Malbergier is right, of course. Candidates, not only in the Brazilian campaign but in any other at any place on the planet, are fully convinced that the people are but a mass of brain-dead idiots ready to be molded and manipulated according to the politicians’ caprices. But Malgerbier goes further than only how politicians see the situation; to him the people are indeed stupid. The unpopularity of proposals centered around “austerity” measures are proof of that.

There is a certain inferiority complex in that diagnosis, since in Europe the population showed strong opposition to welfare spending cuts. Leaving aside questions of the relevance of austerity programs (after all, corporate subsidies are overwhelmingly larger than welfare projects), I intend to focus on the more basic question: Are the people stupid?

Some economists like to use the concept of rational ignorance to describe the behavior of the voters. It is simply not worth it for the average individual to worry about political questions over which he will not have any palpable influence. According to this theory, the people are bad at voting because the incentives to pursue knowledge about relevant social issues are insufficient. Costs are too big in comparison to possible benefits in elections that involve hundreds of thousands or millions of other individuals.

Of course, that doesn’t happen by chance: Representative democracy is designed to mitigate the power of opinions that come from below. The system is set up in a way that perpetuates the influence of the political elite and minimizes significant changes. Representative democracy guarantees at most that there should be some degree of rotation between the power elites that control the state with no violence; before western democracy took over, changes in the elite in control of the state required too much bloodshed. This does not mean that the people exert no influence over the government, but it does entail that this influence is much smaller than is conventionally assumed. The very definition of what is subject to public discussion or what the social issues are is guided by the elite’s opinion.

However valid, rational ignorance seems to be limited. The population, as a whole has uninformed opinions about political and economic themes not because they are stupid or don’t see the benefits in getting informed, but because these questions never present themselves clearly to the public.

The intelligentsia believes that the people are incapable of thinking for themselves and that any social changes will be resisted by that ignorant public. Candidates count on the reactive conservatism of a large sector of the populace to get elected. None of the candidates that lead the presidential polls intend to push any relevant change in frequently debated issues. For instance, changes to abortion, gay marriage and drug legislations are themes that are simply not present in their “proposals.” But that happens only because these questions are never subjected to public debates.

Evidently, the people are going to be against drug legalization; that is the status quo. Public opinion polls that are supposed to reflect the average opinion on a given matter only reflect the status quo. Current institutions exist because they are supported by the population. If the people generally did not agree with them, it would be hard for them to resist for long. Stating that the people are against drug legalization says absolutely nothing: Drug liberation has not been subject of public debate. Only if it was would the people be forced to develop a more or less coherent set of beliefs on the matter.

It is convenient for the intellectual and political elite to assume that the people are stupid or invariably ignorant, because then those elites get carte blanche to act on behalf of everyone.

But to have the people stop being ignorant about issues that affect their lives, it is not enough to bemoan it. Their opinion has to be heard.

Intellectuals and politicians will probably not buy this argument. Maybe they are the stupid ones.

For his part, Chomsky has repeatedly stated that Chávez ushered a revolutionary break with Venezuela’s political past, especially regarding the social policies of the state toward the poor, echoing the foundational Chavista discourse of “Bolivarian revolution.”

In an interview with Spanish newspaper Diagonal in March 2006, Chomsky declared that “for the first time, the country is using … energy resources for its development … in construction, health …” Likewise, in a 2005 op-ed for Mexico’s La Jornada, he wrote “it is only now with President Chávez … [that] medicine has become something real for a majority of the poor.”

Last month, speaking to Venezuelan economist Miguel Ángel Santos, Chomsky repeated his point: “For many years Venezuela was dominated by elites that … harvested all the benefits from the oil bonanzas while marginalizing the poor … Chávez came up against that …”

Regrettably, Chomsky ignores basic facts of Venezuelan contemporary history. There is nothing revolutionary about the Chavista welfare state.

In Revolution as Spectacle, Rafael Uzcátegui, co-editor of Venezuelan anarchist newspaper El Libertario, presents reams of data showing that up until the early 80’s, when oil prices started a sustained decline that drained the Venezuelan state’s capacity to sustain the massive subsidies that appeased the masses since 1958 and ultimately led to the Caracazo (a wave of riots in 1989 where thousands were killed by the military under the second administration of Carlos Andrés Pérez) welfare policies were as ubiquitous, and at times more effective, than those of Chávez’s reign.

Let’s limit our look to the two areas mentioned by Chomsky, housing and health care (Uzcátegui applies a similar analysis to a wide range of welfare policies).

According to national census data, the state’s housing projects reduced shanty-town dwellings as a percentage of total housing from 37.18% in 1961 to 12.56% in 1990. Penetration of the electricity grid was 58.16% in 1961 and 76.59% in 1981. Access to running water increased from 46.7% in 1961 to 68.74% in 1981.

The Chávez administration built an average of of 26,000 households per year between 1999 and 2008. The average for the 90s decade was a much higher 64,000 per year.

The Popular Clinics and Hospitals of the People created by the famous Barrio Adentro Mission, a program widely publicized as having secured hitherto unparalleled access to basic health care for the poor, are today unable to provide treatment for any ailment more complex than a broken bone.

For critical treatments, the people must rely on the old hospital network built during the Fourth Republic, which in 1980 reached one of the widest coverages of the region with 2.7 beds per thousand habitants, but today is basically in shambles.

This translated, among other tragedies, into poor women in Venezuela giving birth under inhuman conditions during the period 1998-2008, and a 16% rate of maternal deaths due to clandestine abortions for 2010.

The flip side of Chomsky’s argument, that Venezuela before Chávez was dominated by elites harvesting most of the oil bonanza, is true, but irrelevant: Today’s Venezuela is still dominated by brave new elites, the so called boliborgoise, wealthy and powerful thanks to their connections to, or direct participation in, the all-powerful Bolivarian state.

Actually, the Chavista elite is much more corrupt, authoritarian and inept than their Fourth Republic predecessors. If the monopoly on the use of force and administration of justice is the defining feature of the state, Venezuela today can easily be described as a failed one: The country’s epidemic of violence netted almost 25,000 murders in 2013, more than 90% unsolved.

Hugo Chávez was no revolutionary. He simply took the petro-statist social democratic model prevailing in Venezuela since 1958 to a whole new level. As Uzcátegui argues in his book, he masterfully executed the art of the demagogic spectacle like no one before him — spectacle that utterly mesmerized Noam Chomsky, despite his analytical and intellectual prowess.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, Noam Chomsky, Deslumbrado por el Espectáculo Bolivariano.
• Portuguese, Noam Chomsky: fascinado pelo espetáculo bolivariano.