The "Democratic" Opposition?

 The Nobel Committee chose this past year to honor the leader of Venezuela's opposition party, María Corina Machado, with its annual peace prize. And look, I share the world's hopes for an end to Maduro's brutal dictatorship and the restoration of free elections in Venezuela (although I reject the proposal of waging an illegal U.S. invasion or covert regime-change operation as legitimate means to get there). 

Still, it does not bode well to me that the leader of Venezuela's ostensible democratic opposition so far cannot bring herself to denounce Trump's murderous extrajudicial killings of Venezuelan citizens, his abduction of 150 innocent people to a torture prison in El Salvador, or his stripping of temporary protected legal status from hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan refugees living in the United States. 

All of those Venezuelan TPS holders, plus those 150 asylum-seekers who were summarily deported to a concentration camp in El Salvador, are victims of Maduro's regime. They voted with their feet to escape his dictatorship—yet were returned to persecution at his hands by our own U.S. government. If anyone should be their champion, it should presumably be the leader of Venezuela's democratic opposition! 

And yet, she has been silent. She has refused to speak out against Trump's multiple atrocities against her own people. 

And look, I get the political calculation as to why. She thinks she has found an ally in Trump who will help her stage regime change in Venezuela and come to power. Maybe she is even a sincere democrat, who does not plan merely to supplant one dictatorship with another, but fully intends to actually restore free elections if she comes to power (that remains to be seen). 

But what is the point of democracy if it does not include standing up for the legal rights of one's own citizens? What hope or justified expectation do we have that she will respect human rights in office, if she is willing to sacrifice human rights so conspicuously now, when she is out of office, in order to enlist the help of a powerful, bullying neighbor in her quest for state power? 

If she is willing to let her own citizens be bombed, abducted, and deported to persecution now, without uttering a peep of protest—why on Earth should we think she will be more solicitous of their rights once she has come to office herself? 

It makes no sense to sacrifice the lives and futures and rights of citizens for the sake of democracy. That's a contradiction in terms. The whole point of democracy is the preservation of citizens' rights; so the latter cannot logically be sacrificed to the former. "The republic is for man, not man for the republic," as Alexander Herzen once put it—citing Proudhon. 

"[T]he maker of values is man himself," Isaiah Berlin writes in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, "and may therefore not be slaughtered in the name of anything higher than himself, for there is nothing higher[.]" 

He went on: "men may not be slaughtered, either in the name of abstract ideas, however lofty, such as progress or freedom or humanity, or of institutions, for none of these have any absolute value in themselves, inasmuch as all that they have has been conferred upon them by men, who alone can make things valuable or sacred[.]" 

You cannot stand by and willingly sacrifice your own citizens, then, on the altar of "democracy"—for what is democracy if not the rights of its citizens? What meaning does it have if it does not mean the protection of the citizens' rights? (I think of Stephen Spender's line: "No cause is just unless it guards the innocent/ as sacred trust.")

It should trouble us to no end, then, that the supposed "democratic" alternative to Maduro seems already to think her own prospects of gaining power are worth the price of silently acquiescing to her own citizens being tortured, disappeared to concentration camps, and murdered in cold blood at Trump's hands.