Evo-lution or Revolution

Evo Morales, Bolivia's leader since 2006, resigned over the weekend after losing the support of the country's military amid protests against alleged fraud in recent elections. Predictably, the global left sees Morales' fall as a coup d'etat, while the right (and many self-styled centrists) sees it as a victory for civil society, people power, etc. over a socialist caudillo. It comes as something as a surprise, since for all that Morales was as radical as Hugo Chavez and his movement in Venezuela, his government had seemed less tumultuous or dysfunctional than the Bolivarian regime. Yet there were signs that Morales' own people were tiring of him. His referendum to overturn term limits so he could remain in office had been defeated at the polls, though friendly judges found a questionable "human rights" excuse to overturn them anyway. Morales clearly saw himself as the sort of indispensable man that the sort of democratic revolution his supposedly was shouldn't really need. Unfortunately, self-conscious revolutions too often suffer from a sense of dependence upon strong personal will. Socialist revolutions seem particularly vulnerable to this dependency, and to the temptation to see individual leaders as indispensable. The Cincinnatus archetype has little appeal on the left, perhaps because it's a patrician archetype -- the leftist presumably has no plantation to which he longs to return, and does not see politics as a burdensome imposition on his personal life. They live to carry out revolution and so probably find it hard to imagine themselves retired from revolution. Yet to the extent that any of them believe their own revolutions to be democratic, they should not want them to be dependent on any one individual's will or vision. No one claiming to lead a democratic revolution should believe himself indispensable to history. That so many leaders do see themselves that way only lends credence to conservative, libertarian or anarchist charges that leftist revolutionaries are interested more in imposing their will on others than in liberating others. That being said, in Bolivia it could be argued that Morales had done enough by promising to hold a new election. To claim that the government can't be trusted to conduct a fair election is a grave charge, but one easily made by parties accustomed, as in Bolivia, to losing when victory seemed theirs by right. The possibility that Morales needed to be removed by extra-electoral means can't be ruled out absolutely -- nor can such possibilities be ruled out anywhere -- but the swiftness with which Bolivia reverted to a sad South American pattern is most likely to encourage those on the left who see the democratic revolutions in Bolivia and Venezuela as failed or hopelessly flawed experiments, overly vulnerable to counterrevolutionary or "imperialist" manipulation. Should the hapless Maduro finally fall in Venezuela, we may well see a reversion on the left to all-out Leninist tactics, including the immediate suppression of all opposition during the seizure of power. While others may draw different lessons from Morales' career, some may conclude that his real failing was his failure to seize absolute power and eliminate his enemies as soon as possible. It's not clear whether what's happening in Bolivia is a right-wing coup or not, but if right-leaning authoritarianism seems ascendant in much of the world, a violent revival of Leninism in response should surprise no one.