{"id":519,"date":"2024-03-04T16:55:49","date_gmt":"2024-03-04T16:55:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.messiah.edu\/politicsinternationalrelations\/?p=519"},"modified":"2025-09-04T13:55:21","modified_gmt":"2025-09-04T13:55:21","slug":"for-times-such-as-this-the-fragility-of-democracy-and-morality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.messiah.edu\/politicsinternationalrelations\/2024\/03\/04\/for-times-such-as-this-the-fragility-of-democracy-and-morality\/","title":{"rendered":"For Times Such as This: The Fragility of Democracy and Morality"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Allie Mast is a December ’23 graduate of politics and international relations, with an American politics concentration and a minor in English.<\/p><\/div>\n

This post is the twelfth of this season of From the Field.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>If you have not yet done so, read this brief post introducing\u00a0Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

When democracies stumble, we are quick to point to human fallibility. When democracies flourish, seldom do we point to the beauty of humankind, in its capacities for resiliency, rationality, and empathy. In times of flourishing, do we notice our ability to profoundly know one another? To recognize that, even if we are not neighbors by proximity, perhaps we are neighbors in the shared experience of humanity. There is an author who has achieved a balance of both, detailing the roots of a democracy\u2019s plunge into chaos, while also intimately narrating the stories of a nation\u2019s people. In Things are Never So Bad that They Can\u2019t Get Worse<\/em>, William Neuman embarks upon a telling of Venezuela\u2019s history and humanity. From a standpoint of clarity, he may be limited by his quest for narrative creativity, but this is hardly a detriment to his message of the tragic beauty of imperfect beings in an imperfect system.<\/p>\n

In detailing Venezuela\u2019s deeply-rooted corruption, Neuman underscores the nuance in our conversations about human morality. Corruption has ravaged Venezuela, penetrating not only its government but also generating corruption among its citizens. After Ch\u00e1vez instituted currency controls, everyone\u2014the Chavistas, the financiers, and especially the middle class\u2014began to buy cheap dollars to sell for a profit on the black market (176). Neuman writes that:<\/p>\n

The nation was an all-you-can-eat-buffet and everyone was pushing to the front to fill
\ntheir pockets with delicacies before they ran out\u2026It destroys your sense of right and
\nwrong\u2026It destroys your sense of belonging to a society, something that matters and has
\nvalue. It destroys the idea of being a citizen (177).<\/p>\n

The corruption demonstrated here was partially to satisfy human greed. But the middle class was not immune from Venezuela\u2019s food and medicine shortages and the power blackouts. What if the black-market profits provided resources for a hungry family? As further fodder for this conversation, we can examine the role of gang bosses in Venezuela. After a woman\u2019s daughter disappeared, the neighborhood\u2019s gang boss, who is the \u201claw in a lawless place\u201d tracked down the man who had kidnapped and killed the girl (92). Presumably, the gang boss killed the man, as \u201cthat\u2019s how justice is done in the barrio\u201d (93). The morality of corruption in Venezuela is a question of means and ends. In an admittedly unethical way, Venezuela\u2019s corruption has provided and likely will continue to provide (so long as there remain gaps left by the government) some twisted form of good.<\/p>\n

Neuman succeeds in his criticism of America\u2019s approach to relations with Venezuela. While it is an unfortunate reality that Neuman may scrutinize his government\u2019s actions with no repercussions, we know from Things Are Never So Bad That They Can\u2019t Get Worse<\/em> (for instance, the experience of Jos\u00e9 Vincente) that such liberty does not exist in every corner of the world. Neuman details the experience of Tom Shannon, who was, for many years, \u201cconsidered to be the person in the U.S. government who best understood what was happening in Venezuela\u201d (185). In times when American leaders might have chosen an aggressive policy, Shannon advised diplomatic and moderate approaches. Shannon retired during the Trump presidency, at a point where he had largely been shut out of discussions about Venezuela (193). Neuman allows dissent to occupy space in the narrative as Shannon explains how the Trump administration lacked an understanding of Chavismo and the larger social, political, cultural, and historical contexts within which Venezuela operates: \u201cI think that\u2019s foolish, quite frankly,\u201d says Shannon (193). By including criticism, Neuman does the work of holding the United States accountable. In doing so, he makes Venezuela\u2019s lack of accountability, and the inability of Venezuelans to hold their government accountable, all the more stark.<\/p>\n

To this author, there is little room for disagreement with Neuman, for this book is a telling of history and a portrayal of Venezuelans\u2019 life experiences. Disagreement with the characters and policies of Ch\u00e1vez and Maduro would be too great a task and plain disagreement with the citizens who have fallen victim to populism would be ignorant of the experiences that have molded their understanding of a legitimate government. Instead, we can direct our disagreement towards Neuman, as the one who has organized the telling of Venezuela\u2019s history and humanity. Indeed, Neuman is successful in crafting a unique pace and maintaining the attention of the audience with his narrative creativity. In doing so, however, he sacrificed a degree of historical clarity. For a reader who might be entirely unfamiliar with Venezuela\u2019s history, Neuman\u2019s bouncing back and forth between history and personal narrative is potentially confusing. For instance, the interspersing of the \u201cBlackout\u201d chapters kept the reader from a chronological time context. Ultimately, Neuman\u2019s authorial choices are a tradeoff that is in service of the book\u2019s narrative strengths.<\/p>\n

William Neuman\u2019s Things are Never So Bad That They Can\u2019t Get Worse<\/em> is a commitment to truth where he sets forth what he has witnessed: a democracy\u2019s infliction of suffering upon its people. His narration is not paralyzed by the weighty task of portraying hardship and corruption. By way of narrative creativity, Neuman illustrates a people who have found the bravery and courage to persist amid darkness. As students of politics, may we strive, just as Neuman, to know and understand, not only the details of geo-politics and a nation\u2019s history, but the experiences of our neighbors both near and far.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post is the twelfth of this season of From the Field.\u00a0\u00a0If you have not yet done so, read this brief post introducing\u00a0Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse. When democracies stumble, we are quick to point to human fallibility. When democracies flourish, seldom do we point to the beauty of humankind, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13588,13576,12096],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-for-times-such-as-this","category-for-times-such-as-this-things-are-never-so-bad-that-they-cant-get-worse","category-from-the-field"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.messiah.edu\/politicsinternationalrelations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.messiah.edu\/politicsinternationalrelations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.messiah.edu\/politicsinternationalrelations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.messiah.edu\/politicsinternationalrelations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/58"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.messiah.edu\/politicsinternationalrelations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=519"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.messiah.edu\/politicsinternationalrelations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":525,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.messiah.edu\/politicsinternationalrelations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519\/revisions\/525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.messiah.edu\/politicsinternationalrelations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.messiah.edu\/politicsinternationalrelations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.messiah.edu\/politicsinternationalrelations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}