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Judi Lynn

(160,219 posts)
Fri Aug 19, 2016, 11:36 PM Aug 2016

Nicaragua’s Right-Wing: Ideology and Wishful Thinking

Nicaragua’s Right-Wing: Ideology and Wishful Thinking

By: Tortilla con Sal

Among the wreckage of Nicaragua’s right-wing political opposition to Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, it is hard to make out anything resembling a coherent political and economic program independent of clearly bankrupt U.S. imperialist ideology. The academic and former Nicaraguan ambassador to the U.S. and Canada, Arturo Cruz, tried to dignify that failure with some vestige of intellectual rigor back in 2013 in an essay whose title translates to “Political reform in Central America: Is Democratic institutional rule at risk?” Recently, Cruz has revived his arguments in a series of lectures whose overall title translates as “Government's petty cash in trouble.”

In a nutshell, Cruz' argument explains the widely acknowledged success of the Sandinista Government as a result of its ability to combine sound macro-economic free market policies with the capacity to satisfy the ever growing demands of both the Sandinista grassroots as well as the demands of many Nicaraguans who previously supported the liberal right-wing parties, in a scheme Cruz labels “responsible populism.” However, Cruz argues, with the virtual collapse of Venezuelan aid due to the economic crisis and the fall of oil prices, the Sandinista government today lacks the “petty cash” needed to make the system work which may herald a period where its hold on political power will be put to test. Cruz has to make mighty omissions to make this case. He might better have called his series of lectures “Whistling in the dark.”

Cruz’s argument serves as an apology for Nicaragua’s capitalist class and its political right-wing expression in a historical period during which the impoverished and excluded popular classes have emerged as economic as well as political and ideological subjects. In 200 years of independent history, Central America’s capitalist elites have been incapable of formulating a sovereign political project of their own, depending mostly on imperial networks of political and economic influence. Now Nicaragua’s political right-wing needs arguments against the emergence of Nicaragua as a sovereign revolutionary society. Cruz’s arguments offer an unconvincing alibi for that historic political and intellectual failure. His view of Nicaragua’s impoverished majority is elitist, a mass of “clients” with little sense of citizenship and no strategic consciousness of their needs. This is part of what Cruz wrote back in 2013:

“Today, Nicaraguans' consumption expectations are undoubtedly low (which should facilitate the task of distributing scarce goods), but they are also immediate, anchored in the present, with little attention to the future, unable to reach a minimum of abstraction. The client – as opposed to the citizen, who expects a lot from government, except from what he can afford with his family income – is focused on the most basic, such as a pound of beans or a galvanized roofing sheet, convinced that the government's main role is to serve him as a crutch.” Clear? It’s hardly important that impoverished families live in dehumanizing immiseration, the important thing is that they look beyond their hunger and their leaking roofs and behave like true citizens. Cruz’s argument goes a long way to explaining why support for right-wing political parties in Nicaragua’s has collapse.

More:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Nicaraguas-Right-Wing-Ideology-and-Wishful-Thinking-20160819-0025.html

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