So the part I don’t get is how a lot of these countries end up with the same leaders for life? You think if they were so democratic that they’d change out occasionally
Typically it’s because to win the election in the first place, you need to be pretty popular. There are cases of unpopular leaders who, while they did some things right, had such massive problems that they were tossed out – Khrushchev is the perfect example of that, but if someone proves that they are good at what they are doing, as Stalin did, as Fidel Castro did, and so on, people are going to generally support that person. Even when someone has a real decline in the quality of leadership (see Mao, though I think the issue is overstated beyond sheer senescence right at the end), if they were involved in something like personally saving the party and leading the revolution to victory while overseeing a doubling in life-expectancy and an end to the vast majority of colonial occupation and reactionary practices like footbinding, spread in literacy and healthcare, etc. etc.
Each of those individual things can completely change someone’s life for the better, so you get a whole lot of good will you need to burn through by fucking up before people abandon you.
An example of this perspective can be seen in part of a talk Michael Parenti gave:
spoiler
You can look at any existing socialist country - if you don’t want to call them socialist, call them whatever you want. Post capitalist- whatever, I don’t care. Call them camels or window shades, it doesn’t matter as long as we know the countries we’re talking about. If you look at any one of those countries, you can evaluate them in several ways. One is comparing them to what they had before, and that to me is what’s very compelling. That’s what so compelling about Cuba, for instance.
When I was in Cuba I was up in the Escambia, which is like the Appalachia of Cuba, very rugged mountains with people who were poor, or they were. And I said to this campesino, I said, “Do you like Fidel?” and he said “Si si, with all my soul.” I remember this gesture, with all our souls. I said “Why?” and he pointed to this clinic right up on the hill which we had visited. He said, “Look at that.” He said “Before the revolution, we never saw a doctor. If someone was seriously ill, it would take twenty people to carry that person, it’d go day and night. It would take two days to get to the hospital. First because it was far away and second because you couldn’t go straight, you couldn’t cross the latifundia lands, the boss would kill you. So, you had to go like this, and often when we got to the hospital, the person might be dead by the time we got there. Now we have this clinic up here with a full-time doctor. And today in Cuba when you become a doctor you got to spend two years out in the country, that’s your dedication to the people. And a dentist that comes one day a week. And for serious things, we’re not more than 20 minutes away from a larger hospital. That’s in the Escambia. So that’s freedom. We’re freer today, we have more life.” And I talked to a guy in Havana who says to me “All I used to see here in Havana, you call this drab and dull, we see it as a cleaner city. It’s true, the paint is peeling off the walls, but you don’t see kids begging in the streets anymore and you don’t see prostitutes.” Prostitution used to be one of the biggest industries. And today this man is going to night school. He said “I could read! I can read, do you know what it means to be able to read? Do you know what it means to be able not to read?”
I remember when I gave my book to my father. I dedicated a book of mine to him, “Power and the Powerless” to my father, I said “To my father with my love,” I gave him a copy of the book, he opened it up and looked at it. He had only gone to the seventh grade, he was the son of an immigrant, a working-class Italian. He opens the book and he starts looking through it, and he gets misty-eyed, very misty-eyed. And I thought it was because he was so touched that his son had dedicated a book to him. That wasn’t the reason. He looks up to me and he says ‘I can’t read this, kid” I said “That’s okay dad, neither can the students, don’t worry about that. I mean I wrote it for you, it’s your book and you don’t have to read it. It’s a very complicated book, an academic book. He says, “I can’t read this book.” And the defeat. The defeat that man felt. That’s what illiteracy is about, that’s what the joy of literacy programs is. That’s why you have people in Nicaragua walking proud now for the first time. They were treated like animals before, they weren’t allowed to read, they weren’t taught to read.
So, you compare a country from what it came from, with all it’s imperfections. And those who demand instant perfection the day after the revolution, they go up and say “Are there civil liberties for the fascists? Are they gonna be allowed their newspapers and their radio programs, are they gonna be able to keep all their farms? The passion that some of our liberals feel, the day after the revolution, the passion and concern they feel for the fascists, the civil rights and civil liberties of those fascists who are dumping and destroying and murdering people before. Now the revolution has gotta be perfect, it’s gotta be flawless. Well that isn’t my criteria, my criteria is what happens to those people who couldn’t read? What happens to those babies that couldn’t eat, that died of hunger? And that’s why I support revolution. The revolution that feeds the children gets my support. Not blindly, not unqualified. And the Reaganite government that tries to stop that kind of process, that tries to keep those people in poverty and illiteracy and hunger, that gets my undiluted animosity and opposition.
If someone taught me to read when I grew up illiterate, gave me a hospital where before the nearest one was many hours away, gave my family a way to safely make a living, I’d probably be grateful to him for the rest of my life, too.
Now, there’s the matter of what should happen, because term limits are principally reactionary (money has no term limit, so it ends up controlling elections that have them), but age limits* are necessary and part of the reason for the customary term limits in China after how old Mao got. We have yet to see what Xi will do or how long he will seek re-election for, but the thing keeping him there is that he has transformed people’s lives by the tens of millions and improved lives by the hundreds of millions, so they believe in him.
Damn that’s a powerful passage. Thanks for that. It reminds me of the Jon Oliver segments where they interview normal people affected by terrible US policies or lack of regulation. So it’s the same thing that probably would’ve allowed FDR to keep running if he hadn’t died. Although that was scary enough that the US immediately put in term limits afterwards.
you want office holders to develop leadership in subsequent generations rather than blocking it, and you don’t want people making decisions who won’t have to live with the consequences. age limits or a lifetime service limit are probably a better way to do that than term limits since someone spending 20-30 years in congress and then having three or four senate terms starting in his 60s is not actually addressing the problem of gerontocracy in US politics.
Typically it’s because to win the election in the first place, you need to be pretty popular. There are cases of unpopular leaders who, while they did some things right, had such massive problems that they were tossed out – Khrushchev is the perfect example of that, but if someone proves that they are good at what they are doing, as Stalin did, as Fidel Castro did, and so on, people are going to generally support that person. Even when someone has a real decline in the quality of leadership (see Mao, though I think the issue is overstated beyond sheer senescence right at the end), if they were involved in something like personally saving the party and leading the revolution to victory while overseeing a doubling in life-expectancy and an end to the vast majority of colonial occupation and reactionary practices like footbinding, spread in literacy and healthcare, etc. etc.
Each of those individual things can completely change someone’s life for the better, so you get a whole lot of good will you need to burn through by fucking up before people abandon you.
An example of this perspective can be seen in part of a talk Michael Parenti gave:
spoiler
If someone taught me to read when I grew up illiterate, gave me a hospital where before the nearest one was many hours away, gave my family a way to safely make a living, I’d probably be grateful to him for the rest of my life, too.
Now, there’s the matter of what should happen, because term limits are principally reactionary (money has no term limit, so it ends up controlling elections that have them), but age limits* are necessary and part of the reason for the customary term limits in China after how old Mao got. We have yet to see what Xi will do or how long he will seek re-election for, but the thing keeping him there is that he has transformed people’s lives by the tens of millions and improved lives by the hundreds of millions, so they believe in him.
*Or cognitive assessments
Damn that’s a powerful passage. Thanks for that. It reminds me of the Jon Oliver segments where they interview normal people affected by terrible US policies or lack of regulation. So it’s the same thing that probably would’ve allowed FDR to keep running if he hadn’t died. Although that was scary enough that the US immediately put in term limits afterwards.
That’s true, but scary for who?
Do you have a link to that talk, or just that quote in particular?
https://www.reddit.com/r/communism101/comments/d8evq0/a_transcription_of_michael_parenti_on_the_cuban/
Thank you!
you want office holders to develop leadership in subsequent generations rather than blocking it, and you don’t want people making decisions who won’t have to live with the consequences. age limits or a lifetime service limit are probably a better way to do that than term limits since someone spending 20-30 years in congress and then having three or four senate terms starting in his 60s is not actually addressing the problem of gerontocracy in US politics.