It feels like Chile is sleep-walking into a communist presidency, with every rejection of the status quo, communism seems to become more acceptable, or less alarming, to a larger fraction of Chileans. Maybe not sleep-walking exactly, maybe it’s a convulsion into a communist presidency, but either way, the final destination seems to be a good probability that Daniel Jadue will actually be president. After the last elections, and the round rejection of the right and centre left, I strongly revised my beliefs about the probability of a Jadue win, to somewhere between 30-40%. In my view, most Chileans, including friends of mine that are actually opposed to Jadue or any other communist on matter of principle, seem to be a bit too nonchalant about him winning the presidency. They think it will never happen, their argument seems to be that no one really likes communists in Chile and they have never had that much support. I think they are wrong, and, as with any random negative outcome, they downplay both the probability of it occurring, and its cost. That is to say, people who have some sort of bias towards the status quo, not in terms of preferences but in terms of expectations, significantly downplay the risk of a negative outcome. In plain English; most Chileans think that there is a low probability that Jadue will win, and, even if he wins, it won’t be that bad.
Downplaying the outcome:
So first let’s tackle the downplaying of the risks of a Jadue presidency. I think there are three reasons for this; 1. Lack of knowledge 2. The history of the communist party of Chile. 3. The right’s constant carping about Venezuela
On lack of knowledge; I think the average Chilean voter does not have a good grasp of the history of communism around the world. They have heard something about the Berlin wall and the Soviet Union, but they don’t really know why the system is bound to fail and the enormous cost in human lives and misery that it wrought in Europe and elsewhere. My impression is that they group communism with other left-leaning movements, and that they consider it just a bit to the left of social-democrats, or even on par with social-democracy. I don’t know why this is so; if I were to speculate, I would guess that there is not a lot of room in high school curricula on the subject, and, given the history of Chile, teachers may have some general affinity for left-leaning movements. This is not only true of teachers, if you spend enough time on Chilean twitter, you will find examples of leading public figures waxing nostalgic about the Soviet Union.
On the history of the communist party: Given that the Chilean dictatorship was right-wing, Chile is in the grips of the “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” syndrome. It reminds me of the popularity of communism in some countries in Eastern Europe after the war; communists fought against fascism, tooth and nail, and in some countries were the only ones that actually did so. While other, more nationalist forces, tried to make deals with the Nazis/fascists, communists did the only morally acceptable thing, they refused to bow to the occupation and put their lives on the line. Naturally, at the end of the war they maintained this reserve of goodwill from the population for having done so, a fact that took 45 years and a whole lot of misery to undo. That is why communist governments harped endlessly about their war effort, it was the reason why they held power in the first place.
Chile, to me, seems to be repeating this mistake. The communist party of Chile was one of the few parties that refused to deal with the dictatorship, that suffered the most under it, and that came out morally clean. So they maintain a reserve of goodwill in the population for having done so. However, at the end of the dictatorship, there was no great support for them electorally, which may have to do with the fact that the opening of Chile coincided with the fall of the Berlin wall and the still fresh memory of the economic disaster of the Allende years. Both of these facts seem to have faded away now, and Jadue is being clever in using the slogan “sin miedo” (without fear) to assuage Chileans. He knows that the older generation have a particular aversion to communism but the younger generation has no such qualms. His campaign wants to lull Chileans into a sense of compliance, implying that there is nothing that links him with the sins of communism past. In a way he is saying: “Relax, this won’t turn into Hungary 1955 or Czechoslovakia 1968, we’re just going to do some more redistribution and help you out, we have nothing to do with the USSR and all that”.
On that front, he is most likely right; Chile won’t turn into those places if it elects a communist. There will most likely not be tanks in the streets of Santiago executing anti-communist protesters. There are many reasons for this, primarily the fact that communism has generally failed around the world and the cold war is over. There is no USSR to give financial and military support to communist regimes and China does not seem particularly interested in doing so either. So I do not think Chile is running a huge risk on that front. So, what’s the problem then? Well, first, not having tanks on the street does not qualify a movement for being democratically elected. It seems trivial, but it is something that I’ve had to remind people of. Second, at least for me, the economic disaster of communism around the world is mostly due to the fact that, in itself, communism is a tragically horrible economic system. It cannot abide any market activity, it has no tools to deal with the complexity of trade, markets, pricing, inventory. Well, it has one tool, central planning, and it always, always, fails. So my problem with Jadue is not tanks on the streets, it is his steadfast belief in a system that has shown itself to be a dead end, a lost cause, a useless answer to the myriad of problems that the world faces. To me this feels like a trivial thing to say, something that I thought that everyone understood. Living in Chile I am starting to doubt it. In my view, someone who remained a communist after 1989 is a religious person, someone who belongs to a cult[1]. I have no other way of understanding it.
At this point in time, Chile needs to do a lot of redistribution, something has to give, no country can survive with these levels of inequality, it just can’t be done. Communists will try to do redistribution, but they will fail miserably, it is not in their nature to understand market mechanisms and try to defend wealth creation while redistributing. Anyone who does, cannot, by definition, be called a communist. I have communist friends whom I respect. They envision a communist future, but have yet to tell me how to get there convincingly. It is possible that Jadue calls himself a communist but will govern like a social-democrat, but I find that highly unlikely. I make this claim based on the way he argues; for example he has already mentioned the nationalization of the privately held pension plans, which seems to indicate that he will be a run of the mill Latin American communist, not the Chilean version of Mujica or Lula that some people imagine.
On the right crying wolf: I have made this argument before, and I do not want to repeat it endlessly, but the Chilean right has a bad habit of screaming Venezuela any time someone tries to do a bit of redistribution in Chile. It is a horrible practice, and they have done it so many times that now, when Venezuela is an actual non-zero probability event, no one will listen. This has given rise to a series of journalists/pundits who, based on the behaviour of the right, tend to dismiss any criticism as mere fear mongering, or, as Chileans call it, “el cuco”. This is also silly, any public policy has its costs, redistribution is costly, but countries do it because it is necessary to maintain cohesion in their polity. It is impossible to govern a country that is so segregated by income and even race as Chile is, it can’t survive. So governments redistribute despite the costs, but to actually mention them does not make one a fearmonger, just someone who is willing to state things clearly. Now the exaggeration on the part of the right is also silly, but nowadays anyone who points out flaws is painted with the broad brush a “Chicago boy”. These pundits are only serving to polarize Chile further, and are not helping things.
Downplaying the Probability:
I think there are 3 reasons as to why people underestimate the probability of a Jadue win, all of them having to do with the large shift in Chilean politics during the last year. I think most people thought that the balance of the past 30 years would maintain, and for every crazy leftie who thinks the constitution is a wish list of public policy, there would be a loonie right winger who thinks a constitution is an imposition on his/her liberty. I am not saying that this was wrong ex-ante, I thought the same way, that’s why I voted “apruebo”, but ex-post this does not seem to be the case; the centre did not hold, and the convention seems a bit out of joint. However, I thought about it afterwards and updated my beliefs. I am writing this post as a way for others to do the same. So why do I think that such updating is in order? Well, I think the problems of the centre left and the right are much deeper than I previously thought, and I learned three things after the elections of May;
1. the right’s inability to leave its three comunas and its segregation from the general population, 2. the right’s lack of meritocracy 3. The center left is slowly eating itself.
On the first point; I think Daniel Mansuy wrote a really good column that I cannot access right now, but the gist of it was that the right is basically serving a very small portion of the population, or at least it bases its politics on the inhabitants of the three comunas. The right is only talking to itself and to people that look like itself. It has very little pull in the rest of the country. The right was not prepared to take on the estallido, because it is not prepared to understand it properly. I actually know people who voted for Piñera and are fully on board with the estallido; these people do exist, and the right seems to want to do everything to alienate them. This can be seen in the slate of candidates that it offers, Lavin, Desbordes or Sichel. I actually like Briones, he is a breath of fresh air compared to the tired old faces that UDI furnishes, but, as I am told by many, and as the polls suggest, he won’t have much of a pull. My impression is that UDI is run by a bunch of empty suits who still think it’s still 1989 and they can’t get their head out of their ass long enough to check out the rest of Chile. Lavin is a poor choice, he represents a long gone past. Will I vote for him if it is between him and Jadue? Probably. But I will do so holding my nose and taking a long shower afterwards. It reminds me a bit of the election of 2016 in the US, some people voted against Trump, not for Clinton.
The lack of meritocracy is a Chile-wide problem, but the right embodies it like no one else. To paraphrase my favourite Lannister: “they confuse what is with what should be”. They have some sense of self satisfaction with their station, almost like an aristocratic view of the world. They think their position is almost like a God given right, and not the product of accident and the injustice Chile was founded in. This permeates Chilean society, and is, at least for a foreigner, extremely unpleasant. I would imagine that for the people who live this reality every day, it would be infuriating. Foreigners live outside of the norms of Chilean society to some extent, our jobs largely do not depend on our last name or our family crest. For Chileans not in belonging to the group, being discriminated continuously for being too dark or not having a nana, the sense of humiliation is deep. I think some sense of balance has to be restored, and the right, for example, could have chosen someone like Rodolfo Carter to be its standard bearer, a popular mayor of a large comuna who won it twice. Why they didn’t is a matter of lack of meritocracy and lack of original thinking. He left UDI, citing disagreements, but I suspect he got tired of the same old faces telling him the wrong things.
The centre-left is in a bad place. I have been saying for a while that the left in Chile is eating itself, and the elections of May were the cherry on top. Yes, the left won most of the seats, but it is not the organized party-based left of the Concertación or NM. It is mostly the unaffiliated left, the left that rejected the past 30 years, and this left is not disciplined, its program is undefined and it can easily be swallowed by the extreme. Although it is early days, and the pronouncements of constitutional convention winners should be taken with a huge grain of salt, what is coming out is not exactly promising. The established centre-left allowed itself to be taken for a ride by the extremes, which rejected its offer of a coalition for the next presidential elections. It looked weak and unorganized, and it made itself the target of ridicule. This probably happened because it failed to defend its great record of the past 30 years, it looked apologetic for a job that, I think, was well done. It feels like it convinced itself it had made a huge mistake by governing the country for the past 30 years. The centre left now looks like that 50 year old guy who goes to clubs and debases himself by trying to look like a twenty year old. He would probably have a better chance if he was just himself and avoided looking like a fool.
This ran a bit longer than I had planned, and these are first thoughts, not the final answer on anything. I am willing to be corrected on mistakes, it is possible I am overreacting, and my personal experience is clouding my judgement. Communists rarely win power through democratic means, and Chile may be no exception. However I think that there is a real distortion in Chile when it comes to communism and I think most people on the left will refuse to vote for the right, even if the choice on the left is a communist. I also think that the Trump effect is at play here; when pollsters call and ask who people are willing to vote for, there may be some unwillingness to reveal their true preferences, something Timur Kuran calls preference falsification. So I think that the true support that Jadue has is underestimated. I hope I’m wrong, although with every day that passes my commie radar is pinging like crazy.
[1] Some will object and point out that Žižek is a communist, and yeah he is. But I would find it hard to believe that he would actually push for a communist running Chile today.
