Barack Obama, Hugo Chávez and the Wall Street Protests

There are some stories that repeat themselves: moments of tension, demographic changes, economic difficulties. The citizens of a country become exasperated and the country is propelled toward the search for a new leader, someone different from those who came before.

This new person usually has an able tongue, makes a succession of impossible promises using perfect discourse and phrases such as “social justice” or “redistribution of wealth,” which reach the ears of not just the poorest, but of the majority. What is to come will be a “change.”

But when the populist leader achieves power, they see themselves trapped in reality and a light begins to shine on the campaign’s promised utopia. They soon realize that to govern with shouts and promises above and beyond themselves won’t bring success. On the contrary, they must communicate and debate with those who think differently.

Nevertheless, if they decide that this option is not viable and prefer to believe, “I won the elections, and what I say goes,” the strategy they will take is different and they will unleash a class struggle.

Hugo Chávez is perhaps the clearest example of this strategy. He has constantly called for the destruction of the rich in his country and promoted, via an unbalanced war, the destruction of Western values as embodied by the United States.

Barack Obama, for his part, has chosen a variant on this theme, adapted of course to the reality of the United States. First, he tried to convince those who had worked hard to earn what they had that earning money was somehow immoral. Unable to achieve this, he began an aggressive campaign against the richest sector of his country, something almost without precedent in the United States.

Appealing to his support base — that is, Americans without work or private wealth — he said that the situation was not their fault, but the fault of those who had the most. He told the 40 percent of Americans that doesn’t pay taxes and that receives government welfare that the fault belonged with the 2 percent of Americans that pays into the greatest part of the federal budget. These ideas, shared by both Hugo Chávez and Barack Obama, have been brought together in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

President Chávez, euphoric because of the protests, said, “This movement of popular outrage has expanded to 10 cities. The repression is terrible; I don’t know how many are in jail by now.”

Eva Golinger, the “representative” of Chavismo in the United States, has participated in the protests, and said, “Occupy Wall Street is the expression of the frustrations of the American people.”*

It doesn’t surprise us that this is coming from such people. What does deserve attention, however, are members of the Democratic Party giving similar declarations.

Both President Obama and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi have said that they support the protestors’ message that it is time for things to change. At the same time, growing evidence exists of coordination between certain sectors of the Democratic Party and those guiding the Wall Street protests.

We can thus see that both Chávez and Obama have used the same methods on many occasions: They use the rich when it suits them and appeal to populism when things become difficult.

Unfortunately for President Obama, the United States is not Venezuela. In the United States, most of the population believes in democratic principles, in autonomy, in respect for individual liberty, and in the rule of law above all else. Protests like those on Wall Street simply frighten them.

This is bad news for the Democrats this close to the next presidential elections. Promoting the cause of the radical North American left only estranges them from the great majority of Americans who only want to keep on living in peace.

Obama is, without a doubt, a great disappointment for those Americans that believed in his motto of “Yes, we can.” Obama´s revolution appears increasingly like the revolution of Hugo Chávez: frightening to Americans.

Today, the U.S. needs less talk of redistribution and banker-bashing, and more visionary leadership of the kind and principle that made this great nation.