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The Bolivian uprising — and that’s what it can be called, or at least it is more accurate to call it that than to call it a “coup” — is in the same category as the current upheavals involving millions of ordinary people taking to the streets in Beirut, Moscow, Hong Kong, Santiago and Baghdad. These are insurrections against unaccountable, unresponsive and — almost always — despotic governments. The Euro-American “left” has had almost nothing to say about this phenomenon, which involves challenges to the entrenched establishment at least as radical as anything that the gringos have managed to mount in Paris, or San Francisco, or London, or Washington, since perhaps 1968.

Photo by Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images

Whether it’s Bolivian radical democrats, or Syrian revolutionary democrats, or Iranian feminists, or teenaged Hongkongers charging into columns of riot police — they might as well not even exist to the comfortable Chavistas in Toronto or the Sandinista sentimentalists in Vancouver. The fight for democracy is the revolution that matters in the world at the moment. Where the polemicists of the “left” are not entirely oblivious to it, they’re as likely as not to be providing rhetorical courage and comfort to the autocrats, like Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, or to would-be autocrats, like Evo Morales.

Bolivia is a tragedy. While the interim administration promises elections within 90 days, it’s not even clear at this point whether Morales’ party will agree to participate. The shame of it is that Morales can be credited with harnessing Bolivian ingenuity and determination to bring that country out of destitution: over his 14 years in power, Morales’ party helped boost Bolivia’s GDP at a rate of nearly five per cent a year. While he earned the praise of socialists the world round, he also earned the respect of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Abject poverty was cut in half. The wealth of the country was relatively well managed, and at least in the early years, was evenly distributed. Literacy rates soared.