Comparing Populism in Venezuela and the United States

Abstract

This chapter presents a comparative analysis of four cases of populism found in Venezuela and the United States: Betancourt’s Acción Democrática (AD) (1945–1948), McCarthyism, the Chávez administration, and the Tea Party. Populism is here defined as a discourse containing a symbolic structure that demonizes the “enemy” as the disruption of the legacy traced to a glorified “founding moment.” This sense of nationalism represented in the relationship between the “founding moment” and the demonization of the “enemy” is reinforced through the attempt to define the enemy within a spectrum of linked internal and external threats to the nation. The symbolic discursive structure, which is found in all four cases, reveals further similarities between the anti-leftist content of McCarthyite and the Tea Party discourse and the Bolivarian/social reformist content of AD and Chavista discourse. The key difference, however, between the cases of populism in the immediate postwar period (AD and McCarthyism) and the present cases (Chávez and the Tea Party) is the relative success of the latter concerning their ability to institutionalize populist discourse within stable systems of democratic politics. This chapter attempts to account for the emergence of these new forms of institutionalized populism in historical perspective by revealing how the relationship between the Manichean structure of discourse and corresponding reductive economic platforms provides for clear-cut methods of implementing policy initiatives within democratic politics.