How the War Came Home: Big Time, Perspectives From a Military Spouse

By Andrea Mazzarino, TomDispatch

28 October 20

 

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At this point in the presidential campaign, who doesn’t know that Donald Trump essentially winked at the plot of 13 men, including two ex-Marines, to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer? Demanding at a rally in Muskegon that she reopen the state under pandemic conditions, the president responded to crowd chants of “Lock her up!” by saying, “Lock them all up.” No less unsubtly, at his first presidential debate, he called on the armed crew of nationalists who dub themselves the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” -- with the emphasis on that “stand by.” And, of course, you don’t even have to ask, “stand by” for what, do you?

Add in his never-ending claims about “fraudulent” mail-in ballots and a “rigged” election, “the greatest scam in the history of politics,” and you have the familiar aggressive Donald Trump, wooing “his” people in the way that we’ve all become more or less accustomed to.

But there’s been another Donald Trump on the stump, too, in these last pandemic weeks of election season 2020, the one after which (at least in his nightmares) the crowds (and legal authorities) could be chanting, “Lock him up!” In fact, he’s clearly begun to feel that, in the wake of November 3rd, he’d better be prepared -- and consider this my suggestion for a future chant -- to “Stand up and move out!” In fact, he’s been speaking with a certain pathos about possibly losing the election and implicitly facing endless legal charges as an everyday citizen. He’s even threatened, post-election, to move to another country: “Could you imagine if I lose? My whole life -- what am I going to do? I’m going to say, I lost to the worst candidate in the history of politics! I’m not going to feel so good. Maybe I’ll have to leave the country, I don’t know.” (Saudi Arabia anyone?) We’re talking about the Donald Trump who recently complained pathetically to suburban women “You don’t love me”; who said to his own fans pitifully enough at a rally in Pennsylvania, “Nobody wants me,” before dancing off stage. ("They don't want me, China doesn't want me, Iran doesn't want me... nobody wants me!" he added as the crowd chanted: "We want you!") He’s similarly pleaded with those suburban women not to be so hostile to him. (“So can I ask you to do me a favor? Suburban women, will you please like me? I saved your damn neighborhood.”)

Here’s one reality of the 2020 election that shouldn’t be ignored: whether Donald Trump (god save us) ends up in the White House for a second term or in Saudi Arabia in flight from justice, he’s going to leave behind a riven and -- because it’s the United States of America -- wildly overarmed populace in the midst of a pandemic, in job hell, feeling angry and betrayed. And that brings me to Andrea Mazzarino, the co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, a military spouse, and a TomDispatch regular. Today, she takes a careful and typically thoughtful look at one part of the torn tapestry of America: the armed, angry far-right men (and ex-military men in particular) who are already doing more than just standing by. Tom

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

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How the War Came Home, Big Time
Perspectives From a Military Spouse

t was July 2017, a few weeks before the “Unite the Right” Charlottesville riots, when white men marched through the streets of that Virginia city protesting the planned takedown of a confederate statue and chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” I was sitting at a coffee shop in my quiet town of Poulsbo in Washington State. I had set aside an hour away from my kids to do some necessary writing, while my husband, then second-in-command on a Navy ballistic missile submarine, sat suspended somewhere in the depths of the Pacific Ocean.

Our toddler and infant were home with a babysitter, offering me a rare chance to write, peacefully, amid the stressors of my life. I had a clinical social-work internship then, counseling war-traumatized veterans, and had spent months single-mothering while my spouse was at sea. To my surprise, I was suddenly jolted from my daydreams by chanting men. Glancing out the window at the usually placid waterfront of our town, I caught sight of a group of surprisingly large white men wearing animal skin loincloths, vests, and horned hats. They were also holding torches and -- I kid you not -- spears. They were loudly chanting, “Poulsbo! Poulsbo! Poulsbo!” And that was when I suddenly remembered that this was our annual Viking Fest in which groups of Washington residents from near and far celebrated the town’s Norwegian founders.

Cars parked more than a mile down our modest streets suggested that such gatherings were anything but local. This would be my second Viking Fest and I would be struck once again by how little I learned about how the town was actually founded, the values it stood for, and which of them might have survived to today. Poulsbo, after all, now existed in a largely militarized area, including a local submarine base, with white, privileged officer families -- those fortunate enough, at least, to be dual-income ones like mine or have trust funds -- purchasing and reselling homes every few years as the U.S. military moved them around the country and the world.

Even in 2017, longtime residents were starting to move away to escape the smoke that snaked into the community earlier each year from ever-fiercer wildfires in ever-longer fire seasons, part of our new climate-changed reality. Meanwhile, Poulsbo’s picturesque gingerbread house-style buildings were being replaced by larger condo complexes, as developers moved ever deeper into the town’s hillside forests that would undoubtedly someday burn.

Viking Fest, with its spectacle of white men banging spears and shouting aggressively, set my heart racing with an unnamed fear. It was, after all, a moment when the recently elected Donald Trump was already demonstrating that practically no behavior, including in Charlottesville soon (“You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides”), should be considered beyond bounds. Later, talking with another military wife, a rare woman of color visiting that town, about the Viking shout-a-thon, amid an almost all-white crowd of officers and their families watching the event, she said, “It’s like there’s no point. It’s like a celebration of white people!”

Who Are They and What Do They Stand For?

Looking back now, it’s hard not to see that evening’s loud and prideful display of white masculinity, which merely disturbed the peace for stressed-out moms like me, as a harbinger of more sinister things to come. Shouting male nationalist groups like the Proud Boys that President Trump told to “stand by” at his first debate with Joe Biden and the Wolverine Watchmen, some of whom have allegedly been linked to a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, are increasingly commonplace in the news.

As a military wife who has made five different moves over the last 10 years, I’m particularly aware of how racially and ethnically diverse this country and its military actually are. Under the circumstances, it’s remarkable that much of white America lacks any understanding of just how threatening displays like Viking Fest must look to the rare person of color who happens upon them.

It should certainly be obvious in October 2020 how destructive to our democracy fraternal, pro-Trump groups have become during Donald Trump’s presidency. Take those Proud Boys. Among the founding principles their website offers are a vague set of notions that include “reinstating a spirit of Western chauvinism,” “anti-political correctness,” “venerating the housewife,” “pro-gun rights” (in a pandemic-ridden country where, between March and July alone, an estimated three million more guns were purchased than usual), and -- get this -- “anti-racism.” For the Proud Boys to say that they reject racism and venerate housewives did little more than provide them with a veneer of social acceptability, even as they planned armed counter-rallies in progressive cities like Providence and Portland with the explicit purpose of inciting violence among Black Lives Matter protesters and their allies.

Other influences, like the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, are even more direct. For example, that site urged its followers to cyber-bully American University’s first black female student government president, Taylor Dumpson after nooses began appearing on that school’s campus in 2017. In April 2016, its founder Andrew Anglin had written, “Jews, Blacks, and lesbians will be leaving America if Trump gets elected -- and he’s happy about it. This alone is enough reason to put your entire heart and soul into supporting this man.”

One thing is certain: all that matters as markers of humanity to the man who inspires and, however implicitly, endorses such groups, President Donald Trump, is white skin and political support. The other night at his town hall with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie, a would-be supporter presented herself as the granddaughter of immigrants who had fled religious persecution in Eastern Europe. She asked the president about his plans to protect DACA recipients from having to return to their countries. The president responded: “DACA is somewhat different from Dreamers. You understand that... Where do you come from, by the way, originally? Where?” After the woman responded that her grandparents came from Russia and Poland, he stated, “That’s very good.” He then went on to discuss his border wall with Mexico; that is, keeping the wrong kind of immigrants out.

The Military as a Recruiting Ground for the Far Right

If there is any concept that these groups threatening to disrupt our democracy stand for, it’s a version of individual freedom -- like not wearing masks -- that’s akin to driving drunk and without putting on a seat belt, rather than waiting for a sober friend to drive you home. Yes, it’s more comfortable not to wear a mask or a seatbelt. The short-term benefits, like physical comfort, are tangible, as is perhaps the exhilarating sense that you can do anything you want with your body. (Ask most anti-maskers about abortion rights, however, and you’ll get quite a different perspective on the degree to which our bodies should be our own.)

Yet the most current scientific evidence is that if all Americans wore masks (and social-distanced) right now, it would potentially save tens of thousands of lives. In the age of Covid-19, however, concerns over public health restrictions to prevent the spread of the virus, including lockdowns of gyms, bars, and other public facilities, have become political firestorms. Such mandated lockdowns were the main reason various gunmen collaborated with the Wolverine Watchmen in a plot -- fortunately foiled -- to kidnap the governor of Michigan and considered a similar plot against Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia.

Perhaps not coincidentally, people of color -- Blacks and Latinos -- die from Covid-19 at a rate about a third higher than their share of the population. In other words, it couldn’t be clearer whose bodily freedoms are really considered at stake in these far-right struggles and whose are expendable.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of these groups is that they take a significant part of their manpower and know-how from the United States military with the tacit support of a Republican Senate. As a military spouse as well as the co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, it’s been no secret to me that our military’s support for bigotry of all kinds is endemic. Racist and sexist remarks are commonplace both on the boats where my husband has served and in gatherings with officer colleagues and their families. Little more than brief reprimands (if that) are handed out in return.

In a country where gun ownership and firearms training are seen by the far right as inalienable, all-American freedoms, the military is a ripe breeding ground for disaffected men looking for individual empowerment, a sense of belonging, and just such training. In fact, a recent New York Times investigation claims that veterans and active-duty military members make up more than a fifth of the membership of America’s 300 anti-government, pro-Trump “militia” groups. According to a 2019 survey by the Military Times, about a quarter of active-duty service members reported witnessing signs of white nationalist ideology among their fellow soldiers, including racist and anti-Semitic slurs and homemade explosives shaped like swastikas.

Nothing is more disturbing, when it comes to white nationalist-style hate, than the way the Republicans in Congress have implicitly sanctioned it. In 2019, after the Democratic-controlled House introduced a clause into the Defense Authorization Act to have recruits screened for white nationalist ideology, the Republican Senate nixed the provision. What more need be said?

How did an institution that should be about service to the nation become a petri dish for people who stand for nothing of collective significance? Even one of the favorite and abiding principles of far-right actors (and many Republicans in Congress), the right to bear arms, seems eerily decontextualized from history in a country that leads the world by far in armed citizens (many with distinctly military-style weaponry).

Let’s remember that this right was grounded in the idea of organizing the revolutionary army against a colonial power that taxed people without representing them and forcibly billeted its military in their homes. The colonists, while rife with their own history of human-rights violations, were not a bunch of disaffected, irrationally angry individual crusaders with an urge to use weapons to threaten civilians.

Two and a half centuries later, the party that regularly signals its support for the far right’s armed tactics still controls the presidency, the upper chamber of Congress, and will soon control the Supreme Court as well. And yet it and its right-wing supporters eternally act as if they were the victims in our world and, from that position of victimization, are now threatening others (and not just Gretchen Whitmer either.)

Many among them still see themselves as subjugated by this country’s ruling elite, which may represent a kind of projection or, psychologically speaking, seeing in others the thoughts and feelings one actually harbors in oneself. And as a therapist who has worked with significant numbers of veterans and military service members, I can warn them: don’t do it. As I know from some military service members who have told me of their time in distant lands, when they used guns against civilians, it shook to the core their belief in the principle of service to country, leaving them distrustful of the homeland they had been fighting for.

Of course, an increasingly armed far right has responded by creating a world of symbols that are deeply comforting to them. Yet do they really stand for anything?

I was recently appalled by a bumper sticker on a minivan featuring two large guns and three smaller ones aligned together like those stickers that show heterosexual nuclear families. Its tagline: “My guns are my family.” At the wheel was a young woman with several children. I balk similarly at pictures on people's lawns that feature Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” flag -- how did he get a separate flag? -- and the word “Jesus” in all-capital letters.

Guns and small children? A separate Trump state and Jesus? Never before has sociologist Émile Durkheim’s idea that religious groups are less in need of a cohesive ideology than symbols to which they can all bow down in unison made more sense to me. Amid such incoherence (and symbolic violence), such an inability to justify their place in this democracy, it might be fairest to say that, as this election campaign heads toward its chaotic climax, Trump and the far right worship little more than one another.

“At Least He Hasn’t Started Another War”

In October, the United States passed its 19-year mark in its second Afghan War of the last four decades. In many ways, that war and the dregs of the conflict in Iraq, which the U.S. invaded in the spring of 2003, have become as empty as the war that far-right groups wage in the United States. The hundreds of thousands of dead civilians, the flourishing of terrorist groups far deadlier and angrier than those the U.S. originally sought to defeat, the degradation of basic human rights including the rights to life and health -- the carnage has been significant indeed. As these wars enter or near their third decade, I often hear friends say about President Trump, “At least he hasn’t started another war.”

Oh, but he has! This time, though, the war is at home. Even the Wolverine Watchmen and their co-collaborators in recent kidnapping plots saw themselves as initiating a civil war, or a boogaloo (to use far-right terminology). Not since the Jim Crow South years have we had to worry about people's physical safety as they approach the polls to cast their vote -- and the “Four More Years” folks and other gun-toting Trump supporters have, I fear, just gotten started. Never would it have been thinkable for a sitting president to overlook, or even implicitly endorse, plots to kidnap and possibly kill elected officials, but Trump has even gone so far as to respond to his supporters at a recent rally in Michigan chanting "Lock her up!" by saying “Lock them all up!” (a play both on his Hillary Clinton chants in the last election and on Governor Whitmer’s pandemic lockdown orders).

Twenty years later, our healthcare resources (never sufficient) are further depleted. A pandemic is again spiking across the country. Those who run for office and try to govern with dignity are being challenged in all too threatening ways. Think of it, whether in political or health terms, as our new war zone. I hope that those who appear to vote in person under pandemic conditions and increasing threats of voter intimidation will not come under attack next by far-right groups. To anyone who is listening in elected office anywhere in America: I hope you have a plan for a peaceful transition of power, since the “law-and-order” president is, of course, anything but that when it comes to sustaining our democracy, rather than his presidency.

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Andrea Mazzarino, a TomDispatch regular, co-founded Brown University’s Costs of War Project. She has held various clinical, research, and advocacy positions, including at a Veterans Affairs PTSD Outpatient Clinic, with Human Rights Watch, and at a community mental health agency. She is the co-editor of War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

US Sanctions on Venezuela Are Deadly - and Facing Mass Resistance

By Steve Ellner, Jacobin

28 October 20

For years, right-wingers have sought to destabilize Venezuela, and even proclaimed their own rival “president,” Juan Guaidó. But average Venezuelans understand that US sanctions hurt them — and should be resisted.

enezuelan centrist Claudio Fermín was a protégé of neoliberal president Carlos Andrés Pérez in the early 1990s — and, at first, a firm opponent of Hugo Chávez. But like some others in the same political camp, in more recent years, he has changed course. Particularly since Donald Trump imposed sanctions on Venezuela, Fermín has become outspoken in vehemently opposing both US interventionism and his own nation’s radical right.

Such a change shows just how much Venezuelan politics have been transformed in the recent past. Since the attempted coup of April 2002, the country’s leftist governments have been pitted against a united opposition, intent on achieving regime change by any means possible. But now, such extreme polarization seems to be weakening.

A former mayor of Caracas and presidential candidate, Fermín is not alone among centrist politicians in bucking the Trump administration’s insistence on a boycott of the December 6 National Assembly elections, in a bid to further isolate president Nicolás Maduro.

Fermín’s nationalistic rhetoric was on display in an interview last month, as he lashed out at the Venezuelan right, the Trump administration, and the other governments that have followed its lead: “The superpowers have buddied up with the nation’s anti-Venezuelan political elite, who don’t really have Venezuela in their hearts, who impede the arrival of oil tankers with much-needed gasoline . . . The sanctions are a negation of national sovereignty.” Washington’s implementation of international sanctions — opposed by dissidents within opposition ranks — has greatly contributed to this shake-up of Venezuelan politics.

Even in recent years, the opposition had been united. In the 2015 elections for the National Assembly, it achieved an all-encompassing unity, supporting a single anti-government ticket that emerged victorious. Then, in January 2019, the entire opposition went along with Juan Guaidó’s self-proclamation as president. But now the centrists, who for the most part recognize the legitimacy of the nation’s political system, are faced off against politicians on the Right who are calling for abstention in the National Assembly elections slated for December 6.

The convergence between center and left is not only the result of Washington’s policies and the untold suffering they have inflicted on the Venezuelan people. It is also the product of president Nicolás Maduro’s adroit strategy of accepting some of the demands of the centrists while pursuing a hard-line approach against the insurgent opposition. Carlos Ron, vice-minister for North America, told me, “Maduro has to be recognized for achieving what appeared impossible: moving a big chunk of the opposition from insurgency to peace.”

President of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro speaks during a demonstration by Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV) at Palacio de Miraflores on May 20, 2019 in Caracas, Venezuela. Eva Marie Uzcategui / Getty

But this strategy also has its downsides. Concessions to business interests, which go hand in hand with Maduro’s conciliatory strategy, have been criticized by a left faction of the governing Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV). In addition, the Communist Party and several other parties and groups belonging to the ruling Polo Patriótico alliance have broken with Maduro and formed a rival slate for the upcoming elections.

And despite their recent stands, it is clear that the centrists are far from stable allies for Maduro. Some are just biding their time — waiting for the right moment to attempt to force him out through a recall election.

Stiffening the Sanctions

As the Trump administration rachets up the sanctions and threats of military action, Venezuelans increasingly reject them. The public opinion firm Hinterlaces released a poll in November 2017 indicating that 72 percent of Venezuelans oppose the sanctions, and another in August 2020 showing that the figure had increased to 81 percent. According to this latter survey, 80 percent of Venezuelans say that the “role of the United States has been negative.”

Trump’s stiffening of the sanctions in the age of COVID-19 is a premier example of what Naomi Klein calls the “Shock Doctrine”: situations of crisis and suffering provide the powerful with unique opportunities to impose dramatic changes.

In the midst of the coronavirus, the Trump administration has ordered four oil service companies to close operations in Venezuela. It is also rescinding similar special “permissions” that had been granted to Spain’s Repsol, Italy’s Eni, and India’s Reliance Industries to engage in swap arrangements involving oil, as long as no cash was involved. The termination of these barter deals will deprive Venezuela of diesel fuel used to transport food and generate electricity.

The sanctions against individual Venezuelans have also taken a disturbing turn in recent months. Previously, the targets were Venezuelan politicians, bureaucrats, and others associated with the government who were accused of engaging in illicit acts, such as corruption, repression, and drug trafficking. But now, in 2020, even political centrists are in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, because of their insufficient enthusiasm for Guaidó.

In January, the Department of the Treasury sanctioned seven dissident members of the opposition’s main political parties — Acción Democrática (AD), COPEI, Primero Justicia and Voluntad Popular — who had begun to question their organizations’ unconditional support for Guaidó and opposition to electoral participation. The Trump administration took at face value the word of pro-Guaidó leaders that the dissidents were engaged in corrupt dealings involving a government food distribution program. In fact, the sanctions were politically motivated, as revealed by James B. Story, US ambassador to Venezuela, when he warned “those who undermine Venezuelan democracy will be sanctioned.”

In September, Steven Mnuchin and the Treasury Department made it even clearer that the sanctions were all about politics. The heads of five break-off parties including AD’s Bernabé Gutiérrez, a well-respected longtime party leader, were placed on the sanction list. In doing so, Treasury accused these “key figures” of carrying out a plan “to place the opposition parties in the lap of politicians affiliated with the regime of Nicolás Maduro.”

In adopting punitive measures, the Trump administration is taking sides in an internal party matter of tactics. Indeed, the dispute within different parties of the opposition, particularly AD and Primera Justicia, over electoral participation versus abstention dates back many years. Gutiérrez questioned his party’s refusal to run candidates in the National Assembly elections of 2005, when Claudio Fermín was expelled from AD for advocating participation.

How Marginal are the Centrists?

Parties on both sides of the political spectrum have split in the lead-up to the December elections. In the case of AD, COPEI, Primero Justicia, and Voluntad Popular, the PSUV-dominated Supreme Tribunal of Justice has recognized the legality of the parties participating in the electoral contest, and not the abstentionist ones.

The Trump administration has labeled the non-abstentionists “marginal politicians.” If the presidential elections of 2018 are any indication, abstention will be just slightly over 50 percent. Naturally, that does not mean that all those who abstain are thereby supporting Guaidó and his allies.

Much is at stake in the battle between the abstentionists and non-abstentionists. The emergence of a bloc of non-leftist parties that either explicitly or tacitly recognize the legitimacy of Venezuela’s political system could pave the way for a new era in the country’s politics devoid of the internecine warfare of the past. Furthermore, it is a clear demonstration of the bankruptcy of the Trump administration’s regime change efforts. And it puts the lie to the claim of both Democratic and Republican leaders that Maduro is nothing less than a dictator.

Fermín argues that opposition party militants are at cross-purposes with their leaders. “Thousands of activists have been denied the possibility of running for city council or for mayor. Abstentionism has castrated a whole generation of activists since 2005.”

Pro-government supporters gather in Sucre Square during a demonstration against imperialism organized by governing party PSUV (Socialist Party of Venezuela) at Palacio de Miraflores on January 23, 2020 in Caracas, Venezuela. Carolina Cabral / Getty

Gutíerrez claims that in January, AD’s state-level secretary-generals held rank-and-file assemblies at the local level and “everyone expressed support for electoral participation.” Subsequently, however, national secretary-general Henry Ramos Allup imposed his will on the party in favor of abstentionism.

Fermín and Gutiérrez may be overly optimistic regarding their projections for the turnout on December 6. The nation’s harsh economic conditions, in contrast to its previous status as a privileged, oil-producing nation, influence many Venezuelans to doubt the legitimacy of the existing system. Furthermore, the sway of opposition parties that favor abstention cannot be overestimated.

Not only AD but also two-time presidential candidate Henrique Capriles of Primero Justicia had been open to electoral participation early this year, but then swung over to the abstentionist camp. Undoubtedly, pressure from abroad, including fear of US sanctions, does much to explain their reconsideration.

Indeed, the international setting is a key variable. Most of the governments in the Americas and Europe are in the hands of right-wing and conservative parties and have played an activist role in favor of Venezuelan regime change. The Venezuelan centrists hoped for backing from Europe, particularly Spain’s moderate government, which at one point sent out mixed signals. But much to the disappointment of the centrists, in September, the European Union rejected Maduro’s invitation for it to provide electoral observers in December.

Maduro’s Gambit

The Maduro government and the centrists have supported each other in concrete ways. In January, the centrists requested and received legal recognition from the Supreme Tribunal of Justice for the National Assembly they controlled, as opposed to a parallel body controlled by Guaidó’s followers. Then, the same court recognized the centrist-controlled parties that had split off from the ones headed by traditional opposition leaders. In turn, the centrists have explicitly or tacitly rejected the Right’s characterization of the Maduro government as a narco-terrorist dictatorship.

Indeed, the centrists’ willingness to defy international and domestic pressure is predicated on three assertions: first, the Maduro government is not a narco-state, second, it is not a dictatorship, and third, it has over the recent past adopted business-friendly policies.

If convincing evidence were to disprove any of these statements, the strategy followed by the centrists would be untenable.

Maduro’s pro-business reforms were welcomed by centrists — but brought criticism from some on the Left, including close supporters. The latest example of the government’s opening to the private sector is the recently passed “Anti-Blockade Law,” which would allow the executive to enter into secret agreements with private capital over new property arrangements — possibly containing “clauses to protect investment in order to generate confidence and stability.”

The Communist Party slammed the arrangement as a reversal of Hugo Chávez’s policies in favor of national independence and an attempt to legalize a “policy of subordination to the interests of capital.”

Fermín was more receptive to the proposal and praised Maduro for not expropriating a single company, which he claimed amounted to a “self-criticism” with regard to the policies of his predecessor.

The second assertion — which debunks the narco-state thesis — denies the existence of the drug-trafficking “Cartel de los Soles,” which Washington has been claiming is operated by the Venezuelan heads of state ever since Chávez was elected in 1998 and is now led by Maduro. Coincidentally, the US Justice Department waited until this March to introduce an indictment in federal court in Manhattan the same day the Trump administration put a $15 million bounty on Maduro.

Fulton Armstrong, with decades of experience working for US intelligence, has said, “No serious analyst I know outside of the government would say there is a Cartel de los Soles.”

The third claim — that of dictatorial rule — is equally far-fetched but calls into question Maduro’s hard line against adversaries. The decision to recognize centrist-led parties instead of traditional opposition leaders, for instance, appears heavy-handed. Maduro defenders may respond that those leaders have cast themselves so far outside of the law by actively supporting foreign intervention and so many violent, regime-change actions that they have, at least temporarily, forfeited their democratic rights. But this argument cannot be applied to leftist parties such as Patria Para Todos (PPT) and the Tupamaro — who, after leaving the governing Polo Patriótico alliance (along with the Communist Party), lost their legal recognition, which was handed to split-off organizations. At the same time, the PSUV’s mayor of Caracas made false accusations regarding the moral conduct of PPT secretary-general José Albornoz.

Government critics point to irregularities and violation of democratic norms, such as the Supreme Tribunal of Justice’s recognition of certain political parties and not others. But most critics seldom present concrete plausible evidence of votes not being counted correctly, surely essential to defining the government as a dictatorship. Electoral fraud is frequently conflated with irregularities, as was the case in the two previous presidential elections of 2013 and 2018. Labeling Maduro a “usurper,” as the opposition repeatedly does, is predicated on the assumption that electoral fraud was committed in both elections.

Luis Vicente León, a much-respected pollster and supporter of the opposition, argued that the essence of democracy is a state that provides “the same conditions for all actors, in which the arbitrator should be impartial . . . and public resources not be used in favor of anyone.” León is right to say that this golden rule is being violated — though to some extent it always has been, ever since the outset of Venezuelan democracy.

Carlos Ron points out that, at least in one respect, the playing field is tilted in favor of the opposition. “The voter knows full well that by reelecting the PSUV, the sanctions stay in place. The minute the opposition returns to power, they’ll be lifted.” That one factor alone is likely to sway a lot of votes in December.