Venezuela and the United States

Welcome! I will be using this Substack for ideas and analyses I am developing for my research and advocacy regarding: Venezuelan politics and human rights, U.S. policy regarding Venezuela, and about the U.S. itself, especially as it goes through many of the same processes of democratic erosion that Venezuela did over the past twenty-five years. I will also be posting links to various media interviews, opinion pieces or quotes as they come out.

Some of you may remember the Venezuelan Politics and Human Rights blog that I founded and curated for the Washington Office on Latin America from 2012-2020. That blog was created with the goal of providing evidence-based analysis of what was happening in Venezuela, taking advantage of the fact that I lived there most of the years during that time. It occupied most of my professional energies during this period.

I started transitioning out of this kind of writing and advocacy when I went on sabbatical at Notre Dame’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies during academic year 2020-21. However, I quickly got back in after Joe Biden was elected, seeing a new opportunity for a negotiated solution to Venezuela’s crisis. That opportunity did in fact occur and reached fruition with Edmundo González’s electoral victory in July 2024. This victory was not recognized by the regime and Venezuela has been in a deadlock since, with the Maduro government ratcheting down militarized authoritarian control and the opposition lead by María Corina Machado seeking international intervention.

At that point, I decided to focus my energies on my scholarly activities and administrative duties at Tulane University. But events have made that difficult. Over the past year, not only has an important segment of the United States decided to follow Venezuela’s lead down the path of democratic backsliding by supporting a populist leader, but Venezuelan migrants and reports of their involvement in crime have become central elements of Trump’s authoritarian project. These are issues that are directly relevant to my scholarship and teaching and I have felt the need to weigh in about them (See New York Times article here, and recent piece in The Dispatch here).

My research and advocacy are based on an understanding of politics that comes from Hannah Arendt, as that space where conflict can take place through debate and discussion, in relative freedom and openness; where interests can be recognized, and collective decisions can be made. In Arendt’s view conflict is an inevitable part of social life because varying experiences, mindsets and values are always at play when humans interact.

For Arendt, the antonym of politics is violence. The latter is the exercise of coercion and effectively denies recognition and shuts down open spaces of discussion and decision making. Arendt’s is not an anarchist view--spaces of politics need to be constructed and preserved through rights and institutions. In my view they also need to be constructed by norms and practices of discourse, for example direct social engagement and reflective analysis.

In my work on Venezuela, I have worked consistently in favor of dialogue and negotiation and against calls for foreign military intervention. I have aimed much of my analysis at disinformation, conspiracy theories and the “othering” whereby political actors dehumanize their opponents and undermine politics. These are forms of anti-politics that, in contemporary Venezuela, work in the wrong direction if the goal is a return to a pluralist democracy.

I have spent a lot of time trying to debunk the various reasons that political actors effectively argue that “this is no time for politics” given the treachery of the “other side.” I have tried to do this with the left and the right addressing what I think of as “right and left orientalism.” More positively, this means I have tried to portray the logics of what Chavismo and its opposition are trying to do.

I have also critiqued the continual reliance on the ad hominem arguments that pass for politics in Venezuela—not just against those on the “other side,” but also within the opposition, between influencers, activists and politicians with different strategies of change. The net effect of reliance on ad hominem arguments has been an impoverishment of debate and repeated failures in strategic thinking.

I do not claim this to be an “everything” position. I fully realize that activists and political mobilizers often need to rely on “the hot cognitions of misplaced concreteness” to mobilize people and even to open up political space. Dry social scientific analysis has a role, but so do calls to action that simplify situations and generate emotion. I can respect that.

However, in my view we are not currently in Max Weber’s iron cage with state and corporate control over all aspects of social life, and passive citizens simply following the crowd.

Rather we are in a world in which our democracies are on fire with mobilization, misinformation and types of political mobilization and governing projects that lead to an anti-politics where it is easier to misunderstand and dismiss or self-sort into bubbles of consensus, than to engage in conflict through dialogue. And this anti-politics contributes to processes of democratic backsliding that institutionally close off politics.

As a social scientist engaged in public sociology, I seek to pare away facets of our anti-politics, using the conceptual and methodological tools at my disposal, my knowledge of empirical facts, and relying on my belief that “objective” analysis is a worthwhile aspiration, if an unattainable goal (by “objective” I do not mean a neutral observer but that I am making claims about a world that is “out there,” and which can be confirmed or disconfirmed by further research and analysis).

None of these tools or outlooks ensure that I am right on any given issue and I welcome real pushback and debate that helps further analysis. Needless to say, arguments based on ad hominem, tu quoque and the other logical fallacies will be ignored, as will insults and speculations about my (admittedly numerous) character defects.

With the name of this substack I am riffing on the title of Octavio Paz’s famous essay “Mexico and the United States.” When I first read it in graduate school, despite disagreement with the details, it showed me how national differences could be analyzed not just through sociopolitical and economic analysis but looking at culture and moral reasonings.

My approach is actually quite at odds with Paz’s portrayal of cultural essences and irreconcilable differences. I do believe in the enduring value of trying to understand cultural rituals, discourses and narratives as they frame politics. However, my work follows the classic impetus of cultural anthropology in which cultural differences are analyzed as a way to emphasize common humanity, and culture is seen as powerful but ever changing.

Having lived about half of the past 32 years in Venezuela, when I hear people in the U.S. misunderstanding Venezuela or vice versa, I often find myself explaining “But from their perspective, this seems like….” I do this precisely because I think conflict should lead to new reconciliations, not consolidated “otherings.”

In the past twenty years my work has moved more directly into political sociology and what, in more recent scholarly trends would be called “global historical sociology.” This is a reconstruction of historical sociology that instead of reifying and comparing nations (as would “comparative, historical sociology”), seeks to understand historical configurations that often cross national boundaries at the sub-national level.

This is helpful in the current context as the Venezuela conflict is a global conflict not just in terms of the relationships between states, but in terms of global links of Chavismo and the Venezuelan opposition in terms of trade, party politics, civil society, population movements and culture.

As a final note I should say that while I am a professor at Tulane University, this Substack contains my views as a scholar and citizen. They do not represent the views or positions of my employer.