I & I Editorial BoardBy all accounts, socialists and their brethren in the Democratic Party will sweep the upcoming midterm elections, which the press will describe as a stunning rebuke of President Donald Trump.
But down in South America, voters are going in the exact opposite direction, getting rid of their failed socialist governments and embracing conservative, free-market leaders in the mold of Trump.
Anyone want to guess why?
It wasn’t that long ago that we were being told that South America was “poised to swing decisively to the left” in what was described, lovingly by the press, as a “pink tide.” Socialists had been in control of Venezuela since 1998. In 2021, Chile and Honduras voted for leftist leaders. The next year, socialists won in Colombia and Brazil. Last year, almost the entire continent was ruled by leftist governments.
The leftist leaders all promised voters “more equitable distribution of wealth, better public services and vastly expanded social safety nets.”
But what they delivered was inflation, stagnation, and corruption.
Then a funny thing happened. One by one, South Americans started kicking the socialists out of office.
By this June, Brazil was left as a “left-wing island,” as one newspaper put it. And from the looks of this week’s election, it won’t be an island anymore, as conservative Flávio Bolsonaro got more votes than incumbent left-wing Lula da Silva, leading to a run-off that favors Bolsonaro. Even Cuba seems poised to liberate itself from the Castro-style dictatorship that has oppressed its people for nearly 70 years.
It’s true that the continent has undergone seismic political shifts over the past decades. But this time, we think, it’s different. South Americans now have the clearest evidence not only of the failure of the left to produce the goods, but are witnesses to the success of Argentine free-market evangelist Javier Milei, who was elected president in 2023 and quickly turned his country around. (See: Here’s Something Trump Should Be Eager To Import, and Where Is Our Javier Milei?)
They also have a leader in Washington who is, in stark contrast to his predecessors, paying attention to our own hemisphere.
One of Trump’s first acts in his second term was the stunning arrest of Venezuela’s leftist dictator Nicolas Maduro and the policing of the continent’s narco terrorists. The dismantling of USAID has starved leftist organizations of funds they’d relied on to keep themselves in power.
As Benny Johnson put it:
Yet, here in the U.S., voters are about to hand control of Congress to a bunch of socialists who are promising, besides impeaching Trump for the umpteenth time, to deliver “more equitable distribution of wealth, better public services, and vastly expanded social safety nets.”
Thankfully, for the next two years, the best Democrats can hope for is gridlock as they engage in an orgy of retribution against Trump. But the risk is that two years from now voters will put a Democrat in the White House, giving the radical left the best chance it’s ever had to “remake” America.
South Americans know where this leads. Are we Gringos really going to ignore the lessons they can teach and trod down that same dead-end path?
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
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