I’ve been looking for an explainer of what’s been going on in Chile and, thanks to Brad Delong for pointing it out. Of particular interest was the way a government won 55 percent of the vote and then held a referendum on a new constitution that crashed— as in really CRASHED!
It crashed not just because it left itself open to “a right-wing disinformation campaign”, but because (allowing for the usual kinds of misrepresentation that are standard operating procedure) it was the victim of a right-wing information campaign.
In July 2022, just four months after the inauguration, the constituent assembly released a draft of the new constitution that would be put up to a referendum in the fall. Laden with 338 articles, it attempted to do everything for everybody who had a hand in formulating it. The proposals ran from meat-and-potato social justice and economic rights issues to proposals that might seem exotic or downright utopian. They included assigning human rights to nature; abolishing the Senate and replacing the House with ill-defined regional committees; and changing Chile into a plurinational state that recognized indigenous territory as almost a standalone nation. The draft also included gender rights, sexual rights and propositions that were foreign to most Chileans, or at best, relatively new in Chilean politics.
“It was way too much,” says Rene Rojas…. “There were two big categories of articles. On one side the basic social needs and rights like healthcare, education, housing, retirement to be guaranteed by the state. On the other hand, a group of more narrow identitarian social justice issues of all types: gender rights, ethnic rights, rights of nature that were all presented in a moralizing way
as special protections for people suffering narrow forms of oppression – not universalist ideas. And in the campaign to approve the draft, that second set of rights that drowned out the more basic, universal ones. It inverted the national mood.”
If you create rights in all things Good, then for them to actually be rights (as opposed to the usual bullshit) those rights have to be exercisable against someone. If they are to have any effect they will advantage some to the disadvantage of others.
My objection is NOT that I’m not in sympathy with many of the economic rights. James Tobin argued for them in the 1960s and 70s and plenty of mainstream progressive economists would have agreed. But he didn’t think you get those rights by putting nice sounding words in a legal document (they had those kinds of rights in the Soviet Union). He thought you get them by fighting for and building the institutions that will deliver them. But political schmooze won’t get you far in doing that. You need to start moving towards your preferred destination, and use that to explain what you’re up to to build support to go further.
Campaigning fairy floss won’t get you there any more than a nice ‘values statement’ appearing in your foyer will deliver the values. Here’s a telling quote:
“I think we all were really naive,” says Barrientos, the historian. “We thought that all this discontent that exploded in 2019 was the beginning of a political process. And we thought that it was a process that was leading to a major change, and we put too much faith in all the millions that marched. But I think it was more a catharsis – a major expression of different identities that exploded at the same time. But that’s different than a coherent political movement. If you ask me today what is the legacy of the 2019 social upheaval, I don’t have an answer.”
How often have we seen that kind of thing? Occupy Wall St for one. George Floyd another. Serious social change is hard slog. The (activist) left have been hard pressed to come up with anything much in the last couple of decades beyond the sloganeering of ‘defunding’ police and various woke campaigns. The actual politicians are still doing worthwhile things, such as the Biden Administration’s climate change initatives and the attempt to get more money to American children. The activist left — at least from what I’ve seen, not so much.
I’d add that the one reform that I think could pave the way for greater radicalism, though it would only create the preconditions for its possibility and it would take time to develop any momentum would be by building far more sortition into the way the constitution works. This gives politics much greater insulation against the alarums and excursions arranged by the right who are at a natural advantage because substantial parts of the media now operate as right-wing propagandists. The left have their own favoured media outlets but they mostly play by the rules — those working for them still think of themselves as doing news and current affairs, so are prepared to give progressives a hard time if they behave badly enough.