And the very popularity that suggests he can keep winning repeated terms as president suggests his majority in the legislature will remain adequate to his needs for a good while, through future elections in which the oppostion is not quite so stupid as to keep up a boycott.

As you know, people in America support or oppose changes to our Consitution as they support or oppose decisions or interpretations from our Supremes, generally on short term considerations of whose ox gets gored rather than longer term.

The GOP wanted term limits when Newt was new so as to force out Kennedy and the long-time Democrat leaders. George Will at the time, for instance, wrote vigorously in support of the idea in about every other column.

As soon as the same suggestion would have forced them out of office, as well, the GOPsters who took office favoring the idea simply stopped talking about it.

As for me, I think they’re a good idea for both houses of the American Congress, as well as the president and VP.

And when HC and his supporters wrote a term limit into their Constitution for the presidency some years back, that was a good idea, too.

Not quite. Or have you forgotten why the legislature is full of Chavistas? A hint: it has something to do with the opposition parties and the advice that they took from the US. Advice that they declined to follow during the subsequent presidential election, one that they lost handily. And the constitution? A lot of people had a role in its creation.

Personally, I have concerns about the removal of term limits from a different perspective, primarily because it presents the prospect that the Bolivarian movement will become sclorotic, a form of leftist Gaullism, and we all know what happened there. But to hear people from political backgrounds who either recognized the 2002 coup plotters as the new government of Venezuela, or were, alternatively, silent, all of a sudden insist that term limits are the essential feature of democracy, is a bit much, especially as, in the US, they oppose them for the Congress, or, in Britain, would have permitted Tony Blair to govern indefinitely.

This is, however, a common strategy when it comes to Venezuela, the elevation of questions of related to political philosophy and administration, ones in which there have been disagreement within academia and the society at large for decades, if not centuries, one in which some countries have made one choice, and other countries another, into ones that, by definition, become signs of autocracy when implemented by Chavez.

And, that was clearly the purpose of Young-Bruehl’s visit to the Observatario, indeed the creation of the Observatario itself, and the publication of her article in The Nation, to indict Chavez for authoritarianism precisely because he doesn’t organize society according to their principles and values, and allow the oligarchy to preserve their influence for their benefit and the benefit of their children. Young-Bruehl and the invocation of Arendt by both her and the Observatario are the means by which this project is legitimized.

Does anyone doubt that the removal of Chavez would result in a violent upheaval in Venezuela, as he has displayed the consistent support of about 60% to 65% of the populace? Strangely, this subject is missing from Young-Bruehl’s article, and for good reason, as it would require her to acknowledge that her new found radical friends would happily attempt to implement the most severe sort of Pinochet repression to retain power, a real violent, bloody repression, not the imaginary wish fulfillment kind that they perpetually accuse Chavez of, something that her inspiration, her good friend Hannah, wouldn’t have looked upon too kindly.

Indeed, one suspects that the Hannah Arendt Observatario would probably change its name to something like the Strauss Observatario or the Kirkpatrick Observatario, as many of its members elevated themselves into positions of power within the new government. In this hypothetical, though, I don’t think that they would be there long, Chavez purchased all those rifles from Russia to make sure that people would be able to effectively resist.

Pilger’s documentary on Latin America, which starts in Venezuela with Chavez, can be viewed here:
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2007/08/pilger-war-on-democracy.html

And on a side note, the abolition of term limits will be voted on by THE PEOPLE before it can be ratified. Any guesses by how big a margin it passes? I’ll wager 60% vote for it.

Not General, Lieutenant is more like it.

‘Actually, the Athenians, the world’s foremost experts on outright democracy, thought term limits - and very short terms - more democratic than doing without them. ”

Really? Does ‘outright’ democracy entail the right to own slaves?
Advertising the long-ago surpassed political achievements of a 3,000 year-old civilization as the pinnacle of democracy is plainly ridiculous. The Athenians might have been the forefathers of democracy, but the political system they created would hardly be considered democratic in our times.

Actually, the Athenians, the world’s foremost experts on outright democracy, thought term limits - and very short terms - more democratic than doing without them.

But they also thought that filling offices by lot rather than by election was even more democratic, since they could see no way the process of election would not give unacceptable advantage to the rich and the mighty.

Case in point? General Chavez.

None of which is to say he will not do great and noble things with his undemocracy.

And none of which is to deny the people can sometimes prudently prefer the rule of a benevolent semi-dictator to that of a bitterly obstructionist and reactionary legislature.

All the same, the demos are not always right. If they were, white majorities would never have tolerated, much less fought to maintain, the enslavement of Africans in the Americas.

And both the legislature and the Constitution Chavez is subverting are of his own creation, anyway.

Could the Bolivarian Revolution, already firmly in control of the whole government, not proceed successfully without a quasi- (or outright, eventually) dictatorship of El Numero Uno?

Are not the cemeteries full of indispensable men?

of course, yours is quite fine, but, in a way, too serious, because there are some really bizarre things in the article that border on parody

for example, there is a passage where Young-Bruehl suggests that the children of the oligarchy are so ravenous for knowledge of past social movements that they have been inspired by . . . yes, the 1962 Port Huron statement of the SDS!

also, the origins of the Observatario are interesting in itself, at least as related by Young-Bruehl

it appears that some Caracas intellectuals created the Observatario after Chavez began to more closely align himself with Iran (after a history of verbal support for the Palestinians) and made his admittedly tasteless remark about “Christ killers” in 2005

at the time, efforts to tar Chavez as an anti-semite went nowhere, as there is nothing in his public political life to support it, but, even so, it did apparently inspire Zionists within Venezuela to awaken from their slumber and suddenly discover that he possessed authoritarian tendencies as profiled by Arendt about 50 years earlier

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Venezuela

The standard of education in Venezuela is one of the highest in the region. Of Venezuelans aged 15 and older, 93.4% can read and write, one of the highest literacy rates in the region. The literacy rate in 2003 was estimated to be 93.8% for males and 93.1% for females. Although the Venezuelan education system is overextended and underfunded, the Venezuelan government remains committed to the idea that every citizen is entitled to a free education.

Nine years of education are “compulsory” education. The school year extends from February to November. The student population and the education budget have increased, but many children do not attend school because they are undocumented aliens or because of “poverty”. An estimated 20% of the population is without any formal education. The Ministry of Education of Venezuela’s efforts are aimed at adapting the curriculum to the demands of an increasingly technological society, expanding compulsory education, and upgrading teacher qualifications.

Many children under five attend a preschool. Children are required to attend school from the age of six. They attend primary school until they are eleven. They are then promoted to the second level of basic education, where they stay until they are 14 or 15. Public school students usually attend classes in shifts. Some go to school from early in the morning until about 1:30pm and others attend from early afternoon until about 6:00pm. All schoolchildren wear uniforms. Although education is mandatory for children, some poor children do not attend school because they must work to support their families.

Venezuela has more than 90 institutions of “higher education”, with more than 6 million students. Higher education remains free under the 1999 constitution and was receiving 35% of the education budget, even though it accounted for only 11% of the student population.