Consider term limits. The US Constitution was amended to enforce term limits in direct response to FDR’s popular 12-year presidency (he died in office, going on for 16). As a policy, it is self-evidently quite anti-democratic (robbing the people of a choice), but nevertheless it has been conceptually naturalized to the extent that the 2019 coup against Evo Morales was premised explicitly on the idea that repeated popular electoral victories constituted a form of dictatorship. If rotation was important to avoid corruption or complacency, corporations and supreme courts would institute term limits too. Term limits ensure that in the miraculous scenario that a scrupulous, charismatic, and intelligent individual becomes a rebellious political executive, they won’t be in power long enough to meaningfully challenge the entrenched power of corporate vehicles manned by CEOs with decades of experience. Wolfgang Schäuble, a powerful advocate of austerity policy in Europe, succinctly summarized the extent to which electoral democracy is subordinate: “Elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy.” One Party States and Democratic Centralism are not the result of lack of sophistication or cronyism, they are a proven bulwark that acknowledges that political power will often need to be exerted against the will of Capital, and so the wielders of said power must necessarily undergo a much more serious vetting process than a popularity contest.
But to make it short: a president going into a fourth term when the constitution only allows 2 should ring alarm bells, especially when said president is ignoring a referendum by doing so.
This is who you are allowing to shove ideology into your brain
I’d be fine with the same leader for 1,000 years if they are an agent of the proletariat and beloved of the people. Term limits has literally nothing to do with democracy or lack thereof. By the way, number of parties doesn’t either. Two western misconceptions about what democracy is (lots of squabbling parties, lots of turnover in every elected position - neither of these are synonymous with democracy and in fact hinder it in many ways)
Not to be pedantic, but saying “democracy eroded” makes me think there is some wide-ranging effort to undermine democracy along many vectors. If you just pointing to Evo winning elections in violation of term limits… idk that’s really just one thing. Even if I think that what he did was “undemocratic”, I wouldn’t call that a wholesale undermining of democracy.
You haven’t shown or proven any slow long term erosion though. Your entire thesis that it’s less democratic now is that an anti-democratic law was overturned and the populace elected who they wanted
this chart clearly proves that Evo Morales and MAS is less democratic, and therefore eroded democracy. Just because the fascists who came next (as they clearly should have, but don’t imply i support them since i never explicitly said that!!!) massacred people doesn’t excuse the lack of commitment to democracy from Evo. Checkmate tankie
Evo, 2009 Consitution. They had the problem of not having a succesor figure. And instead of fixing that problem they went the other shortsighted route of removing term limits.
Do I care about term limits in the face of seething ultra-reactionaries doing everything they could to revert back MAS policies, culminating in a literal coup? Of course not.
Evo never lost a presidential election, and his party did more to politically mobilize people who were up-to-that-moment “non-voters” or blocked from it in several ways.
lol no. I’m pretty familiar with what went down in Bolivia with Morales as that’s around the time in my radicalization when I began internalizing the incestuous relationship between the CIA, Corporate Media, American Foreign Policy and the IMF. I read Jakarta Method later and it was like I had watched a chapter happen in real time. That was also around the time I really started to grasp how much American media erases the disparities between Indigenous peoples and the governments they live under.
I mean, the fact he wasn’t willing to follow laws implemented during HIS rule kinda tells you everything you need to know. “Rules for thee but not for me”
him and the bolivian people defeated the reactionary lawfare imposed against them by the ruling class and rich of bolivia, those compradors. Democracy can only be realized when sell outs and imperialists are banished and excised from politics
the fact he wasn’t willing to follow laws implemented during HIS rule kinda tells you everything you need to know.
What if they were from before his time? Would that actually be better, or would you have a new way to characterize that it tells you all you need to know?
I’ll give you that, it shouldn’t matter when or under which president a law was implemented when evaluating its validity. The only thing that matters is whether a law has the backing of the population.
And yet he didn’t just not follow it, he took the result to court as he was legally entitled to do. It’s very strange how you’ll hold to the narrative of an article written in 2017 when you have the benefit of knowing the outcome, of seeing the neo-nazis and other violent reactionaries that opposed him and killed thousands after they ousted him. They didn’t just appear over night with a snap of a finger when he didn’t “follow the rule”, they were an active force in the government and the media that created the very narrative you’re now espousing, despite knowing the truth.
I am merely criticising his (lack of) commitment to democracy.
I agree that Bolivia was better off with him than it is now, but that doesn’t invalidate my point.
The fact that the people who came after him were/are worse does not retroactively turn him into a Saint.
Term limits are bullshit anyway. If a president is good and well liked they should stay.
Our “best” (relatively) President won four terms because he implemented a basic social safety net. Capital responded by making sure that wasn’t possible again.
It’s funny how a prime minister in Europe holding power for more than a decade is fine but a President in Latin America is suddenly a dictator for wanting more than 2 terms.
Personally I’m not convinced of term limits either. It’s more about the fact he readily ignored a constitution implemented under his rule, as soon as it started bothering him.
And I mean thats what the referendum in 2016 was about. If the people had wanted him to stay in power, they would’ve voted to increase the maximum amount of term limits. But they simply didn’t, they did not want him to go into another term. He did anyway.
I was talking about presidential elections. The opposition coalitions never produced a candidate that people preferred over Evo. Cuz their policies sucked.
Yeah, the party not having a succesor figure was an important problem, that instead of fixing they went for the stupid shorsighted route, which gave oxygen to every ultra-reactionary force, local and international.
Do I care about term limits in the face of seething ultra-reactionaries doing everything they could to revert back MAS policies, culminating in a literal coup and the subsecuent massacres? Of course not.
Evo never lost a presidential election, and his party did more to politically mobilize people who were up-to-that-moment “non-voters” or blocked from it in several ways, than any other party. Why? Because the other parties represent the interests of powerful minorities. The last thing they wanted is poor disenfranchised people voting.
Do I care about spineless, reactionary comprador journalists, judiciaries and other burocrats? LMAO. That whole scum did everything to maintain the pre-Evo status-quo conditions of Bolivia. Latin America is scourged with them, my country included. Dipshits that could have fitted perfectly in the US Confederacy, for example.
They are a minority that clinges to immense power that has never been democratized. You can’t vote for who runs Fox News nor the CNN, nor the Supreme Court, and yet those people have more power over the destiny of a country than any Congressmember.
You remind me of something (Parenti I think?) said, where he criticized people who had bad things to say about Castro, and said that people should compare the current regime with what it replaced; I’m reminded of the government that replaced Evo’s and the lady (whose name escapes me) who called the indigenous population satan worshippers.
I’ve no idea of the state of democracy under Evo, but if I recall correctly, he changed laws to allow the native population to work in the government where apparently prior it had been illegal for them to do so. His rule was actually great for Bolivia, which is probably why his party won the elections again after the coup.
“Democracy is when the US gets what it wants, and when the US doesn’t get what it wants saving democracy is when we do a coup to stop someone we don’t want from being democratically elected.” - Lemvi
Ah, the good old strawman. I never mentioned the US.
I’ve seen comments like this a few times now. “He speaks out in favor of democracy, so he must blindly agree with anything the US does!” (there, another strawman)
No, I can advocate for democracy without being a fan of the US. I’d even go so far as to say that anyone really advocating for democracy should be highly sceptical of the processes they have in the US, as they aren’t really democratic.
And yet you have nothing to say about the democratically elected Bolivian courts ruling in the democratically elected Morales’ favor. The courts with judges elected by the Bolivian people disagree with you. And who are you to question their, and by extension the Bolivian people, decision?
In this instance we have a court comprised of judges that have been elected not by the people, but by Congress, with each judge having been elected up to ten years ago on one hand. On the other we have a recent referendum held among the people.
They contradict one another, the people do not want to allow a third term for presidents, the court does.
In my opinion there are two questions we should ask to determine which side is more likely to represent the will of the people:
Which election took place more recently?
Which election was more direct?
The referendum was more recent than the election of most of the judges.
The referendum was also held by the population directly, while the judges were appointed by congress.
So in my opinion the result of the referendum should hold more weight than the judges’ decision.
No, how recent an election is isn’t the sole criteria. And as we’ve seen with Brexit, referendums aren’t an open-and-shut case for gauging the will of the people. To use another example, there have been multiple referendums in Crimea dating back to the 90s where Crimeans want to secede from Ukraine and join Russia, but I seriously doubt you’ll say that the annexation of Crimea by Russia was just Putin doing what the Crimean people wanted to be done since the 90s.
It’s not a strawman. You claimed democracy eroded under him when what, term limits changed? Democracy isn’t defined by term limits you fucking idiot and the UK has none, Germany has none, etc etc. Does that make it less democratic than other countries? No it fucking doesn’t.
You’re an idiot. Bolivia is significantly more democratic than the US. You clearly have absolutely no knowledge of how their system is structured, you’re entirely vibes based. How do their courts work? What’s the structure of the government? How does it interact with the courts? Do you know any of these things in even the vaguest fucking detail at all? No you fucking don’t.
When I call the US undemocratic I do so from a position of understanding its entire system top to bottom, its branches, its hierarchy, how its branches interact, who has power over what, etc etc etc. You have no fucking idea what you are talking about, you regurgitate whatever vibe some bullshit liberal media source has put in your feelings and have absolutely zero actual knowledge whatsoever outside of those feels. You’re concept of basically every other country is 100% propaganda driven feels rather than any level of actually educated investigation. I bet you couldn’t even say how many years exist between elections, you’re on that level of lack of knowledge and vibes-based statements here.
And those vibes lead you to idiotically supporting US intervention, coups, and going door to door with death squads killing people. Slap yourself. You’re a fuck.
A series of 16 audios in which opposition leaders call for a coup against the newly re-elected president Evo Morales were leaked through various social platforms.
Local media point out that the destabilizing plan would have been coordinated by the United States Embassy in Bolivia prior to the elections and cites US senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, who are said to have direct contact with the Bolivian opposition in the strategy to overthrow Morales.
The plan focuses on the fact that if Evo Morales won the elections on October 20, a civil-military transition government would be established. The new government would allege fraud in the electoral process and would not recognize Morales’ electoral victory.
In the audios filtered through social platforms opposition leaders call to burn structures of the government party and to put together a general strike throughout the country and to attack the Cuban Embassy in that country.
The publication of the audios arises in the midst of the political crisis following the electoral triumph of Evo Morales, whom the opposition accuses of committing fraud.
Weeks ago in a speech President Evo Morales had referred to alleged coup plans and that his government had the recordings. Neither the opposition nor the United States Embassy has referred to the leakage of the audios.
SUMMARY OF THE AUDIOS:
AUDIO 1: It illustrates the commitment of US senators Marco Rubio, Bob Menendez and Ted Cruz in the coup plan in Bolivia.
The coup was undemocratic, that does not mean the state before was democratic.
Its a bunch of powerful people fighting for power with no regard for the will of the people.
Its a bunch of powerful people fighting for power with no regard for the will of the people.
Surely you have something resembling evidence to back up this claim and you are not just both-sidesing for US-planted White Christian fascists like a muppet? Even the pro-coup Financial Times admits that:
An ethnic Aymara Indian, Mr Morales empowered the country’s indigenous groups like no Bolivian leader before him. He cut poverty in half and presided over rapid economic growth, fuelled by exports from a gas industry he nationalised. These policies resonated strongly in a country where serfdom was only abolished in 1945 and indigenous people were forbidden until 1952 from entering the square outside the presidential palace.
During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.
If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
Replace Soviet Union with “Evo Morales” and it still holds. Nothing anybody could ever say to you could change your mind because your mind is already made up.
Democracy did kinda erode under him though (however, it has been eroding even quicker since he was ousted, so there’s that)
from https://redsails.org/why-marxism/
Marxism comes through once again.
How did it erode?
You forgot this.
Here’s an article from 2017 that I think sums it up quite well: https://carnegieendowment.org/2017/06/20/bolivia-s-democracy-at-risk-what-role-for-external-actors-pub-71301
But to make it short: a president going into a fourth term when the constitution only allows 2 should ring alarm bells, especially when said president is ignoring a referendum by doing so.
https://carnegieendowment.org/about/trustees
This is who you are allowing to shove ideology into your brain
I’d be fine with the same leader for 1,000 years if they are an agent of the proletariat and beloved of the people. Term limits has literally nothing to do with democracy or lack thereof. By the way, number of parties doesn’t either. Two western misconceptions about what democracy is (lots of squabbling parties, lots of turnover in every elected position - neither of these are synonymous with democracy and in fact hinder it in many ways)
If he won the election, he won the election. Term limits are mainly a tool of capital, since capital does not have term limits.
Not to be pedantic, but saying “democracy eroded” makes me think there is some wide-ranging effort to undermine democracy along many vectors. If you just pointing to Evo winning elections in violation of term limits… idk that’s really just one thing. Even if I think that what he did was “undemocratic”, I wouldn’t call that a wholesale undermining of democracy.
It’s undemocratic when one person wins multiple elections in a row because a majority votes for them.
I disagree, to me erosion is a slow and natural decline that can be kept in check by proper maintenance.
You haven’t shown or proven any slow long term erosion though. Your entire thesis that it’s less democratic now is that an anti-democratic law was overturned and the populace elected who they wanted
Who was the president when that constitution was put into place?
Evo, 2009 Consitution. They had the problem of not having a succesor figure. And instead of fixing that problem they went the other shortsighted route of removing term limits.
Do I care about term limits in the face of seething ultra-reactionaries doing everything they could to revert back MAS policies, culminating in a literal coup? Of course not.
Evo never lost a presidential election, and his party did more to politically mobilize people who were up-to-that-moment “non-voters” or blocked from it in several ways.
lol. Some of us wanna play with the libs too ya know.
Ah, I thought you thought the constitution at that time was from some dictatorship from the seventies.
lol no. I’m pretty familiar with what went down in Bolivia with Morales as that’s around the time in my radicalization when I began internalizing the incestuous relationship between the CIA, Corporate Media, American Foreign Policy and the IMF. I read Jakarta Method later and it was like I had watched a chapter happen in real time. That was also around the time I really started to grasp how much American media erases the disparities between Indigenous peoples and the governments they live under.
I mean, the fact he wasn’t willing to follow laws implemented during HIS rule kinda tells you everything you need to know. “Rules for thee but not for me”
him and the bolivian people defeated the reactionary lawfare imposed against them by the ruling class and rich of bolivia, those compradors. Democracy can only be realized when sell outs and imperialists are banished and excised from politics
What if they were from before his time? Would that actually be better, or would you have a new way to characterize that it tells you all you need to know?
I’ll give you that, it shouldn’t matter when or under which president a law was implemented when evaluating its validity. The only thing that matters is whether a law has the backing of the population.
And yet he didn’t just not follow it, he took the result to court as he was legally entitled to do. It’s very strange how you’ll hold to the narrative of an article written in 2017 when you have the benefit of knowing the outcome, of seeing the neo-nazis and other violent reactionaries that opposed him and killed thousands after they ousted him. They didn’t just appear over night with a snap of a finger when he didn’t “follow the rule”, they were an active force in the government and the media that created the very narrative you’re now espousing, despite knowing the truth.
I am merely criticising his (lack of) commitment to democracy. I agree that Bolivia was better off with him than it is now, but that doesn’t invalidate my point. The fact that the people who came after him were/are worse does not retroactively turn him into a Saint.
no term limits are silly. And it’s undemocratic to have restrictions on who the public may elect
Term limits are bullshit anyway. If a president is good and well liked they should stay.
Our “best” (relatively) President won four terms because he implemented a basic social safety net. Capital responded by making sure that wasn’t possible again.
It’s funny how a prime minister in Europe holding power for more than a decade is fine but a President in Latin America is suddenly a dictator for wanting more than 2 terms.
Personally I’m not convinced of term limits either. It’s more about the fact he readily ignored a constitution implemented under his rule, as soon as it started bothering him.
And I mean thats what the referendum in 2016 was about. If the people had wanted him to stay in power, they would’ve voted to increase the maximum amount of term limits. But they simply didn’t, they did not want him to go into another term. He did anyway.
And yet he won the actual elections. As I said, extremely shortsight and stupid move, and yet he never lost.
I don’t get your point. Is a referendum not an “actual election”?
I was talking about presidential elections. The opposition coalitions never produced a candidate that people preferred over Evo. Cuz their policies sucked.
A plebiscite is not an election.
Yeah, the party not having a succesor figure was an important problem, that instead of fixing they went for the stupid shorsighted route, which gave oxygen to every ultra-reactionary force, local and international.
Do I care about term limits in the face of seething ultra-reactionaries doing everything they could to revert back MAS policies, culminating in a literal coup and the subsecuent massacres? Of course not.
Evo never lost a presidential election, and his party did more to politically mobilize people who were up-to-that-moment “non-voters” or blocked from it in several ways, than any other party. Why? Because the other parties represent the interests of powerful minorities. The last thing they wanted is poor disenfranchised people voting.
Do I care about spineless, reactionary comprador journalists, judiciaries and other burocrats? LMAO. That whole scum did everything to maintain the pre-Evo status-quo conditions of Bolivia. Latin America is scourged with them, my country included. Dipshits that could have fitted perfectly in the US Confederacy, for example.
They are a minority that clinges to immense power that has never been democratized. You can’t vote for who runs Fox News nor the CNN, nor the Supreme Court, and yet those people have more power over the destiny of a country than any Congressmember.
what is “democracy” to you? Because the will of the people was much closer aligned to the actions of the state under him then after the coup
You remind me of something (Parenti I think?) said, where he criticized people who had bad things to say about Castro, and said that people should compare the current regime with what it replaced; I’m reminded of the government that replaced Evo’s and the lady (whose name escapes me) who called the indigenous population satan worshippers.
I’ve no idea of the state of democracy under Evo, but if I recall correctly, he changed laws to allow the native population to work in the government where apparently prior it had been illegal for them to do so. His rule was actually great for Bolivia, which is probably why his party won the elections again after the coup.
She’s doing just fine.
Agreed, but being more democratic is not the same as being democratic.
???
This is your brain on ideology
“Democracy is when the US gets what it wants, and when the US doesn’t get what it wants saving democracy is when we do a coup to stop someone we don’t want from being democratically elected.” - Lemvi
Ah, the good old strawman. I never mentioned the US. I’ve seen comments like this a few times now. “He speaks out in favor of democracy, so he must blindly agree with anything the US does!” (there, another strawman) No, I can advocate for democracy without being a fan of the US. I’d even go so far as to say that anyone really advocating for democracy should be highly sceptical of the processes they have in the US, as they aren’t really democratic.
And yet you have nothing to say about the democratically elected Bolivian courts ruling in the democratically elected Morales’ favor. The courts with judges elected by the Bolivian people disagree with you. And who are you to question their, and by extension the Bolivian people, decision?
In this instance we have a court comprised of judges that have been elected not by the people, but by Congress, with each judge having been elected up to ten years ago on one hand. On the other we have a recent referendum held among the people.
They contradict one another, the people do not want to allow a third term for presidents, the court does.
In my opinion there are two questions we should ask to determine which side is more likely to represent the will of the people:
The referendum was more recent than the election of most of the judges. The referendum was also held by the population directly, while the judges were appointed by congress.
So in my opinion the result of the referendum should hold more weight than the judges’ decision.
No, how recent an election is isn’t the sole criteria. And as we’ve seen with Brexit, referendums aren’t an open-and-shut case for gauging the will of the people. To use another example, there have been multiple referendums in Crimea dating back to the 90s where Crimeans want to secede from Ukraine and join Russia, but I seriously doubt you’ll say that the annexation of Crimea by Russia was just Putin doing what the Crimean people wanted to be done since the 90s.
It’s not a strawman. You claimed democracy eroded under him when what, term limits changed? Democracy isn’t defined by term limits you fucking idiot and the UK has none, Germany has none, etc etc. Does that make it less democratic than other countries? No it fucking doesn’t.
You’re an idiot. Bolivia is significantly more democratic than the US. You clearly have absolutely no knowledge of how their system is structured, you’re entirely vibes based. How do their courts work? What’s the structure of the government? How does it interact with the courts? Do you know any of these things in even the vaguest fucking detail at all? No you fucking don’t.
When I call the US undemocratic I do so from a position of understanding its entire system top to bottom, its branches, its hierarchy, how its branches interact, who has power over what, etc etc etc. You have no fucking idea what you are talking about, you regurgitate whatever vibe some bullshit liberal media source has put in your feelings and have absolutely zero actual knowledge whatsoever outside of those feels. You’re concept of basically every other country is 100% propaganda driven feels rather than any level of actually educated investigation. I bet you couldn’t even say how many years exist between elections, you’re on that level of lack of knowledge and vibes-based statements here.
And those vibes lead you to idiotically supporting US intervention, coups, and going door to door with death squads killing people. Slap yourself. You’re a fuck.
https://web.archive.org/web/20191111063323/https://www.en24.news/news/2019/11/10/bolivia-audios-leaked-from-opposition-leaders-calling-for-a-coup-against-evo-morales.html
no lol
The coup was undemocratic, that does not mean the state before was democratic. Its a bunch of powerful people fighting for power with no regard for the will of the people.
Surely you have something resembling evidence to back up this claim and you are not just both-sidesing for US-planted White Christian fascists like a muppet? Even the pro-coup Financial Times admits that:
“the white supremacist US-backed fascists are just as corrupt as the indigenous proletarian government”
Replace Soviet Union with “Evo Morales” and it still holds. Nothing anybody could ever say to you could change your mind because your mind is already made up.