Politics

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    [post_date] => 2021-11-18 23:36:08
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    [post_content] => Will voters choose fear or hope?

Chile is experiencing one of its most powerful historical moments since the end of the dictatorship in 1990. The results of the November 21 presidential election will decide the fate of the social movements sparked by the 2019 “Chilean awakening' and of the constitutional process begun in 2020. Of the six candidates competing for the presidency two men who represent starkly opposing visions for Chile’s future are leading in the polls.

Gabriel Boric, 35, is a left-wing candidate who seeks to implement the social changes that Chilean people have been demanding over the last decade; his platform calls for ending the neoliberal economic-political model brutally imposed under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

On the far right is José Antonio Kast, 55, who wants to perpetuate the extreme neoliberal model that is the legacy of Pinochet’s rule. One of the many worrying aspects of Kast’s platform is a jingoistic anti-immigrant position, which includes a plan to construct ditches along Chile’s borders to prevent migrants—primarily from Haiti and Venezuela—from entering the country.

The volatile situation in which Chile finds itself—polls show Kast at 27.3 percent, ahead of Boric with 23.7 percent—makes this election an exceptional one, likely the most important since the return of democracy in 1989.

[caption id="attachment_3469" align="alignleft" width="640"] José Antonio Kast at a press conference on August 30, 2021.[/caption]

This election campaign takes place in the context of a process to rewrite the national constitution, which came out of the massive protest movement that swept across the country in 2019. The factors that led to the protests, the issues that are driving this election campaign, and the future of Chile’s democracy are the subject of this article.
1. The ‘Chilean Spring’
On October 14, 2019, high school students in Santiago responded to a government announcement of a public transportation fare hike of 30 pesos, or $0.04, by calling for widespread fare evasion; they amplified their call on social media with the hashtag #EvasionMasiva. Over the next few days, the chant "evadir, no pagar, otra forma de luchar" (“evade, don’t pay, there’s another way to fight”) was heard in almost every subway station. The student protests spread, sparking a mass movement for social change that reflected growing discontent over Chile’s enormous wealth gap, stagnant wages, and insufficient social services.

The proposed subway fare hike, though small, came to symbolize the broader injustices and inequalities of Chile’s economic and political system, as enshrined in the Pinochet Constitution. Chile is the most unequal member of the OECD, with 50 percent of the population earning just $550 per month, even as the cost of living continues to rise while wages remain stagnant. The government suspended the proposed transit fare hike, but the move came too late: the spark of protest had already been already lit; people began to ask questions about years of increasingly inadequate pensions, education, and health care.

During the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-90), while the military regime was prosecuting, torturing, and killing political opponents, the “Chicago Boys,” a group of right-wing Chilean economists who had studied with Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, were busy implementing a right-wing economic model. Pinochet’s repressive dictatorship was the ideal environment for unilateral imposition of reforms in pensions, health care, and labor law—and for the privatization of state companies.

In 1980, the Pinochet Constitution was enacted through a very dubious referendum, aligning the neoliberal economic reforms with the legal regime defined by the constitution.

The system changed little after the dictatorship ended in 1990. Constant opposition by the country’s right wing to any mention of deeper reform, as well as a certain comfort from the center-left political elite with the existing system, provided a further obstacle to more far-reaching change. During this period, Western governments held Chile up as an example of political stability and economic growth in South America.

But Chile’s perceived prosperity and stability were based on an economic and political system that was creating a huge wealth gap, with the richest one percent of the population earning 33 percent of the country’s wealth while the lower middle and working classes were barely able to make ends meet. For far too long, those in power ignored the growing resentment of Chile’s economically marginalized citizens—until it exploded.

On October 18, tens of thousands of citizens poured onto the streets to protest the brutal police response to student demonstrators, which included mass arrests and the use of live ammunition. That night protesters ambushed 70 Santiago subway stations; students flooded in to vault the turnstiles, vandalize equipment, and pull the emergency brakes on trains. Police responded with beatings, tear gas, and arrests. These events were the tipping point: over the next three weeks a full-scale social movement erupted, with up to a million people pouring into the streets, clamoring for a new social and economic order that would bring dignity to the Chilean people.

[caption id="attachment_3477" align="alignleft" width="640"] Protesters in Santiago on November 19, 2019.[/caption]

The government responded with a repressive crackdown that included the deployment of soldiers on urban streets, the imposition of curfews in several cities, and President Sebastian Piñera’s “declaration of war” against the protesters. For untold thousands of Chileans, the sight of soldiers on their streets triggered barely repressed memories of the Pinochet dictatorship. Their fears were reflected in the horrific reports of police shooting protesters with live ammunition, often aiming at their eyes from close range. As a result, at least 300 people were injured in the eye, more than half of them partially blinded. Despite documented reports of these incidents compiled by the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International , Piñera's government denied all the accusations of human rights violations.

In this polarized context the government and the opposition reached a political agreement. On November 15, 2019, they announced a national referendum to decide whether and how a new constitution should be drafted to replace the 1980 Pinochet Constitution. The announcement helped quell the social unrest. The Chilean people had stood up for and won their right to draft a new, democratic constitution with the help of popularly elected representatives. The referendum was held October 20, 2020 and the result was a landslide: 78 percent of Chileans voted in favor of a new constitution.
2. The impact of the global rise in authoritarianism on the Chilean constitutional process
The events of 2019-20 loom heavily over the presidential election. Two issues could affect the outcome. First, there is the need for social transformation. Massive support for a new constitution drafted by elected representatives reflects the popular will for democratically implemented change to reduce inequalities.

The second factor looming over this election is a fear of instability. The same people who want political and social reforms also fear the cost associated with economic and political upheaval.

The euphoria of the 2019 social uprising was followed by the global pandemic, which has hurt the economy and had a chilling effect on Chilean society's social, political, and economic ambits. Unfortunately, the right and the far right-have taken advantage of this period of global instability to promote the idea that a new constitution and a left-wing president would bring about an economic and political “disaster.”

The Chilean far right knows they don’t have a winning argument for maintaining the dictatorship’s constitution, so instead they are spreading fear with fake news and nationalism. In several important ways, the rising power of Chile’s far right and the threat of authoritarianism reflect the issues that dominated the last two US presidential elections.

First, there is the debacle of the center right. Before Trump was elected as the Republican candidate in 2016, the moderate right in the US found itself rudderless, with no clear leaders, no discourse, and no obvious political agenda. Meanwhile, the center left failed to tackle inequality and other social ills. These two factors paved the way for Donald Trump’s takeover of the GOP, and his victory in the 2016 presidential election. Similarly, in Chile, the right-wing government of Sebastian Piñera, who is deeply unpopular, has been described as the worst in the history of Chile’s democracy. The traditional right-wing parties’ lack of credibility and the political isolation of right-wing voters contributed to the creation of a viable far right.

Second, nationalism and anti-migrant sentiment are growing rapidly. Kast, the far-right candidate, is following the “Trumpist” or “Bolsonarist” blueprint of blaming migrants for the country’s social and economic problems. His dangerous rhetoric has provoked violent attacks on migrant communities, such as the September 24 police-led eviction of Venezuelan migrants, including small children, from a camp in the port city of Iquique.

Third, conservative and fundamentalist religious groups, including the Political Network for Values, make up an important constituency in the Chilean far right. Their growing political clout threatens any progress on rights for women and the LGBTQ+ community.

Fourth, there is a strong move toward protectionist foreign policy, alongside opposition to multilateralism. One of the main political refrains of the far right is to decry the uselessness of global forums and international agreements—particularly those that deal with human rights, the environment, and migration.

Kast, for example, has declared his refusal to abide by the Escazú Agreement, a regional environmental treaty that guarantees access to information, public participation, and transparency in environmental matters. The agreement also provides special protection to environmental activists against threats and violence from polluting industries. Kast’s refusal to honor this treaty is reminiscent of Trump’s 2017 executive order to withdraw the US from the Paris Climate Agreement. The victory of the Chilean far right would almost certainly result in the country’s political isolation on the international stage.

Fortunately, there is a political alternative to Kast. Gabriel Boric, a former law student, wants to move away from the country’s neoliberal past while curbing the rise of authoritarianism through a progressive and rights-based approach to policymaking. Boric’s platform builds on the social demands that a large segment of the Chilean people has pushed for over the past two decades. He rose to prominence as a leader of the 2011-13 mass student movements, which called for universal free high quality education, and launched his political career from that experience. Now his close relationship to social movements provides Boric and his allies with a real grasp of the current political reality of most Chileans. The leftist candidate's political platform calls for the total transformation of the privatized pension and inadequate health care system left over from the dictatorship, as well as an ecological agenda that recognizes the climate crisis as the catastrophic threat that it is, while offering solutions for social change and fair economic growth.

The global rise of populist authoritarianism, including in the UK and the US, has not escaped the notice of Chileans. Their country’s constitutional transition should take place under the watch of a government that believes in the process and will thus facilitate it rather than impede it.
3. An essential step toward achieving social progress
Considering what’s at stake with the ratification of the new constitution, the health and progress of the Chilean political system depends in many ways on this electoral race. For instance, feminism has been an important social component in making the constitutional process more democratic. In 2019 the Chilean feminist collective Las Tesis amplified the women’s movement with their exuberant protest song, “A rapist in your path.”  It became a global feminist anthem and Chile’s feminist protests led to the inclusion of gender parity among constitutional representatives. Now Kast, the far-right candidate, wants to abolish the Ministry of Women and Gender Equality, which would mean a complete reversal of all the demands the feminist movement fought for.

The far right’s position on climate change is also very worrying. Kast’s platform casts doubt on the very existence of climate change, referring to it as a “stance” instead of a “scientific certainty.” On the other hand, several weeks ago the constitutional convention issued a declaration of climate emergency and defined an “ecological approach” as one of its guiding principles for the new constitutional text. Kast is an authoritarian threat to all the potential progress on social rights and ecological agenda that the constitutional process can bring. He led the political campaign against the new constitution and his political positions oppose any structural reform. If elected he will probably try all the mechanisms to obstruct and discredit the legitimate and legal constitutional process.

Kast and Boric’s polarized positions on women’s equality and the environment reflect the opposing directions that the constitutional discussion could take, as the threat of authoritarianism from the far-right looms over Chile. The health of the country’s political and economic future hangs in the balance as Chileans await the results of both the constitutional process and the presidential election. Hopefully, the candidate who is elected president on Sunday will assist and collaborate with the constitutional assembly. For Chile, this would mean a stable and transformative constitutional transition toward a more just, democratic and sustainable country that is finally rid of Pinochet’s authoritarian politics and crippling neoliberal economic agenda.
    [post_title] => Chile faces its most consequential election since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship
    [post_excerpt] => A sharply divided electorate will choose between a young candidate for social change, and a far right middle aged candidate who embraces a radical neoliberal agenda and praises the Pinochet dictatorship. 
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    [post_content] => The true bulwark against Trumpism is at the state and local level.

In the eyes of many locals, Nate McMurray’s campaign was a fool’s errand. He was running for Congress as a Democrat in New York’s 27th congressional district, where a greater percentage of residents voted for Trump in 2016 than in any other district in the state. District 27 is vast: it includes Orleans, Genesee, Wyoming, and Livingston counties, parts of Erie, Monroe, Niagara, and Ontario, suburbs of Buffalo and Rochester, and farm country; altogether, it is home to over 700,000 people. Around 42 percent of voters are registered with the Republican or Conservative parties.

McMurray is a fierce critic of former president Trump; he champions Medicare For All, gun control, and legalizing marijuana. When he first ran, he lost narrowly to Republican Chris Collins, who was then under federal indictment; Collins later resigned from Congress and pled guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud. Celia Spacone, a retired psychologist who was a McMurray campaign volunteer, told me in 2019, “Collins was indicted on felony charges, and people still didn’t want to hear about a Democratic candidate.”

After Collins resigned, McMurray ran against Republican nominee Chris Jacobs in a June 2020 special election to fill Collins’ seat, and again lost by a relatively narrow margin. When McMurray challenged Jacobs in the November 2020 general election, he lost by a much wider margin. (The presidential election boosted turnout across the board, leading to a surge of Republican voters.)

Recent research suggests that the Democratic Party might have benefited from McMurray’s willingness to run in a race that he was all-but-predestined to lose. The mere fact that a forceful, energetic candidate ran a high-visibility campaign in the district mobilized volunteers, energized Democrats, and might even have boosted Joe Biden’s vote share.

According to election data compiled by the Daily Kos, Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 25 points in District 27 in 2016. District voters went for Trump again in 2020, but the margin narrowed significantly, from 25 to 16 points. There are a number of possible reasons for that shift, including the pandemic and/or local voters’ preference for Biden over Clinton. But the fact that a Democrat put up a fight was good for democracy—and good for the party. (Collins faced a Democratic challenger in 2016, too, but her campaign didn’t attract as much attention as McMurray’s, in part because her platform wasn’t as bold and Collins wasn’t yet under indictment; as a result, the race wasn’t as close.)

As a candidate, McMurray worked hard and made a point of courting supporters in often-overlooked rural counties. Rural Democratic county committee chairs were especially supportive of his campaign. “Nate brought a lot of energy and passion to his races that really excited a grassroots following,” Judith Hunter, chair of the Livingston County Democratic Committee, told The Conversationalist. “That was a very impressive thing and surely helped candidates up and down the ballot.”

Hunter also chairs the Democratic Rural Conference of New York State, which represents New York’s 47 rural counties (the state has 62 counties in total). It can be tough to get people to show up to volunteer and vote for down-ballot candidates, she said, and it was easier to recruit campaign volunteers for McMurray because he was running for Congress. Still, she added, “Once people understand what a campaign needs in terms of volunteer power, it’s something a certain proportion respond to, and they’re not going to go away.”

Recently, the progressive organization Run For Something partnered with data firms Kinetic21 and BlueLabs to analyze the effect of down-ballot races on Biden’s performance in the 2020 presidential election. They found that contested state legislative races—those in which both Democrats and Republicans ran, rather than just Republicans—yielded a small but notable (0.3-1.5 percent) boost for Biden. Even when a down-ballot Democrat loses, the fact that they bothered to run can benefit a presidential candidate. This is known as the “reverse coattails” effect—the reverse happens when a down-ballot candidate rides the “coattails” of a popular presidential candidate.

Ross Morales Rocketto, co-founder and chief program and recruitment officer of Run For Something, explained during a phone interview why progressive candidates should run, even in places where they are likely to lose. One reason is that doing so could boost the candidate at the top of the ticket. Another big reason, he said, citing an old sports adage, is that “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don't take.” Given how unpredictable the results of redistricting can be, the Democratic Party doesn’t know which races may turn out to be competitive. And given that the most recent census likely undercounted Latinos, Rocketto said, Democrats should rethink their tendency to avoid running candidates in deep-red areas.

“What ends up happening is that people who live in these areas only see Democrats as the caricatures they are on Fox News or Parler or Infowars or other conservative media outlets,” he said. “But when you have a candidate there, going to their door, they get to see one of their neighbors—somebody who actually lives in their community and likely shares some of their values—talking about another way [to address local problems].” It’s especially effective, Rocketto noted, when candidates stay focused on local issues. Rocketto sees ensuring that Democrats run for local office even in districts where they have little chance of winning as part of the long-term work necessary to reverse “some of the polarization that we currently see.”

In 2016, Leah Greenberg cofounded the progressive organization Indivisible, which she now co-directs, to help counter Trump’s agenda. Greenberg, whose family is from small-town Alabama, has also spoken about how powerful it can be for residents of red and/or rural areas to encounter self-identified progressives in their communities. Democrats who live in red states sometimes compare the experience of revealing their politics to friends and neighbors to LGBTQ peoples’ experience of “coming out.” As Hannah Horick, who chairs the Ector County Democratic Party in Texas, told Politico in 2020, a number of West Texas Democratic organizers are also openly LGBTQ. According to Horick, a friend once told her it was harder to come out as a Democrat in West Texas than it was to come out as gay.

Running as a Democrat in places that have historically been hostile to Democrats is less quixotic than it used to be. This is partly because voters of color have grown as a share of the electorate in recent years, while white voters, who are likelier to support Republicans, have declined. Hispanic voters account for increasingly large shares of the electorate, particularly in battleground states like Arizona, Florida, and Nevada, and red states like Texas. And thanks to the extraordinary efforts of local organizers and pro-voter registration, anti-voter suppression groups like Fair Fight, around 130,000 more black people registered to vote in Georgia in 2020 as compared with 2016.

The GOP has sought to counteract demographic shifts and efforts to expand the electorate by making it harder to vote. Since the record turnout of the 2020 election, Republican legislators have proposed over 250 laws that would limit mail-in, early, and Election Day voting in 43 states throughout the country. In March, Georgia’s Republican governor made it a crime to distribute food or drink to voters as they wait in line to cast their ballots. A recent Washington Post analysis characterized Republican efforts to restrict voting as “potentially…the most sweeping contraction of ballot access in the United States since the end of Reconstruction.”

Steve Phillips, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, has long argued that the key to making Democratic gains in Republican strongholds is to register and mobilize voters, specifically black and Latino voters, most of whom vote Democratic. Millions of eligible voters, including many people of color, did not vote in 2016 or 2020. Youth turnout “surged” in 2020—53 percent of eligible young voters (ages 18 to 29) voted in 2020, versus 45 percent in 2016—but that still means nearly half stayed home. A perennial fight within the Democratic Party is whether to focus on winning over swing voters or mobilizing eligible voters who never or rarely vote, most of whom would theoretically vote Democratic.

Yet it would be short-sighted to assume that a diversifying electorate will eventually ensure that the Democrats remain in power indefinitely. In a country as large, diverse, and gerrymandered as the United States, the Party cannot rely on voters of color and/or young voters alone. Political demographer Ruy Teixeira recently reflected on a book he cowrote with John Judis in 2002, in which the two analysts posited that demographic changes in the U.S. would benefit the Democratic Party. “Democrats should take advantage of a set of interrelated social, economic and demographic changes, including the growth of minority communities and cultural shifts among college graduates,” he wrote of the book’s central argument, adding, “But we also emphasized that building this majority would require a very broad coalition, including many voters drawn from the white working class.”

That crucial nuance, Teixeira said, was lost. Instead of cultivating support among multiple groups at once, including working-class people of all races, “many Democratic pundits, operatives and elected officials have falsely come to believe that demographics are destiny.”

Ideological, ethnic, and generational differences within communities of color make it unwise to take these voters for granted. Just over a third of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) voters backed Trump in 2020, with the former president also gaining support among Latino and Black male voters. Conversely, as Nate Cohn noted in a recent analysis for The New York Times, Democrats have made gains among white voters in recent years, and Republicans can no longer take that constituency for granted.

None of these shifts happened overnight. That’s why dedicated and appealing candidates, especially those running for local office, can gradually increase Democratic viability in conservative areas. Even if they lose the first time, or the first couple of times, their campaigns can make a difference. In local races, if a candidate is known, trusted, and has a plan to improve their neighbors’ daily lives, that often matters more than their stance on national issues. Run For Something asks candidates seeking its endorsement whether or not they agree with a series of statements on racial justice, income inequality, immigration reform, LGBTQIA+ and gender equality, climate change, and gun violence. But candidates who emphasize local issues, Rocketto said, “tend to do better than folks who allow their races to become nationalized.”

Marché Johnson lost her first city council race in Montgomery, Alabama by just six votes, then ran again and won by 174 in April. At the end of the day, she told me, it’s everyday issues that matter the most. “Everyone needs their trash done on time, everyone needs their roads cleaned, everyone needs their lights up,” she said. “So I focus more on the problems and getting viable solutions.”

Raising money is one of the main challenges progressive candidates face in places where the Democratic Party is virtually nonexistent. “The issue this always comes down to is resources,” Rocketto said, “and competition for those resources.” The money, he said, is there, but it tends to go to high-profile candidates in widely watched races, rather than to local candidates whose races cost less and who are better-positioned to win with adequate support.

“If the Party had been treating state legislative elections with the same level of priority that we treated the U.S. Senate over the last 10 years, we probably wouldn't be struggling with [state-level voter suppression bills] today,” Rocketto said. It’s easy to convey the urgency of beating Trump, he added, acknowledging that doing so was equally critical to the Democratic agenda. It’s harder to explain that the true bulwark against Trumpism is at the state and local level. “People actually do care about this work,” he added. “They just don't always care about it with their money.”

Strong local candidates, he said, tend to be “super-charged organizers,” which brings its own set of benefits. He mentioned a candidate who lost a race in a small town in Missouri in 2017, and later harnessed the energy and contacts he had cultivated during that campaign to advocate for environmental issues before the city council. “It’s good for the civic health of a place to have these folks running,” Rocketto concluded, “even if you know they're going to end up losing.”
    [post_title] => How a political candidate can help their party win—by losing
    [post_excerpt] => Even when a down-ballot Democrat loses, the fact that they bothered to run can benefit a presidential candidate. 
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