As a new student at UW-Madison, my email was apparently automatically signed up to numerous distribution lists without my knowledge. As a result, I received an email the other day with the subject “Socialism is destroying my home country. Be careful, Americans.” The email linked to an opinion piece in the Madison Federalist by Javier Cardozo titled, “I Lived Under Socialism. That’s How I Know It’s Dangerous.” Always excited for well-reasoned criticism of my beliefs, I decided to give the piece a read.
Unfortunately, I was sorely disappointed.
Cardozo opens his piece by telling us that his home country, Venezuela, is “the perfect example” of acountry that adopts socialist policies and ideas. He then laments that he sees many Americans wrongly supporting policies that would bring the same hardship that Venezuela has suffered.
Cardozo gives us a brief explanation of how Venezuela ended up under the control of strongman and self- described socialist Hugo Chávez and then walks through several “socialist” acts that he claims took place under the Chávez regime. He then concludes that anyone who believes in socialist ideas ought look at Venezuela, ending by advising Americans to be careful because “the ideas that leftists want to implement here would break the country.”
Cardozo’s conclusion makes several strong assertions; however, the preceding piece fails to establish any of them. How did socialism destroy Venezuela? I’m not sure. Cardozo never tells me.
Let’s just assume all of the facts Cardozo gives are true. Let’s even accept, for the sake of argument, his seeming interpretation of “socialism” as being any policy that pushes for economic or social equality.
Even taking all of Cardozo’s claims as true, his argument does not follow.
Cardozo gives, as best I can decipher, three key factual claims that he uses as examples against socialism.
The first is that the state seized property from private landholders, often leading to less productivity. The second is that the state used various strategies to silence enemies of the regime. The third is that the regime leaders used “social missions” to steal money and indoctrinate people. Though he mentions other grievances offhandedly, these three seem to be his three core claims.
Cardozo spends considerable time discussing the state’s seizure of property. He gives perhaps his strongest argument here, that the mass seizure of property led to lower agricultural productivity. Cardozo also, however, provides the hole in his own reasoning. While he seems to want to attribute the productivity loss straightforwardly to socialism, he does not charge decreased productivity to socialism or to the seizure of property itself but rather to “poor management, lack of technical expertise, and inadequate investment.”
One can raise the obvious counterfactual: had the state had better management, more technical expertise, and adequate investment, would productivity not have suffered? One could certainly imagine that a more capable and better run government, that of the United States perhaps, would fare much better with property seizures. Cardozo’s argument gives no mechanism for disputing this, nor does his argument hold socialism at fault for productivity loss.
Cardozo’s second primary claim revolves around the repression of political opposition. Cardozo repeatedly points to acts that he says were taken to suppress and silence enemies of the regime. Again, even if we take these claims as factual, what does this have to do with socialism? Socialism and authoritarianism are two different things. Socialism and corruption are two different things. One could certainly make an argument explaining how socialist beliefs encourage the repression of political enemies, but Cardozo does not do this.
He points to several strategies for political repression and silencing opposition. But are these facts of socialism, or facts of Chávez’s regime and its efforts to maintain power? Cardozo seems to connect the two, but we’re given no reason to believe that a desire for equality will necessarily lead to political repression. Cardozo seems to presuppose this to be evident without ever establishing it.
Thirdly, Cardozo tells us about the regime’s “social missions.” “Social missions” seems to mean any number of policies aimed at the social good, namely public education and public housing. He then suggests that these policies were bad because the education was “terrible and more oriented toward indoctrination than acquiring knowledge,” and because public housing was “of poor quality” and used as leverage to prevent political dissent.
Is Cardozo suggesting that all public services are necessarily of poor quality? That all public education devolves into indoctrination? That all public services are used as tools to control the public? He is, of course, writing as a student of the University of Wisconsin. As a student at this public university, Cardozo has free access to Madison’s public transportation system. He can receive medical care for free at the University Health Services. It seems to me that Cardozo’s issue then is not with public services in the abstract, but rather with the execution of Chávez’s government’s public services, which may very well deserve the criticism he gives it.
Through all three claims, we see a recurring problem. Cardozo sees mismanagement, governmental abuse, corruption, or some other problem with Chávez’s government, and, without explanation, asserts these problems to be true of “socialism.” Cardozo’s argument gives no pause to the idea that a better run, better resourced, better-established government with stronger democratic institutions could execute the policies which Cardozo calls socialism without all of the bad, without the poor quality, without the corruption, without the authoritarianism. Cardozo’s entire piece is about how socialism caused all of Venezuela’s woes, but we’re never actually given that argument.
This failure makes his framing all the more interesting. Cardozo attempts to use the instability and poverty of Venezuela to advance an ideological argument about the United States. However, he ignores specific actions that the United States has taken which have contributed to, albeit not necessarily caused, much of Venezuela’s hardships. Cardozo makes no mention of US sanctions against Venezuela which have directly contributed to Venezuela’s poverty. Cardozo does not discuss how US political interference in Venezuela has directly contributed to Venezuela’s political instability. And he makes no effort at all to address American military intervention in Venezuela. While none of these on their own explain
Venezuela’s current situation, it strikes me as odd that someone seeking to assess the current state of Venezuela would leave them out.
What, then, do we make of Cardozo’s argument? Perhaps we can read it as one highlighting the danger of undermining elections, breaking institutions, weakening checks and balances, and propping up strongmen. I wonder what Cardozo and the Madison Federalist would have to say about that.
