Don’t look now, but there are some very unhappy people with the state of the social revolution in Venezuela.  As Ramparts has reported before, the Venezuelan revolution of late has been more fueled by hunger than the socialist philosophic concept of equality of outcome, though it is a foregone conclusion that, at this time, everyone is equally hungry.  Normally two to three million people spilling out into the street for something other than an international sport victory is not a promising sign for a country’s ensconced leadership, but El Presidente Maduro and his ruling thugs are a particularly hardy and resistant bunch.  There remains something unique about socialist dictators, in that they seem immune to the typical pressures that would normally cause a more democratically elected leadership to think the time to resign was imminent.  The means of daily survival are critical ingredients for control – the more scarce the ingredients, the more dependence of the population on the rapidly diminishing resource.  The secondary lever for all such socialist autocracies is control of the military, with troops well fed and troop leaders well pensioned.  For autocrats like Maduro, the twin images of omniscience and omnipotence must always be present to maintain the veneer of confident immunity to “risks” to the glorious revolution. Maduro must present the synthesis of the Man of the People and the Man of Steel.  Kevin Williamson of NRO may have devised the best description ever written of inevitable transformation of these would Stalins:

In most cases, the revolution begins with a peasant prelude and reaches its crescendo with some variation on the theme of Napoleon; socialist revolutions in particular have a peculiar habit of beginning with a man in a work shirt and ending up with a man dressed like Cap’n Crunch. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro does look a sight in his beauty-pageant sash and Mr. T-worthy gold chains.

Inevitably as the peoples’ hunger grows and their desire for spectacle and fear for authority diminishes, the sashes and gold chains, the generalissimo outfits, no longer have their projected power.  Venezuela, the South American country most closely aligned with concept of societal success prior to 1995, with a deeply educated  and prosperous middle class,  in twenty short years under the socialist schemers of Chavez and his pale imitation Maduro, has been plunged into the abyss of total breakdown.  The only functioning market is the black one, and the most legitimate vote undertaken by Venezuelans in the last five years has been the vote of three million citizens with their feet as they left the country hoping to salvage their tattered lives, once supposedly liberated by socialist visions, now intensely focused on simple survival.

Maduro has walked his tightrope with tenacity, but cracks are widening and the chance for real violence, and potentially  Ceausescu style violent overthrow grows.  The growing crisis has many risks beyond the ruling Venezuelan Politburo, and the countries are finally belatedly  attempting to do the right thing.  The United States this week pulled diplomatic recognition from Maduro’s ruling clique and recognized instead the President of the National Assembly, Juan Guiado.  Guiado himself is somewhat of a stand-in for the Maduro opponent, Leopoldo Lopez, under house arrest since opposing Maduro in 2014.  The second important step the US took was offering Maduro safe passage out of the country.  Dictators always have to weigh the continuing ability to horde assets from the country they lead, while risking the grotesque amounts they have already shepherded out of the country into safe havens. Trying to hold onto both of course risks ending up with neither, and falling into the hands of a very, very angry mob.

As the street protests grow in intensity, so does the dimwittedness of the leftist elites in the United States, who cling to the notion that this once more horrendous example of the epic failure of the socialist vision to improve anything for anybody, is evidence of the need to take another try and get it right.  Socialist utopian visions cling to the notion that the missing ingredient is the vision minus the corruption, only to be blind to the obvious that it is the vision itself that is corrupted.  For the idealistic mental snowdrifts that are newly elected US Representatives  Alexandra Ocasio- Cortez and Ilhan Omar, and other examples of the young American generation’s citadels of lighter than air intellect, the United States remains chief corrupter by its success with a capitalist model, and desperately needs an enforced cleansing, towards the world of Venezuela.  The more cynical older generation representatives of the socialist dream like Bernie Sanders and the Hollywood elite, look instead for a more staid revolution, that would preserve their ability to get theirs, but secure the redistribution of wealth and eliminate individual incentive from, as Williamson so craftily describes in his NRO article , as the “Kulaks” .

We will need to watch carefully over the next weeks as the usual snakes in the grass position themselves to take political advantage of Venezuela’ desperate straits.   For the long suffering people of Venezuela, hopefully there is a way out of the mess without further catastrophe and violence,  that gets them their freedom back.

In dark times,  one always looks for the Angel in the Whirlwind.