Reelected to a third term by a landslide early this month, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez rallied his supporters with much-loved anti-George Bush rhetoric. While Administration officials have recognized his victory as democratic, they have also derided Chavez as a budding autocrat. Even Nancy Pelosi, leader of the House and a fiercely anti-Bush Democrat, has responded to Chavez's Bush-bashing by calling him an "everyday thug."
Look a bit closer, however, and one can perceive a strange string of parallels that unite the seeming archrivals -- Bush the conservative Republican and Chavez the Castro-loving socialist. Both are highly ideological leaders who claim to personally represent sweeping global movements and tendencies; both have polarized their countries with wedge issues, deliberately controversial policies, and heavy rhetorical emphasis on external threats. Much as the substance of their policies may differ -- and much as either may be loathe to admit it -- they actually govern from the same playbook.
Ideologically, Bush has positioned himself as the world's self-avowed defender of democracy, seeking to impose it across the Middle East. Chavez promotes a socialist model (which, in his victory speech on December 6, he defined as "love"), and has made himself out to be the spokesman for the world's poor and marginalized peoples.
In a country where poverty is widespread (figures are highly debated) Chavez swept 63 percent of the electorate largely by investing billions of oil dollars into social programs for the needy like health care, free higher education, and monthly allowances for single mothers. He has also paid off over a billion dollars of Argentine debt to the International Monetary Fund and established substantial trade deals with American bogeymen Cuba and Iran.
In many ways, Chavez, who strives to be the world's most outspoken opponent of U.S. "imperialism," is shadow boxing George Bush's every move. The fear factor is a case in point.
While, for years, George Bush has rarely missed an opportunity to remind Americans that Osama bin Laden or one of his minions is coiled to strike, Chavez continually stokes popular passions with a fiery portrait of Uncle Sam. (In June of this year, for instance, following repeated accusations that the U.S. was trying to destabilize his government, Chavez had Venezuelans conduct exercises simulating their response to a U.S. invasion.) And crucially, both Bush and Chavez have made an art of staking support for their domestic policy on the appeal of a potent geopolitical message.
Chavez has dubbed his brand of reform the "Bolivarian Revolution" after Latin America's most famous hero, Simon Bolivar, who sought to expel colonial powers and unify the southern continent. He makes no secret that his mission is independence from U.S. dominance and economic integration with the rest of Latin America. In the words of Venezuelan scholar Alberto Garrido, who has authored some 16 books on Venezuela's controversial leader, "geopolitics for Chavez is more important than any election. In the absence of a multi-polar world, there cannot be revolution in Venezuela." Likewise, Bush's clash of civilizations in the Middle East, his crusade for liberty and his war on terror, all form a global strategy that, for a while at least, buoyed his domestic support. But more recently, Bush's popularity has bee-lined toward the South Pole, raising questions about whether Chavez's message of regional unity is more durable than Bush's aggressive geopolitics.
The crucial similarity between the two may come down to the fact that both leaders provoke controversy and elicit strong opinions as a matter of deliberate strategy. "In terms of style, it's hard to talk about Bush or Chavez in a dispassionate way," said Fred Rosen, a Miami Herald columnist based in Mexico City. This is how these leaders want it.
Infusing common political strategy with newfound intensity, the socialist firebrand and right-wing hawk have honed almost militantly organized political parties and capitalized on wedge issues, purposefully forcing their own citizens to be either with them, or against them. In addition to national security politics, Bush has used gay marriage, abortion, euthanasia, and other social conservative issues to polarize the U.S. electorate. Chavez, meanwhile, has used anti-wealth oratory to encourage and exacerbate class-based political fissures, choosing political warfare over compromise with his largely middle-class opposition.
Of the 4 million Venezuelans who voted against Chavez and for opposition candidate Manuel Rosales in the December 3 elections (which, in another U.S. echo, featured heavy use of electronic voting machines), the deciding motive was often the same as that of John Kerry supporters in 2004: revulsion at the incumbent. Up to election day, Chavez's popularity, like Bush's today, was on the wane. It seemed that both men's divisive, ideological politics had begun garnering diminishing returns.
But when Chavez scored an overwhelming victory, it showed that his version of divisive politics have in fact inflamed his support -- the mirror opposite of Bush's current condition. Obviously, in the long-term, substance still counts for more than political style. Chavez's subsidization of social programs through profits from the state-owned oil company is evidence that he can keep his word and deliver to a mass political base; nothing similar can be said of the oil man from Crawford.
Nevertheless, it's worth noting the striking similarities in style and political strategy uniting these two antagonists. Both are practitioners of a politics combining old-fashioned elements of personality-driven appeals and demagoguery with a new kind of sophistication -- all befitting today's combative, polarized global context.
Niko Kyriakou is a freelance journalist. He has written from the United Nations bureau of Inter Press Service and in United Press International's headquarters in Washington D.C.
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