career.
And certain kinds of pseudo-intellectuals will be more than happy to put lipstick on that pig, as this infamous Karl Rove quote illustrates:
It may not actually work, but it certainly feels good in the meantime!
This sounds like envisioning something happening right away now:
What I bolded is craziness.
This is not going to happen right away. Working over damaged oil wells and drilling new wells, repairing or replacing damaged or cannibalized processing facilities would take a lot of time, including obtaining the needed parts and supplies .
Coincidentally, I was listening to The Daily this morning on the subject of what is happening in Iran.
And this is what I heard:
Trump : Khomeini :: American protesters : Iranian protesters.
@charontwo: I believe I talked back audibly to the podcast when she said that.
I get sooo frustrated when the MSM indulges these Trumpist fantasies.
Right now I’m asking myself whether this is a false dichotomy. In other words, is it possible to have political leadership that is both good at the “theatrical” politics, and can also put competent people in place?
Have we seen such a person? Would FDR be like this? I think I should limit consideration to the age of media, which takes figures like Polk and Lincoln out of the equation.
@Jay L. Gischer:
I don’t think so. Theatrics depend on a clear and simple narrative. Politics (or, at the very least, designing and implementing actual policy) is complicated and messy. It’s never done and never finished.
And while Obama, for instance, was very, very good at the theatrics part (I happened to see him speak on the campaign trail in early 2008), he never tried to make the theatrics replace policy.
For him, the theatrics were a means of selling policy, which kept the theatrics grounded to some degree.
For today’s Republicans, theatrics are the policy. It’s all about making their hateful supporters feel good. None of the shit that they propose makes sense otherwise.
I mean, why are they even in Minneapolis to round up undocumented people? If that’s the actual goal, why not raid the Midwest’s rural meatpacking plants? I am rather certain that this would give a lot more bang for the buck.
The fact is that Republicans are better at political theater simply because they don’t feel the need to care about any practicalities at all. That’s one hell of an advantage.
@charontwo:
Craziness indeed.
The current largest oil producer is the US, at over 13 million barrels per day. Saudi arabia and Russia both hover at around 10 million. Venezuela is at, drumroll……., 1.1 million. By contrast, Mexico produces 1.7 million.
Now, Venezuela at its height of production in the 90s managed 3 million barrels per day. Nice, but literally a drop in the bucket of total world production of over 90 million barrels. and to get back to that, requires a multi-billion dollar investment over a decade or so.
The US could far more easily turn the spigot on and off as things stand right now, seeing as they produce over three times as much as Venezuela might get to by the mid 2030s.
People are so blinded by large numbers, or merely by the word “oil”,
@drj:
Didn’t Obama say govern for three years and campaign for one? He seemed to follow that model. As opposed to Rove (@drj: ) who ran the “permanent campaign”.
Even if President Trump is wrong that controlling the means to produce oil in Venezuela is a spigot that could be turned on/off and noticed by the world (as Kathy and others note, even if we get their production back up to a couple millions barrels a day it is a drop in the bucket the world would barely notice), what I think is in the back of his head is that he could turn the U.S.’s oil production capacity on/off almost at a whim.
Now…that would be noticed by the world but is almost too crazy to contemplate him actually threatening to not sell U.S. Oil to the world as a whole.
It would be beyond dangerous for him to try this as we already know that this action can lead to a world war, since an oil embargo along with other sanctions/embargoes from the U.S. made Japan so desperate that they thought showing us they could put enough of a hurt on the U.S. at the time would force us to the table and work with them again, but clearly that did not happen.
Even through Russia and most of the oil producing nations in the Middle East would ignore Trump’s declaration that he is going to stop selling oil on the world marketplace, a drop of nearly 13 million barrels per day (or even half that amount) would be noticed and not in a good way.
I have to assume that Congress might stop being lazy and actually pushback if President Trump decided to really start mucking about with the world’s oil supply. Sure, reducing the amount of oil the U.S. offers to the world would raise oil prices which would make Trump smile with no clue as to why this would actually be a very, very bad thing (seeing as how out of control oil costs would turn that affordability issue into a mega-issue impacting most everyone in America), but again…I feel that the GOP has a point at which they would realize they need to step in and take drastic steps to right the ship.
Loyalty over expertise. Isn’t that generally recognized as the fatal flaw of autocracy?
What I didn’t realize, until I saw the process of falling into autocracy from the inside, is that this flows both ways. The party and the leader demand loyalty and that everything support their rule. But also various groups have beliefs that fly in the face of expert opinion: evolution is not only wrong but evil, COVID isn’t serious and vaccines are bad, more guns make us safer, etc. A party with nothing much else to offer is happy to absorb and cater to any group they can get, so they accept these fringe groups. The big example is fossil fuels. Accepting that they produce harmful pollutants and global warming would mean a loss of huge profits. So the industry donates heavily toward molding public opinion and to any party that will have them and support their selfish interests. That’s how we end up with Jim Inhofe and snowballs on the Senate floor. Eventually the party becomes a coalition of groups denying various aspects of reality and eager to accommodate other loons to get power.
Loyalty over reality flows upward as well as downward. The party and the leader respect their adherents’ and donors’ unreality and the whole thing drifts off into cloud cuckoo land. We’ve watched it happen.
@inhumans99:
As Dr. Taylor points out, our system requires two, and only two, parties. Unless somehow a third party forms and displaces one of the current two, we desperately need the Republican Party to reacquire a grip on the handrail of reality. But the only way to make that happen is to beat them badly at the polls, again and again.
@inhumans99:
It would be on brand for El Taco to do just that.
The US imports around 6.5 million barrels of oil per day. Partly because of its high energy demands, partly because some of the oil it produces cannot be refined inside the country. So, raising oil prices would raise gas and other energy prices, unless he went full laissez-faire capitalist and imposed price controls.
I almost wish he’d do it.
@Kathy:
No one’s tried that in the US since the Texas Railroad Commission eventually failed. The Texas and Oklahoma producers followed the TRC production allocations for many years because they got tired of boom and bust. And the East Texas fields were sufficiently dominant to swing the price. About 1970 the TRC told the oil companies to open the spigots and… nothing happened. The fields had reached the point where they couldn’t drill enough new wells fast enough to offset the production decline in existing wells (see also, creaming curves).
@Michael Cain:
Over the past thirty years or so, new oil fields have been found and developed. Brazil is kind of big, around 4 million daily barrels, but there are others of varying production capacity.
Therefore reducing some production no longer has the effect it used to have.
One thing about such people is they won’t contradict him in public, much. And that’s huge, because El Taco seems to believe everyone is as stupid and ignorant as he is (per my own observation the other day, most of those who voted for him are dumber and more ignorant than he is).
Today he claimed Russia and China are hell bent on taking Greenland, and the latter can’t do a thing to defend itself. Whereas he, personally and not meaning America, can stop them.
I don’t need to explain NATO here. And, fortunately, I don’t even need to explain Nato to mad Vlad or Xi.
Someone needs to explain NATO to El Taco. Not just for the obvious reasons, like he’s obligated to aid Greenland, but the value of NATO for America and especially for Europe.
Denmark has been placing troops in Greenland, and there will be military exercises on the island shortly. Several European countries are taking part (Canada ought to contribute, too), including Germany and France. It’s not a massive show of force, but did you ever expect Europe to stage any kind of show of force for the US?
This is really getting serious.
@gVOR10: Dr. Taylor has also pointed out that political parties in the US are kind of empty shells that have no meaning unto themselves, and no means of enforcing any particular policy or opinion whatsoever.
So the only corrective is for the Republicans to lose, lose hard, and lose repeatedly. At which point the Republican Party will reinvent itself while pretending it never was those things, it’s the Party of Lincoln.
I’m not sure how much losing is necessary. They have been losing hard here in California for nearly 20 years. Since Prop 187. I’m still not sure the craziness is gone, though. Maybe it’s just a different kind of crazy? But it surely has swayed Mexican-Americans in California to spurn the Republicans, which otherwise would be a fairly natural fit.
The only Republican to win a statewide race here since Prop 187 is Arnold, and he was avowedly pro-immigrant, being one himself. However, he got lucky with the recall, since he could never win a Republican primary with that attitude.