By Monica Showalter
In today’s happy news, Chile’s voters have decisively, overwhelmingly rejected a full-blown socialist rewrite of their 40-year constitution that otherwise has served them so well.
According to the lefty U.K. Guardian (whose account was less biased than that of the New York Times):
Chileans have voted comprehensively against a new, progressive constitution that had been drafted to replace the 1980 document written under Gen Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.
With 96% of the votes counted in Sunday’s plebiscite, the rejection camp had 61.9% support compared with 38.1% for approval amid what appeared to be a heavy turnout with long lines at polling states. Voting was mandatory.
Senator Ximena Rincón, one of the leaders of the reject campaign, described the victory as “clear and emphatic”, and called for a new constitutional convention to be convened.
Wow, two to one! That’s a hell of a margin.
Suffice to say, what the Chilean voters rejected were all the siren song promises of the left — free health care, free education, free abortion on demand (something that dates to the Bolsheviks), animal rights, tree rights, other greenie nonsense, state control of resources, gender parity in government, transgender privileges, government pensions with an expropriation of private pensions, government jobs to anyone who wanted one, a “plurinational” state with Indian tribes on an equal footing to the government, and a total loss of individual rights to come with it. The president could run for consecutive terms, the way Hugo Chavez used to do, and the Senate would be eliminated, as a thing of the past.
In short, they voted ‘no’ on turning their country into a socialist hellhole.
According to the New York Times:
Chilean voters rejected a 170-page, 388-article proposal that would have legalized abortion, mandated universal health care, required gender parity in government, given Indigenous groups greater autonomy, empowered labor unions, strengthened regulations on mining and granted rights to nature and animals.
In total, it would have enshrined over 100 rights into Chile’s national charter, more than any other constitution in the world, including the right to housing, education, clean air, water, food, sanitation, internet access, retirement benefits, free legal advice and care “from birth to death.”
And it would have eliminated the Senate, strengthened regional governments and allowed Chilean presidents to run for a second consecutive term.
The text included commitments to fight climate change and protect Chileans’ right to choose their own identity “in all its dimensions and manifestations, including sexual characteristics, gender identities and expressions.”
It was written by leftists, given the legislative composition, and for leftists, having every item on the leftist “to do” list on it.
According to the Times:
Leftists, who won more than two-thirds of the seats, took full control of the process; they did not need a single vote from conservative convention members to approve additions to the proposal.
As a result, said Ricardo Lagos, the center-left president of Chile from 2000 to 2006, the proposal was “extremely partisan.”
One of those. Yes, we in the states are familiar with the durability of such mono-party ram-throughs, impossible to pass by compromise with multiple parties, triggering the “by any means necessary” ethic of the left.
Not surprisingly, it was loudly endorsed by Bernie Sanders, Regina Tlaib, Noam Chomsky, Jeremy Corbyn, Gustavo Petro, and other prominent radical leftwingers from other countries, some of whom wouldn’t want to live in such a place themselves if they weren’t in charge of it.
What it resembled was the constitutional rewrite that Hugo Chavez rammed through in the early 2000s in Venezuela, leftists rewriting the entire rules of a society in order to “transform” it to their leftist ideal.
The media was uniformly biased in reporting the current Chilean constitution as the “Augusto Pinochet” constitution. That it was written at the end of the Pinochet era, in preparation for a free Chile outside the confines of the military government (which by the way, was itself constitutionally done, something the lefties have never accepted), is probably one of the biggest media distortions about the current constitution that was supposed to be so bad. It was a leftist propaganda lie, not a factual description. That Chile’s free-market constitution has since been amended, and amended, and amended, usually by center-left but democratic and freely elected governments in the post-Pinochet era, is never noticed. Calling it the “Pinochet” constitution is a total misnomer, given how often center-left governments have changed it around with the consent of the governed.
But unlike a lot of Latin American governments, which change their constitutions (as one Nicaraguan friend explained to me years back) “the way we change our underwear,” Chile’s constitution did endure at its core, making Chile a model of stability. Its core free market and individual rights principles never changed. That’s why Chile has remained so stable compared to its neighbors.
Meanwhile, the current constitution brought about prosperity to Chile as the years passed and the rabid left yelled about Chile’s free market reforms “failing”:
That chart, with its soaring prosperity line upsets the left hugely, in the same way it upsets Joe Biden and his allies, the former of whom called the prosperity that President Trump brought to America “a threat” to democracy.
“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” Biden said…
Probably the biggest reason for Chile’s successful result is what the late great Herman Cain called “the Chilean Model” which had he been elected president, he vowed to bring to the states. That’s Chile’s revolutionary innovation of private savings for retirement funding, which replaced Chile’s utterly bankrupt social security system. Pioneered by the great Jose Pinera, a Chicago-school of economics economist, the system gave individual Chileans huge retirement fundings well beyond what Americans get from Social Security, eliminating the need Americans have to save on the side as well. It also gave Chile a vast pool of savings and investment capital that enabled the private sector to develop the country — roads, bridges, mining, fishing, wineries — and raise incomes and jobs of workers to first-world levels. Chile is the only country in Latin America that has very successfully crawled out of the designation of “developing country” as a result. Standards of living in Chile are high, and unlike most other Latin American countries, Chile is not a net exporter of illegal immigrants — Chile has a huge illegal alien problem of its own as nationals from socialist hellholes seek entry, legally or illegally, to Chile. Bottom line: The Chile Model lives!
What we have here is a stunning success story derived from that constitutional base, premised on property rights, individual freedoms and the rewarding of hard work and merit.
Chile, though, has been plagued by lousy leaders and low growth in recent years, sadly, one of the most loserly being President Sebastian Pinera, who though nominally a conservative, actually allowed himself to be hoodwinked by the left in permitting the votes on this new leftwing constitution three years ago as leftists started to riot. He was a RINO pushover, being scared of being compared to Pinochet, and as a result, Chile was turned into Portland for months upon months as the left ran rampant.
As a result of this weakness, a voter reaction was triggered, and now Chile has an utterly unfit president, a 36-year-old tattooed far-left clown named Gabriel Boric as its president, who has rapidly begun to make a hash of Chile, and very early into his presidency, has become unpopular. When he got elected president as a student “leader” of the riots, the equivalent of an antifa leader, he was all in for the new leftwing constitutional rewrite that Bernie Sanders so heartily endorsed, and at his inauguration bombastically claimed:
“If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave.”
Well, no. That didn’t work out very well for him since last night, did it?
There will likely be more attempts to rewrite the constitution, but with a two-third rejection of this all-the-left-all-the-time version, the momentum is against it, and he and his pals probably won’t have that much time until voters get rid of them. Chile draws its strength from building on what it has, not by remaking society, again and again from the ground up, the way tyrannical communists do, viewing human beings as malleable “matter.”
Guys like Hugo Chavez like to rewrite constitutions to their liking and claim they are the people for it, but Chileans didn’t take the bait. They knew that if they approved this constitution, they’d be entering a leftist roach motel from which there would be no return, unless they wanted another revolution. Enough of them had seen what happened in Venezuela even if they didn’t live through 1973. Well, having been through 1973, plenty had been there, done that. That’s the exact dynamic of what went on in Chile as Salvador Allende, a close Castro ally, took over Chile on a weak mandate and sought to reinvent the country on the lines of Cuba and kid you not, North Korea. Chile’s legislature and courts then acted to direct the military to oust him, which is how Chile ended up with Pinochet and his military government.
Instead of trashing what they’d already built over the years for the great socialist Utopian dream, Chileans opted to keep what they had and trash the leftist radicals instead.
Let’s hope this lights the fuse for an enormous chain reaction to be felt all across the hemisphere, including here.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/09/chile_dodges_a_socialist_bullet.html