The only real threat to American democracy comes from Americans themselves

The only real threat to American democracy comes from Americans themselves

By Jared Diamond
For the Los Angeles Times
December 30, 2014

When I was living in Chile in 1968, my Chilean friends often explained to me proudly that their country was different from other Latin American countries. Chile had a long democratic tradition. Its armed forces had rarely and only briefly meddled in the government, and not at all since 1932.

Chile was blessed by a strong cultural identity and a big middle class. It had a diversified economy that combined the world’s largest copper mines with manufacturing and agriculture. Chileans were better educated than other Latin Americans, and they based their universities and agriculture on European models. Most of all, they explained, Chileans knew how to govern themselves, as summarized in the saying “We Chileans will never be extremists.”

My friends then didn’t foresee what would happen five years later. In 1973, after decades of democratic elections, Chile’s armed forces overthrew then-President Salvador Allende. The resulting Chilean military government, under General Augusto Pinochet, set modern world records for inventing sadistic sexual tortures too revolting to describe in print. It aimed to exterminate its opponents, “disappearing” and killing thousands of Chileans and driving a hundred thousand more into exile. Pinochet held on to power for 17 years.

In retrospect, there had been abundant signs of trouble brewing in Chile for years before the coup. The country’s left, right and center political parties, which drew roughly equal numbers of votes, couldn’t agree on how to address Chile’s chronic economic and social problems, which kept the Congress in a state of gridlock. Allende had been elected by a narrow 36 percent plurality of voters, and his party coalition controlled neither house of Congress, yet he nevertheless tried to introduce radical political and economic changes.

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