Where Are We [The Opposition], Really?
Where are we, really?
Well, from an economist's point of view,
it's not hard to characterize the rut we're in: essentially, it's a
Coordination Failure. Whether you're an abstentionist or a
participationist, I think most of us can agree than either strategy
only makes sense if everyone joins in. Tendentially, I'm a
participationist, but I fully realize that having everyone abstain is
better than having half of us participate and the other half abstain.
Similarly, I imagine most abstentionists think it would be better to
have everyone participate than to have half of us abstain. But we have
no mechanism to settle the debate in favor of one position or the
other, and so we seem inexorably headed towards the indescribably
boneheaded Nash Equilibrium.
Why is this happening? The textbook
answer is that we don't have coordination mechanisms sturdy enough to
enforce convergence on one of the two positions. That's both right and
not at all helpful. Why don't we have those mechanisms? And why doesn't
debate lead us toward convergence? Come to think of it, why is the
intra-oppo debate so vicious, so self-defeating? How exactly did we get
into this mess? Those are the better questions...and it's here that the
analysis gets really, really depressing.
First, we have to own
up: there is something very, very wrong with the way the opposition
deals with itself, how it talks internally and seeks to work problems
out. That situation may have come about in the context of Chávez, but I
think it's a cop-out to blame it on Chávez...even in the midsts of
battle with the most ruthless of enemies, some wounds are
self-inflicted. And the opposition's sheer inability to coordinate -
or, to put it differently, to hold a conversation with itself that
leads to coordination - is a self-inflicted wound.
I remember,
some time in 2002, hearing Roberto Giusti argue explicitly that Chávez
was so dangerous that journalists "could not afford" to be impartial
towards his government. "I cannot be impartial between democracy and
dictatorship," Giusti said. Lots of oppo journos were taking a similar
line back then, and we all stood up and cheered for them. It all
sounded ever so brave, so gallant, remember? We were so caught up in
the drama of the moment, we didn't stop to think through how radical a
position that was, and how dangerous its implications. We should have.
Why?
Because decisions are only as good as the information that's available
to those who make them. To the extent that that information is
complete, impartial and accurate, it will give rise to decisions that
produce the consequences intended. To the degree that it isn't, it will
give rise to decisions that don't.
Now, what was Roberto
Giusti really saying back in 2002? He was saying that the information
the media publish should no longer be judged by the normal standards of
journalistic ethics. Questions of newsworthiness, impartiality,
confirmability and public interest would be set aside, and information
would be judged by its usefulness in helping achieve an overarching,
transcendent political goal: overthrowing the budding dictatorship.
Henceforth, when a reporter arrived at a newsroom with a story, the
first thing his editor would ask him would be not whether it was true,
or whether it was new, or whether it had been confirmed, but rather
whether it would help get rid of Chávez.
This new conception of
the media's role meant that journalists would abdicate their
responsibility to "hold up a mirror to society," to produce a space
where society is able to see itself, warts and all, and to recognize
its own reality as fully as possible. Henceforth, the media would serve
as a trick mirror - reflecting only those parts of reality that it
judged would further an ulterior end. That the image such a mirror
produces is deeply distorted is tautological: in this context, the
distortion is the point. And do notice that this isn't some wild
conspiracy theory: this is the understanding of their own role that
many of the nation's leading journalists proudly and publicly embraced.
That
key figures in the oppo media openly endorsed this way of communicating
should've given us pause. That they thought of their ethical
obligations as a kind of "luxury", an added extra to be discarded when
it proved inconvenient, should've put us on guard. How would we react,
for instance, if a doctor took that kind of attitude towards his code of professional ethics?
But
we're Venezuelans, so the passion of the political moment overcame us.
And it's perfectly understandable. After all, Giusti and Colomina and
the rest of them more or less announced, "from now on, we're only going
to tell you what you want to hear." Who's going to object to that?
We
should've realized all along that decisions made on the basis of a
distorted understanding of reality can't be expected to produce the
outcomes intended by those making them. We shouldn't be surpsied that
the rise of openly partisan journalism set the stage for a series of
catastrophic oppo own goals.
Back in 2002, we didn't stop to
think through the risks, the potential costs involved in volunteering
to be lied to. We didn't stop to realize that with every story puffed
up out of all proportion because it made the government look bad, our
understanding of our own country would diverge just a little bit from
reality. We didn't think through the fact that, with every story buried
or ignored because it made the government look good, the distance
between the world as it is and the world as we think it is would grow.
Those
who warned about this process were dismissed as cryptochavistas or, at
the very least, as spoil-sports for busting our vibe at a time when all
we wanted to do was sing "y decimos síííííí a la esperanzaaaaaaa..."
So, it's true, we were systematically deceived...but it's also true
that we practically begged to be systematically deceived.
In the
systematically distorted mirror the Giusticialista media put in front
of us, everything was the way we wished it to be. We wished to live in
a country where everyone hated Chávez's guts, the media showed us a
country where everyone hated Chávez's guts. We wished to believe
everything the government did would backfire due to incompetence and
venality, the media showed us a country where everything the government
did backfired due to incompetence or venality.
That our
decision-making came to be dominated by wishful thinking shouldn't
surprise us. As the Globovisión mindset colonized the opposition
consciousness ever more completely, decisions come to be made on the
basis of means-ends relationships that found no correspondence in
reality (having generals camp out in Plaza Altamira will destabilize
the regime! refusing to vote in assembly elections will delegitimize
the government!)
All along, the oppo journo-punditocracy
believed that the key to getting rid of the regime was to establish,
beyond any possible doubt, that the public overwhelmingly rejected
Chávez. For a while, from 2001 to early 2004, that wasn't so hard to
establish: it was true.
But then reality threw the
punditocracy a curve ball it was entirely unprepared for: it changed.
In the second quarter of 2004, when the misiones started to make
themselves felt and Chávez's popularity started to pick up, the
punditocracy found itself up a political creek without an ethical
paddle.
Their reaction when faced with these changed
circumstances shouldn't surprise us: people like Giusti had been
perfectly frank about it for years. This guerra was most definitely avisada.
They lied. In the way that journalists and editors lie: not so much by
telling outright untruths, but by puffing up those elements of truth
that suit their objectives and playing down or ignoring those that
don't.
So the polls that showed Chávez gaining in 2004 weren't
reported, or were reported in a box on page 29, while any hint that the
Si campaign was doing well was an automatic six columns above the fold
on page one. The startling impact that the misiones had on barrio life became more familiar to readers of The Guardian or The New York Times than to readers of El Nacional or Notitarde.
The ongoing passion that many poor people felt for Chávez was
systematically downplayed. And little by little, day in and day out, we
as opposition supporters were deprived of the informational tools we
needed to understand what the hell was happening in our own society, in
our own country.
This whole juggernaut of distortions came to an
explosive head in the wee hours of the morning of August 16th, 2004,
when the Recall Referendum results were announced. Now, I want to be
clear here: what follows is not an argument about whether there was or
wasn't fraud in 2004, a question that I remain agnostic on. What
follows is a reflection about how and why the vast majority of
opposition supporters became totally convinced, beyond the slightest
shadow of a doubt, that there had been massive fraud and the election
had been stolen long before any evidence to back this up was available.
Because,
in the end, that was what was striking, wasn't it? We may look back now
and retroactively bolster our conviction that there was fraud on the
basis of analyses that were published much later, but the reality is
that we were just as certain at 5:10 a.m. on August 16th! When it came
to fraud allegations, the certainty came first: the evidence we could
wait for. So what interests me, more than the underlying question, is
the conditions for the production of that certainty, the mechanisms
that managed to convince us that something we had no proof of had to be
true, that our conception of the world didn't make any sense otherwise.
Looking
back, it's hardly surprising that oppo leaders rushed out to cry fraud
on the spot: nothing in their conceptual arsenal prepared them for the
possibility that they could lose fairly. Hundreds and hundreds of hours
of political propaganda - much of it mascarading as journalism, the
rest of it self-avowed - had been invested to convince anyone who
opposed Chávez that what was happening couldn't happen, not fairly,
anyway. So the claim of fraud was a necessity to preserve our whole
understanding of our social reality, and that understanding that had
been carefully crafted over years by people who had told us explicitly
that they considered impartial information a luxury we could not afford.
We've
been living with the consequences of these choices ever since.
Obviously, we didn't manage to overthrow the bastard: all we did was
fatally undermine our own ability to understand the society we live in,
to "think straight" about the political moment, and to agree on
strategies of resistance that make sense. Five years on, Roberto
Giusti's pledge doesn't look so gallant: turns out that what we
couldn't afford was systematically distorted communications.
What's
sad, though, what's really dismaying is that we don't even recognize
the situation we're in, because the people who brought it about - and
here I'm thinking much more of Miguel Henrique Otero and Alberto
Federico Ravell than of R. Giusti - are still in charge of our
communications. They have yet to issue anything like a mea culpa,
possibly because, having bought their own propaganda, they're the most
dissociated of the lot and genuinely can't grasp the scale of the
cognitive havoc their editorial lines have wreaked.
Five years
after Giusti's declaration of (the abandonment of his) principles,
we've pretty much lost our ability even to talk to each other without
biting one another's heads off. After half a decade of systematically
distorted communications, we can't even agree on a single version of
our contemporary history. We can't produce a shared understanding of
the reality around us that can serve as a platform for our political
action toward the future. And that, I think, is the real reason we
can't coordinate: if we can't agree on what is to be done, it's because
we can't agree where we are, or how we got here.
After years
of systematically distorted communications, of decisions we were sure
would have one effect and had another, of misplaced allegiances and
squandered reserves of trust, it's not surprising that a kind of all
encompassing nihilism has taken over opposition discourse, a kind of
quiescent, polymorphously disgusted but imprecisely directed wrath
based on a kind of existential disorientation that expresses itself in
an ironclad refusal to believe in anyone or anything again. That is the
legacy of Giusti's gallantry.
If it was just that we didn't
understand what's been happening in Venezuela, well, that would be bad,
but we could work it out. It's actually much worse than that. It's not
just that we don't understand what's been happening in Venezuela, it's
that we don't understand that we don't understand what's been happening
in Venezuela, and when you don't understand that you don't understand
something you're well and truly fucked, because you have no clear path
towards gaining an understanding of it. You don't see the need for it!
To
tell you the truth, Katy, that's the reason why I haven't been writing
much about politics, - or, at all, since that Oppo Harikiri post.
Together with Escualidus Arrechus's [a blog commentator] shrewd observation on how screwed
our political culture is, that poll knocked me into a state of near
catatonic depression about the state of our public sphere. The mountain
ahead of us just seems larger and more daunting every day: more and
more, chavista insanity seems more than fully mirrored by the craziness
on our side. It's kind of too much for me.
posted by Francisco @ 10/04/2007 03:19:00 AM
Dear Quico [Francisco],
Sorry it's taken me so long to reply to your
previous post, but I wanted to take my time before answering what, in
essence, is a debate in which both parties agree. Fundamentally, we
both agree on how frustrating it is to see our side caught up in a
useless debate on whether or not to participate. As for the opposition
media, we both agree that it does more harm than good. So what is there
to debate?
Lots. Because where you see reason for despair, I see
an opportunity to make us stronger, to make our positions more
coherent, to test our tolerance.
I've been on the record before
as saying that I don't think the elimination of Chavez's term limits is
necessarily a bad thing. My approach to the current state of rigor
mortis on our base electorate sort of points to that direction -
namely, that until the Chávez phenomenon has run its course, we're
better off not winning.
Don't get me wrong - obviously any
legitimate opportunity to unseat Chavez should be taken and exploited
to the max. However, all losses point to something, and in our case
losses point to the flaws in our side. Until we learn the lessons from
the bitter medicine that chavismo has supplied us with, we're better
off in the opposition. The country isn't, but we are.
Take, for
instance, April 13th, 2002. On that day, the opposition movement should
have learned a few things. One of them is that Chavez has the honest,
yet a bit fanatical, support of a large minority of the population.
Another is that we should never rely on the military to solve our
problems. And finally, we should have learned that unseating
governments by unconstitutional means is the kiss of death which takes
away legitimacy from all attempts to make our country a better, freer
place to live. Can we honestly say we have learned these lessons? Some
of us have, others of us have not.
In August of 2004 we learned
another lesson. That day we should have learned that unity in the
opposition is not a panacea, that the way the media paints a picture is
not always the way the country is. We should have learned that the
international community is not going to come and save us, and that we
should never, ever trust Chavez's electoral authorities. Finally, we
should have learned that there is a non-significant mass of people who
chavismo has enfranchised, people who had never come out to vote but
decided to do so for the first time because they honestly believe in
the process.
I think we were certainly the victims of
electoral shenanigans that day. I also think that it didn't make a
difference in the final outcome, and that international observers knew
about this and basically ok'ed a flawed referendum by assuming that
this was a case of a broken clock actually getting the time right. Can
we honestly say we have learned these lessons?
In December of
2005 we declined to participate in Congressional elections. That day we
should have learned that you can't prove fraud if you don't force the
other side to cheat. We should have also learned that massive
abstention may backfire on us, and that perhaps the only side we end up
punishing with our actions is our own. Have we learned all this?
I
think that abstaining that day may have been a mistake, but it was the
only politically viable option at the time given how the CNE was caught
lying about the secrecy of the vote. I also think that people have a
hard time believing this was the only reason parties decided to not
participate.
In 2006, the lesson should have been that no
matter how enthusiastic the crowds or how feverishly you campaign, you
can't defeat an electoral behemoth like Chavez with a disorganized,
improvised campaign. We don't need to think back much to remember that,
during last year's World Cup, with the elections five months away, the
opposition still didn't know who their candidate was going to be. We
should have also learned that opinion polls, more often than not, get
things right. Did we learn all this?
My point in writing this
laundry list of mistakes made and things unrealized is not only to
convey the idea that, until we learn these lessons, we won't get rid of
Chavez. What I'm believing more and more these days is that until these
lessons are learned, we don't deserve to get rid of Chavez.
I'm
convinced that Chavez and chavismo have changed Venezuelan politics,
yet Chavez seems to be the only politician who has understood this. The
poor in Venezuela have long been neglected, a fact few people dispute
these days. And Chavez has brought about a sense of empowerment in
people previously disenfranchised. Whether this empowerment is real or
not is beside the point - what matters is that they feel empowered.
I'm
convinced that this thing that has been engendered will make people
realize, sooner rather than later, that chavismo goes against the very
surge of citizen power that it thinks it has brought about. I'm also
convinced that, until chavismo runs out of financial weapons to feed
its populist project, we're better off getting ready for the true
battle.
It would have been unthinkable for a project like
Chavez's to gain power in the middle of the 1970s. But during that
time, the seeds of what we have now began to grow. Chavez and his
minions were in hibernation, waiting for their time, and it came in the
1989-1992 period. Perhaps now is our time to hibernate as well,
metaphorically speaking.
One of the lessons we still have not
learned - and here I include you, Quico, first and foremost - is to
appreciate our diversity. Yes, it is frustrating that we still have
abstentionists in our camp. But until we learn to embrace that debate,
until we learn to see that it's not, in your words, "fucking hopeless",
we will never be electable. After all, how can we convince the country
that we are the only way to reconciliation if we can't even tolerate
the people in our side who think differently? Only when we learn to
deal with the Marta Colomina's and Roberto Giusti's of our side, to the
point of them being able to tolerate us, will we be ready to take the
lead.
Quite frankly, as much as abstentionists may annoy me from
time to time, I understand their point and I see where they are coming
from. Abstention is a phenomenon, it is an integral part of the psyche
of our electoral base in the same way that the Tupamaros are an
integral part of the psyche of chavismo's base. But Chávez doesn't
attack the Tupamaros, he sort of tolerates them, tries to rein them in.
That is how you deal with the radicals on your side whose support you
need.
(And for all my abstentionist friends out there - don't
take it personally, but you *are* radical; we love you, but let's call
a spade a spade)
I have said this before and I really believe it
- I will outlive this. If chavismo defeats us ten, twenty or thirty
more times, fine, it had to happen. Had Germany gotten rid of Hitler in
1938, the world would be a very different place, but perhaps Germany
wouldn't be the civilized, modern country it is now, built on the
rubble of its own people's madness. History has its pace, and we should
learn to read it and not force it. In the meantime, the only productive
thing we can do is participate as much as we can and develop our
grassroots network. We've been given the wonderful gift of defeat -
let's use it to wisen up.
posted by Katy @ 10/09/2007 02:03:00 PM
