The Patriot Post® · Chile's Model for America
Joe Biden gave a dark and threatening speech with a Third Reich-like background last week, and the White House titled its transcript with the ostentatious description “on the Continued Battle for the Soul of the Nation.” Well, America isn’t the only nation in the world with radical leftists trying to redefine its soul. Way down in South America, the people of Chile voted on the soul of their own nation over the weekend, and the result of massive turnout was a resounding 62-38 rejection of radical leftism. We’ll see if it sticks.
In 2020, amid leftist-fomented discontent, 78% of Chileans voted to draft a new constitution. What was proposed under leftist President Gabriel Boric sounds an awful lot like the Joe Biden-Bernie Sanders-Nancy Pelosi-Squad wish list of “progressive” policy preferences. Indeed, Sanders and Squad member Rashida Tlaib were vocal proponents.
On the ballot were things like giving legal and representation preferences to “indigenous” people, establishing a system of reparations, ending private healthcare and education, extending government control over pensions, expanding taxpayer funding of abortion all the way up until birth (in a nation where all abortions were banned until 2017), enforcing the Left’s beloved gender ideology, and destroying religious liberty and free speech.
The American Leftmedia praised the proposed constitution as “one of the most progressive in the world,” which would have “enshrined over 100 rights into Chile’s national charter, more than any other constitution in the world.” Make that “rights” with the appropriate scare quotes because most of those “rights” would have to be provided by someone else.
In short, the leftist effort would have essentially shredded the constitution established in 1980 under Augusto Pinochet — a constitution that played a key role in Chile’s resurgence over the last 40 years.
Venezuelan citizen and Manhattan Institute fellow Daniel Di Martino recently explained:
Chile is and has been the success story of Latin America. Plagued by extreme poverty, shortages of goods, and hyperinflation in the early 1970s, it is the richest country in Latin America today. Extreme poverty has been nearly eradicated and intergenerational socioeconomic mobility is higher than in Germany, France, and even the United States.
The Chilean miracle has been the result of the current constitution, ratified in a referendum in 1980, and of the reforms that ensued under the advice of Milton Friedman and his protégés. In the early 1970s, Chile was the least free economy in Latin America, Venezuela the freest. Chile overtook Venezuela by 1990, and today the roles are reversed as Venezuela embarked on the socialist project Chile left behind, resulting in nearly half a million Venezuelan immigrants choosing Chile as their new home. Free markets lead to prosperity. Socialism leads to poverty.
Naturally, leftists promising utopia will end up making Chile and America look a lot more like the dystopia in Venezuela.
Free markets are never perfect, of course, given that imperfect humans are involved. Chile has had economic issues in recent years that leftists used to feed public angst and call for a new constitution. Boric said he will “take this message with great humility,” but he promises to keep working on a new constitution that will almost certainly be less free than the current one. “Progressives,” after all, are never done, no matter the country.