’Tis but a Scratch

Nothing to See in Caracas

More than a decade ago, Maduro was chosen by his predecessor, President Hugo Chávez—the socialist populist who dominated his Venezuelan politics from 1998 until his death in 2013—to replace him. Like Chávez, Maduro ruled as an autocrat—and drove the country’s economy to ruin. Venezuela’s abundance of oil once made it among Latin America’s wealthiest countries; now, about 82 percent of the population lives in poverty.

After Maduro claimed victory in July, protests broke out across Venezuela, and the regime responded with mass arrests. The U.S. and dozens of other Western countries have recognized González’s victory and called on Maduro to step down—but the authoritarian powers of China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba are still backing him, while the regional players of Brazil and Mexico are working to negotiate a way out of the impasse.

So how long can Maduro hang on?

Moisés Naím—Venezuela’s former minister of trade and industry, and the former director of its Central Bank—is a distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington and the author of The Revenge of Power. To Naím, Maduro can still count on two sources of power: international support and domestic repression. China is backing Caracas in multilateral organizations, while Cuba is effectively managing the Venezuelan economy—and security forces are crushing the opposition at home. Still, Naím says, the resounding electoral defeat caught Maduro and the government by surprise; and video footage spreading on social media of authorities torturing people from the opposition suggests what such violence often suggests: The regime is anxious …

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• “There’s a new reality for the poor now: hunger and lack of jobs. It’s dismal enough that more than 7.5 million Venezuelans have left the country. Every young person with the means to go is getting out. That’s not just an economic downturn or some business cycle. It’s something else. Corruption, repression, and ineptitude have devastated this country’s economy.”
• “[Venezuela’s autocratic friends] are as much mercenaries as allies. Their support is transactional. That said, Maduro can now count on support from a superpower: China. Beijing supports him in multilateral organizations, public statements, official visits, and so on. With such a powerful backer, the standoff over the election could turn into a kind of frozen conflict. It’s possible that nothing will change for a long time.”
• “The Maduro regime is a dictatorship, period. There are no democratic checks and balances. Venezuela’s Supreme Court reports to Maduro. The National Electoral Council reports to Maduro. The executive and judicial branches depend entirely on Maduro. The economy also depends on Maduro. The repression? That’s Maduro, too.”

That’s why we look at it the way a detective would: Everything The Signal does starts with good questions, and every answer leads us to more of them.

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Politics and the English Language—and the Paranoid Style

The claim quickly became a meme on the American right and—unusually for a Trump provocation—the subject of at least some earnest conversation beyond the right.

Of course, it’s not a coup—on any established meaning of the word: Biden stepped down, albeit under coordinated pressure; the party is uniformly behind Harris—an elite decision, in the first instance, but one that’s proved enormously popular across the party’s tens of millions of members; … and there was no evident threat of violence.

It’s not a coup, but it is—as some Democrats have taken to saying—weird.

It may once have been normal for party insiders to pick U.S. presidential nominees in what journalists have since imagined as smoked-filled rooms; but what’s happened here is unprecedented in contemporary American politics.

It may also be true that Harris has been formally first in line to replace Biden as president since January 20, 2021; but that’s a different thing—with a different process to it—and the last time Harris did run for the Democratic nomination herself, in 2020, she could hardly have done worse.

Now, it seems, her handlers are advising her to play it safe and avoid speaking to reporters, even about the core of her policy platform. That may well change after Harris accepts the nomination and it’s no longer possible for anything to go sideways at the Democratic National Convention. But the weirdness may linger—even if no one’s ultimately done anything wrong.

—Gustav Jönsson

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