OPINION:
Last Sunday, Chile consigned a new “constitution” that would have made the country the most “woke” on Earth and dismantled the free economic system that has made it one of the most prosperous in South America to the scrap heap. Voting is mandatory in Chile, so everyone trooped to the polls —- and 62% rejected the new rules.
But in Chile as in this country, leftist elitists increasingly believe that elections are only democratic reflections of the public’s feelings when they win and blame the ignorance of voters and the chicanery of their opponents when they lose.
Thus, Chile’s leftist president dismissed the importance of the vote and doubled down on his desire to enact the new constitution. Inexplicably, he promised his followers that he and others will “listen to the voice of the people. Not just today, but the last intense years we’ve lived through” while at the same time the spokeswoman for the campaign on behalf of the new constitution announced, “we are committed to creating conditions to channel that popular will and the path that leads us to a new constitution.”
Note that despite the vote, the “people” are supposed to want what they just overwhelmingly voted to reject. The American mainstream media also got into the game in solidarity with the Chilean left, reporting with a sense of disappointment that opponents of the new constitution relied on “misinformation” to defeat it.
Even in the face of a major campaign to persuade Chilean voters otherwise, common sense prevailed. Country after country to our south has been electing leftist leaders in recent elections. Chile’s new president, Gabriel Boric, a 36-year-old woke leftist elected in March, championed the new 178-page constitution, cobbled together by his ideological soul mates and consisting of some 54,000 words in 388 articles incorporating everything on any modern-day leftist’s wish list as the way to a new progressive future.
It mandated abortion rights, a right to housing, gender equality, and “free time, physical activity, sex education, cybersecurity, the protection of personal data” along with rights for animals and trees and “free and full legal advice” It would have also abolished private health care and pension funds as well as private schools, and according to The New York Times, transform Chile into “one of the world’s most left-leaning societies.”
Progressives the world over applauded the effort to remake Chile, believing that the new Chile would become a pioneer in the effort to get other non-woke nations like the United States to scrap their existing constitutional arrangement. Publications like The Guardian were already urging Americans to follow Chile’s lead. The applause, however, was premature as the Chilean people demonstrated on Sunday an unwillingness to trade a constitutional framework that has worked for a progressive fantasy.
In the nineteen seventies, a Library of Congress study cited Chile as “the poorest among Latin America’s large and medium-sized countries.” In recent decades, Chile emerged as perhaps the most successful economy south of our border. Reason’s Daniel Raisbeck reported recently that the Chilean poverty rate dropped from 45% in 1982 to 14% in 2014 thanks in large measure to the county’s embrace of free market economics. GNP growth has skyrocketed and a nation that was once a basket case stands out in the region as an economic success to be emulated.
This infuriates leftists who are invariably friendlier to the rulers of Venezuela and even Argentina than to those of Chile. The left persuaded Chilean voters in 2020 of the need to revise the old constitution, then hijacked the process. As what they had in mind became clear, public support for their efforts melted away. The authors… and their new president… assured Chilean voters that the new rules were needed to fight climate change, gender inequality and racism, but the public gradually realized that their free and prosperous society could not survive under the new constitution.
Their president assured the public that while the constitution might seem vague, it would be interpreted after ratification to avoid the dire consequences that worried so many. That didn’t sell. Voters began to suspect that the drafters… and their president… had made it clear enough in the 58,000-word draft that they could and perhaps would do just what their critics suspected. Mainstream outside analysts from The Washington Post to The Economist reluctantly agreed that the Chilean economic miracle might well be in jeopardy if the new constitution was ratified and implemented.
Progressives the world over believe they know what’s best for the rest of us. When they lose, it cannot possibly be the quality of their ideas, but because not everyone is sophisticated or wise enough to accept their nostrums. They confuse “misinformation” and legitimate criticism.
Sunday, Chileans proved decisively that they may not all have Ivy League degrees or wear thousand-dollar suits but know the road to prosperity and how they got there. That’s called common sense and our domestic progressives may learn in November that Chilean voters aren’t the only ones possessing it.
• David Keene is editor at large at The Washington Times..
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