What is the political logic of Chavismo, the ideology associated with the former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and which characterizes the government of his successor Nicolás Maduro?

On the basis of fieldwork carried out in diverse parts of Venezuela during the 1990s and 2000s, AHCD Faculty Associate Rafael Sánchez argues in a recent article that contemporary populisms are characterized post-truth populism “into which a revolutionary project like Chavismo mutates when subject to conditions of intense neoliberal globalization.”

He calls this post-truth populism a “Humpty Dumpty populist revolutionary logic (“a word ... means just what I choose it to mean,” said Humpty Dumpy to Alice in Alice Through the Looking Glass), [where] regardless of any evidence, numerical or otherwise, not only is ‘the people’ a homogeneous entity, in line with the official rhetoric that often pits it against an ill-defined ‘civil society’ made of middle-class enemies of the regime, this ‘people’ is necessarily and exclusively Chavista”.

These movements, Professor Sánchez argues, are not ‘illiberal democracies’ in Fareed Zakaria’s (2003) sense of authoritarian regimes where a political sector rules through the orchestration and manipulation from above of the democratically elected majorities. Instead, they are characterized by something else: “first, their state-centered, properly politico-theological, totalizing project to bring about revolution, that is, a radical transformation of the entire social order of the nation-state at all costs [and, second] the fact that, for reasons to be clarified, this single-minded revolutionary project is carried out under neoliberal conditions that are, however, highly resilient to any such hubristically totalizing ambitions”.

For Professor Sánchez, the neoliberal predicament that the Chavez regime inherited, from rising inequality to widespread privatization, is rooted in a breakdown in institutional legitimacy that can be traced to the late 1980s and an IMF program of structural adjustment implemented between 1989 and 1993 that, among other things, resulted in the withdrawal of subsidies for public services. This “nearly complete loss of legitimacy of all representative institutions amid a catastrophic retreat of the theologico-political or of the state’s ability to hegemonically encompass sociality as a totality that is the key dimension that must be taken into account when it comes to apprehending the meaning, logic, and dynamism of Chavismo as a populist movement”.

This article is based on Rafael Sánchez’ piece “Post-Truth Populism in Venezuela” that was published in the issue of Global Challenges coordinated by the AHCD on “Democracy at Risk”. Read more HERE.