Upstairs, Downstairs

Five Things You Need to Read Today

1. Undemocratic Socialism

There is a lot going on with Venezuela right now, and I'll get to that in a moment. But first, a piece I sent out to subscribers of this newsletter on February 4 under the title, "The Lessons of Venezuela," has just been published in a slightly revised form in the Washington Examiner. Go read it.

The main change I made was to update it with a story about another "democratic socialist" in Congress, Ilhan Omar, who suggested that it was the opposition in Venezuela, not the socialist dictatorship, that was likely to use violence and kill people, supposedly with US support. She made this incredible claim while berating the administration's special envoy on Venezuela, Elliott Abrams, for a 40-year-old massacre in El Salvador.

Bringing up El Salvador is a bad idea, because it reminds us of the last time American leftists went all in to back a brutal socialist dictatorship: Nicaragua's Sandinista regime, which was funding and supporting the vicious civil war next door. This also gives us a chance to revisit the real history of American intervention in El Salvador and what we actually accomplished there, as Rich Lowry does.

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