Bringing up Venezuela Is Not an Argument Against Socialist Policies

Bernie and AOC aren’t fighting for a socialist America, and what happened in Venezuela wasn’t a failure of socialism.

I’m not a socialist, but I constantly find myself defending socialists, because the critiques they receive are often so profoundly idiotic. The main criticism that’s been impossible to avoid lately? “Venezuela.” No, not a complex dissection of what exactly happened to Venezuela’s once-booming economy—simply bringing up the country of Venezuela as if doing so constitutes an argument.

Donald Trump recently utilized this line of attack in his State of the Union. He said that the United States condemns the “brutality of the Maduro regime” and that socialist policies have turned Venezuela “from being the wealthiest in South America into a state of abject poverty and despair.”

Now, I think we can all agree what is happening in Venezuela is horrific. Nicholás Maduro has done terrible things to his people. However, it wasn’t socialist policies that turned Venezuela into a “state of abject poverty and despair,” and there is zero risk of the United States following in Venezuela’s footsteps.

“Using the sad situation in Venezuela as a way of beating up on socialism is somewhere between ignorant and childish,” Richard Wolff, a professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, told me recently. “It takes your breath away — by the sheer stupidity of it. A student who wrote that kind of thing in an essay would be getting a bad grade even from a right wing professor, if they had any sense of history or reality.”

Wolff told me this is akin to blaming the dreadful things we see happening in countries like Saudi Arabia or the Philippines solely on capitalism. You could certainly argue aspects of capitalism have hurt the people who live in those countries, but it’s false and somewhat ridiculous to argue that their only problem is capitalism.

“No serious historian does this,” Wolff said. “This is ideological warfare masquerading as having something historically grounded to say.”

So what actually happened in Venezuela? It’s complicated, but I assure you the country didn’t become what it is today because it invested in universal healthcare or free tuition at public colleges. There are some key points to consider when we look at what happened in Venezuela:

The United States helped cause this mess. Ever since Hugo Chávez took power in the late 1990s—promoting certain socialist ideals and an anti-American ideology—the United States has been leading covert and overt operations against the Venezuelan government. Venezuela has more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. has tried its best to see that a friendly government would be in control of that oil. Other Latin American countries have dabbled in socialism, and they didn’t meet the same fate. Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Ecuador have all had socialist leaders, and they didn’t experience what Venezuela is experiencing today. Venezuela relied far too much on its oil industry. One of the main reasons Venezuela’s economy collapsed to this point is its once-thriving oil industry. The country essentially only exported oil for many years, and then oil prices took a dive in 2016. That and multiple other factors sent the economy into a downward spiral. As Wolff noted, “This is what we call a monoculture in economics. This is a society that has… proven itself unwilling or unable to diversify its industrial base. It remained dependent on the enormous oil supply that it has.” Corruption has been a major factor in Venezuela’s downfall. Nicholás Maduro, like Chávez before him, has led an administration rife with corruption. Both of them certainly gave lip service to being men of the people, but greed and the desire for power define their administrations. One of Chávez’s treasurers was actually sent to prison for taking over $1 billion in bribes. A group of former Venezuelan officials were charged last year with operating a $1.2 billion international money-laundering scheme. One case against Maduro himself claims he has defrauded his country to the tune of $2.5 billion.

Venezuela didn’t fall apart simply because it adopted some socialist policies, and the United States is not going to end up like Venezuela if it adopts socialist policies. We certainly have corruption and foreign adversaries working against us, but we’re much more powerful, and we don’t have an entire economy that is reliant on one product. Furthermore, a total of zero prominent politicians are pushing for what most Americans would consider to be a fully socialist economy.

To be clear, there are many different kinds of socialism, but when Americans think about socialism, they tend to think of this communist/socialist system where we’ve seized the means of production, everything belongs to the state and everyone makes the same amount of money. Politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are certainly not fighting for that.

What politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are fighting for would be more akin to a European social democracy. That’s why Bernie brings up countries like Denmark and Sweden when he defends his policies, which are countries that are typically labeled as social democracies. These are countries that have a capitalist system and a strong social safety net. You can make a lot of money there, but the poor also have access to free healthcare, free college, free childcare, etc. What our socialist politicians are fighting for is simply a more level playing field and a society that takes care of everyone.

Venezuela got where it is today because of corrupt leaders, foreign intervention, its oil industry and many other factors. The policies that are currently being proposed in the U.S. would not take us anywhere near where Venezuela ended up. To argue they would, as Wolff said, is “ignorant and childish.”