Regime Change in Venezuela: A Bipartisan Project

On a night back in 2019, the late-night pundit and self-described comedian Bill Maher was having a conversation with his good pal Ann Coulter. When Maher isn’t sweet-talking the ladies, he often is haranguing them, and this is what he did when their conversation turned to the subject of Donald Trump, who was then serving his first term as President. Maher opined that Trump was actually insufficiently jingoistic and pro-America, and that many of his supporters, Coulter included, were merely feigning their chest-thumping patriotism. Exhibit A was Trump’s foreign policy in Latin America, which Maher excoriated for being unacceptably dovish. “It’s our backyard!” whined Maher moments before invoking the Monroe Doctrine. “And you’re the patriot??” And now that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has been kidnapped and extradited to the United States, it appears as if Maher has finally gotten his wish. Let’s hope that Maher’s other wishes finally come true in the New Year, because heaven knows he’s suffered long enough.

While Maher’s coarseness isn’t terribly surprising, what might be less obvious is the fact that he is ultimately speaking for both sides of America’s political and media landscape. He remains a darling in liberal circles because, at the end of the day, he is a spokesperson for the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Maher, a self-described ‘9/11 liberal’, has spent as much time criticizing Muslim members of congress as he has conservative politicians who aspire to remove them entirely from public life (a position now adopted by the Republican mainstream). He also adores jokes about the genocide of Arab children (said genocide being initiated and abetted by the Democratic mainstream). Like some Democrats, he was initially tolerant of Bernie Sanders’ two major attempts to revitalize the party’s failed brand. This tolerance turned to bitterness and hatred upon realizing that Sanders’ mass of supporters represented an unacceptable threat to his wealth and privilege. These days, rich folks like Maher, Democrat or Republican, never mention any social democratic ideas or policies without connecting them with third-world slums, Stalin, breadlines, etc. Bill Maher’s political MO, minus the lame jokes, is not at all out of step with that of the Democratic Party.

The Democrats have brought us to this moment. If they have not directly carried out Maduro’s abduction, in flagrant violation of the UN Charter and the US Constitution, they have provided an indispensable political cover for Trump and his cronies, one that a true opposition party would never have facilitated. When Marco Rubio, the arch-warmonger and regime change proponent, was nominated by Trump to be Secretary of State, all 47 Democratic senators voted to confirm him to the position. While some Democratic senators may have tactical disagreements with Rubio, they share the same overarching objectives: the containment of Russia by fighting them “to the last Ukrainian,” and the end of a dominant China, through armed global conflict if necessary. The Democrats are always willing to prove their patriotism by providing ever-ballooning budgets to the Pentagon, a leech on the planet that has never passed an audit, while Americans are starving on the street.

The Democrats have colluded in the destruction of international law and territorial sovereignty. They sat back (or laughed) while Barack Obama destroyed Libya, paving the way for Libyan slave markets and a sharp rise in global terrorism. As Israel committed assault after assault on the people of Gaza while building illegal settlements in the West Bank, Obama responded with the time-honored bromide “Israel has the right to defend itself.” When Obama failed to close Guantanamo Bay and continued the strangling blockades on Cuba and North Korea (leading to thousands of civilian deaths in each case), the rest of his party cheered and applauded all the way. As for Maduro himself, Obama absurdly characterized his regime as a threat to our national security, pushing through additional rounds of punishing sanctions. Of course, sanctions always hit the poorest members of society hardest, and no one understands this better than policymakers and heads of state imposing those very sanctions.

The fact that Charles Schumer and Nancy Pelosi remain in power is an unmistakable sign of American democracy’s terminal decay. This is the same party leadership who presided over the disastrous War on Terror, oversaw the suspension of habeus corpus and the adoption of torture as state policy, and insisted we “look to the future” every time accountability for war criminals was suggested. The anemic statements they have made, along with those of the zombified House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries, are nothing more than lip service. They did not lift a finger when Trump, Rubio, and War Secretary Hegseth murdered scores of unarmed fishermen who they claimed, sans evidence, were Venezuelan drug traffickers/narco-terrorists. Don’t expect any genuine opposition from this bunch, unless a sternly-worded letter counts as opposition.

Is any Democrat taking a strong line against the illegal coup and destruction of Venezuela? Only the usual suspects, who are hopelessly outnumbered in Congress, not to mention deliberately marginalized by their own party. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s statement was stronger than others she’s made in the field of foreign policy, but its defects are telling. AOC described Trump’s actions as illegal and immoral, true, but added that they originated as attempts to distract from his domestic failures, chiefly the cost-of-living crisis and the Epstein debacle. This statement bears no fundamental difference with that of Pete Buttigieg, who declared that Trump decided to “launch a war for regime change abroad” because he is “failing on the economy and losing his grip on power at home.” Buttigieg’s statement is probably the more hypocritical of the two, given his unambiguously pro-war, pro-regime change politics. However, his statement, much like AOC’s, reeks with the arrogant language of our empire. This invasion and kidnapping is expressly described as Trump’s doing - as if these moves don’t have broad support among the country’s political elite. This kind of scapegoating papers over the complicity of both the Democrats and the GOP, who are unabashedly in favor of regime change. It’s also insulting to suggest n that a new foreign adventure is needed to distract from domestic failures when most Americans are already opposed to new foreign wars and understand that their declining quality of life stems in part from their tax dollars being systematically looted to feed the war machine.

A few weeks before Maduro’s kidnapping, Mayor Mamdani described Maduro as an oppressive dictator, an enemy of independent political expression and individual freedom. It reminded me of Bernie Sanders’ condemnation of Maduro during the 2020 Democratic primary as a “vicious tyrant.” These statements lay bare the chauvinism of America’s liberal left. It is possible to speak truthfully about Maduro’s abuses of power, the crackdowns on free expression, and the corruption of his government while at the same time acknowledging imperialism’s role in shaping that state of affairs. Failing to do so makes international solidarity with aspiring socialist movements impossible. Perhaps Mamdani remembers when Sanders was excoriated by the mainstream press for daring to suggest that Castro’s government improved the quality of education in Cuba, and now does not want to endure similar red-baiting. Regardless, this defensive stance indicates an unwillingness to stand up to his own party. Their hostility to anything connected with socialism, their disdain for international law and territorial sovereignty, their racist and patriarchal attitude towards the third world, and their naked support for imperial aggression have all helped manufacture consent for this latest war. The Democrats brought us to this moment and they, like Trump and the GOP, ought to at least own up to it.