Somewhat tortuously, the State Department has congratulated the victory of Hugo Chavez’s referendum to revoke term limits on his rule as a victory for participatory democracy, while faintly recommending a new respect for multiparty pluralism. Consider for a moment if you were to receive official foreign congratulations for your civic virtue, upon learning that a president of the United States had just succeeded in repealing the 22nd Amendment, allowing him to serve forever as permanent head of state. A cold experience, surely.

Congratulating this referendum is an insult to liberal forces in Venezuela which have been battling mightily against long odds and at risk of arrest, to preserve some semblance of a liberal society in a country deeply mired in the grip of crypto-fascist hysteria.

One of the most regrettable ideas of the Bush years was the then president’s bizarre belief that any political outcome was ultimately justifiable if it were arrived at by course of a general election. Something that even the experience of an elected Hamas government in Gaza apparently failed to completely dissuade him of. It’s a pity to learn that we’ve traveled even further down this misbegotten path with a new administration.

 It should be understood that it is the liberal dispossition –one that supports and informs constitutional restraint on state power– not the democratic procedure, that distinguishes Western democracy from being the will of a fanatical mob. Liberalism is the soul that makes democracy moral and viable. The United States should not praise any democratic outcome as instinsically worthwhile, as Bush once did. What it should praise are liberal democratic outcomes….and Chavez’s coupling of potential permanence with his already near autocratic authority, is no victory for liberalism.

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