Soldati Senza Confini wrote:The Archregimancy wrote:Mrs Archregimancy, who is Russian, has also just pointed out to me the similarities between caudillismo - as defined above - and Vladimir Vladimirovich.
Whether this is coincidence or not, I leave for others to judge.
Hrm. Putin and caudillos have very little in common for most of its period if you are comparing them to Trump, personally speaking as a Latin American who has studied some Mexican and Salvadoran history. There's far more intersects between Trump and caudillos than with caudillos and Putin, with one notable exception which is Porfirio Diaz.
I think the closest famous caudillos you could attribute Trump with would be Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana in degrees of competency.
Caudillismo has a lot of defining features of the "strongman" political archetype, but in practice, Latin American caudillismo has presidents bending the rules or outright choosing their political successors after they were gone from what the people considered "the presidency". The power behind these caudillos never really tended to fade and they were the voice and policy of the party, with new presidents following the footsteps and agenda of these caudillos when they were powerful, and when they were not the caudillo was a bombastic leader full of themselves, which is why Santa Anna and other caudillos are a really close example to Trump than they are to Putin, which, again, as I said a notable exception is Porfirio Diaz of Mexico, who was ruthlessly efficient and powerful.
Fair points all. While there's inevitably overlap between caudillos and strongmen outside the Americas, there are clear characteristics within caudillismo that are unique to the Americas.
Leaving aside historical figures, on the basis of being forced to watch el comandante closely when I was working in Venezuela, I don't think a comparison between Trump and Chavez is wholly unreasonable. No doubt there are those who would object that comparisons between an allegedly wealthy New York capitalist and a Venezuelan socialist are invidious, but the whole point of caudillismo is that core behaviours and attitudes to power are more characteristic of the type than ideology. Historically caudillos have encompassed everything from conservative arch-traditionalists to populist socialists (which you well know; you're not really the target of that comment). But the appeal to a disaffected working class that feels it's been left behind by modern economic forces, the use/manipulation of modern media, the reliance on a particular style of bombastic charisma, the claims that the voting process is rigged and/or corrupt, the opposition to traditional governing elites, and the adoration of all things military (at least Chavez had an excuse for that one) are all shared characteristics; acknowledging Trump has some distance to go before he reaches late-Chavez levels of disdain for existing constitutional norms and opposition to free media (Trump has, so far, also spared us the hour-long extemporisations on national television). Again, many of these are shared with other strongmen in other parts of the world, but there's a particular feel to caudillismo that makes it a specifically American phenomenon.
On a separate though related point of yours, it's also worth noting that the tradition of hand-picking a successor goes back to the earliest period of Latin American independence; Bolivar even wrote the principle into his 'ideal' Bolivarian constitution for Bolivia - though his reasons for doing so were no doubt very different than Chavez's reasons for picking Maduro. Either way, the concept of a president for life appointing his handpicked successor has very deep roots within Latin American political theory as well as in the practice of caudillismo.
It may well be that some of these comparisons are overblown, but I also think it would be dangerous to ignore them completely. Perhaps our US-based friends should only start really worrying when Trump calls a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution with the acquiescence of the Republican Party.
But while US constitutional practice and forms have been impressively robust over the last 200 years, there's absolutely no reason to assume that they're permanent, either. The United States is a young country, and while the underlying assumptions behind its governmental norms went through through a far worse crisis than the Trump administration in the 1860s, there's no reason to assume those norms are immune to collapse. Increased ossification in the US political process, increased hyperpartisanship, and a caudillo-like US president who not only fails to respect constitutional norms but actively accuses those norms of being rigged and corrupt, are a dangerous combination.
Nothing is permanent, historically speaking. The Achaemenid Empire survived 220 years as the superpower of its time before collapsing like a house of cards; Manzikert happened less than 50 years after the death of Basil II; the Mughal Empire's disintegration after the death of Aurangzeb was extraordinarily rapid; the British Empire was a major world power as recently as 1947. Americans can rightly take pride in their country's constitutional achievements, but they should be very careful about assuming that those achievements are permanent, or that the United States is somehow unique in its ability to resist the historical inevitability of the eventual overturning of its established order; and - like the collapse of the Soviet Union - there should be no assumption that anyone will see it coming before it happens.
I stress that I'm absolutely not predicting a collapse of the US constitutional order under Trump; American institutions have proven to be robust in the past. But I am arguing that no one should be complacent about assuming that the constitutional order can survive, and necessarily will survive, simply because it's survived past crises.
