Growing up in Venezuela, I watched the socialist strongman Hugo Chávez use the politics of resentment to turn a rich country to ruins. He promised an oil-funded utopia, but we got hunger, blackouts and a murderous dictatorship.
I know what happens when legitimate economic frustration becomes moral condemnation — and when citizens are encouraged to blame their problems on a single group that is supposedly taking something from them.
It is why I’m increasingly alarmed as I see the same socialist ideas of popular resentment becoming increasingly popular in America today.
A recent survey found that 53% of young adults have a favorable view of socialism — and 38% view communism positively.
It’s hard to fathom this reality given that this ideology caused 100 million deaths in the 20th century.
Meanwhile, capitalism has lifted a billion people out of poverty in the 21st century alone. But only 45% of young adults in America view it favorably.
How could this be?
I know what they say. I used to say it too. They claim that democratic socialism isn’t the same kind of socialism that devastated my homeland — or Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, China, the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and so on. Venezuela wasn’t really ever socialist, so they say, and the reason Cuba is poor is because of US sanctions.
They’re wrong.
Venezuelans didn’t vote in 1998 to become Cuba, or even a socialist country — and we, too, dismissed warnings from Cubans who told us Chávez was not the moderate democrat (and capitalist) he presented himself to be.
Chávez didn’t use the word “socialism” in his first six years in office. When he ran for office in 1998, his rhetoric was tame compared to the anti-capitalist ideas spouted by today’s DSA.
But he grew increasingly radical and eventually called his movement “socialism of the 21st century,” as he pledged to make Venezuela more like Cuba. He expropriated companies and pulled a TV station off the air. He imposed price controls and opened government grocery stores. He fired oil executives who challenged his direct takeover of the industry on live TV. He corrupted the judiciary, put political loyalists in charge of the military and brought in Cuban security operatives to sniff out dissident generals.
Before Chávez, Venezuelans had legitimate grievances about inequality and corruption. Chávez directed their anger at the rich, Yankee imperialists, business owners and the journalists who dared to question his policies.
Socialist policies caused massive food shortages, leading to rampant childhood malnutrition and starvation. It caused the largest peacetime economic collapse in modern world history, and the largest displacement crisis in the history of the Western Hemisphere.
Yet somehow socialism is gaining popularity in the US.
I understand why: Historical evidence doesn’t matter as much as political slogans mouthed by charismatic politicians, which are what sway voters.
Once a movement convinces its supporters that a particular group is not merely pursuing its interests but actively harming society, increasingly extreme policies and even persecution become easier to justify.
America’s political debates are increasingly falling into that dynamic, and New York politics serve as a great example of it.
I was particularly troubled when Mayor Mamdani filmed a video outside billionaire Ken Griffin’s Manhattan penthouse to promote a tax on second homes. He described the measure as targeting the “richest of the rich.” Griffin later said he believed the video had put him in harm’s way, and it probably did. What I found particularly unsettling is that Mamdani was turning a private citizen into a target of resentment. It reminded me of Chavez pointing at buildings and ordering their expropriations on live TV when I was a kid.
And the use of resentment to accumulate power is not a problem exclusive to the left. The right also engages in toxic populism, with its own set of villains used as a cover for policies that erode our fundamental rights. Instead of billionaires, landlords, and corporations, they go after immigrants, “globalists” and the media — like Chávez.
As Marcel Granier, the director of Venezuela’s most important TV station, Radio Caracas Television, which Chávez forced off the air in 2007, noted in a new documentary that I narrated about the collapse of my country, “Totalitarianism isn’t a switch you flip.” It’s “a process that gradually takes over.”
It takes over when we decide that defeating our enemies is all that matters. Listen to Venezuelans like me who saw their homelands gradually destroyed. We’ve seen this movie before. It doesn’t end well.
Germania Rodriguez Poleo is a New York-based journalist and narrator of Reason’s upcoming film, “Escaping Venezuela,” which premieres in New York on Oct. 13.
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