HAVING RECENTLY gotten into an argument with a young friend in her 20s about the increasing necessity of voting for President Biden again, it got to the point where she asked me if I was familiar with Noam Chomsky. I could tell her I probably first read him about thirty or forty years before she was born. I added that I'd written him a letter once and he'd answered it. After Violetta Chamorro won the presidency of Nicaragua, ending the Sandinista government, I asked Chomsky how he could repeatedly see such things happen and not fall into despair. He answered saying that he had no right to fall into despair which, considering how much my opinion of Chomsky has taken a hit since then, I go back to repeatedly as being one of the soundest things someone on the secular left has ever said to me.
Did I know who Noam Chomsy is!
I also asked her if she had any idea of who Chomsky intended to vote for in November, something I don't know. If he doesn't vote for Biden he'll be voting for Trump no matter who he marks the ballot for or doesn't mark it for. Those are the only two alternatives under our dangerous presidential system as opposed to a prime ministerial system in which you could vote for the Democrats' congressional representatives and end up with a Democratic prime minister. Our system, when copied by later developing countries is associated with falling into dictatorial rule than the prime ministerial system, though it has plenty of problems, too. But ours is far more dangerous for putting everything into one person who could die or be assassinated or otherwise not win on election day. As we have learned, especially with the collusion of the Rehnquist Court in 2000 and the upcoming Roberts Court efforts to put Trump back in office, those dangers have increased with the ruthlessness of the Republican-fascist Supreme Court.
Anyway, reading this article about the 2024 Sandinista government's oppression, the then leader of the 1980's Sandinista government and present-day dictator, Daniel Ortega and his wife-Vice President Rosario Murillo, are well on the way to copying much of what the previous dictators of the country did. They are eliminating any institution or group or individuals who could mount an opposition to their dictatorship. As an admirer of the then figure in the democratic Sandinista government, the late Ernesto Cardenal and an opponent of the Ortega dictatorship as it left behind their supposed ideals, the current Ortega dictatorship's violent actions against the Catholic Church resonate with irony and a sense of deja vu. Even more ironically, the Trump regime, in an executive order, targeted Murillo. The Trump order called on Nicaragua to "restore democracy." Ha!
I will probably use this ironic situation in the future as an example of how Marxism an anti-democratic ideology, no matter how circumstances force "moderate" Marxists such as constituted the original Sandinista party, to accept some of the norms of liberal democracy. The ease with which Marxists can convince themselves and gull others into going past those as easily as the Nazis convinced the German establishment to in the early 1930s is a lesson in how dangerous that ideology is. Our own secular-civic mock-religion is quite dangerous enough on that count as we are just beginning to discover and, for People of Color, woke Women, woke anyone, really, that is no new discovery.
Things are a lot more complex than I thought they were in the 1980s as I opposed the Reagan-Bush I terror campaign to reimpose fascist dictatorship in Nicaragua, though it was possible to believe, then, that the Sandinistas of that time might actually develop into a real egalitarian democracy. I still think of the election of Violetta Chamorro as a tragic capitulation of the Nicaraguan People to Reagan-Bush era terrorism though I doubt the government under Ortega would have ended up as I hoped it would. Back then I thought democracy was possible under an ideologically materialistic regime but I don't believe that any more. I still admire the Catholic left which I can say my mother supported, even in the face of John Paul II's and the then Cardinal Ratzinger's opposition. I don't respect Marxism at all, any more. I was never a Marxist, myself, never having been a materialist and realizing as soon as I looked into it that it was based on some pretty naive pseudo-scientific scientism. But I thought it was possible for them to do better than the fascists and oligarachs. I don't think anything but a radically egalitarian and moral democratic government is reliable. Not in Nicaragua and not in the United States. Catholic social teaching is hardly 100% reliable, it is a human conception so it couldn't be, but it's miles ahead of both liberal democracy and any strength of Marxism. I'd have trusted Cardenal with power, he'd have carried it through though he'd probably have been murdered by Reagan's terrorists. As I pointed out recently the liberal democracies have a lot of sins to answer for even from before Trump.
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