AP obtains documents showing Venezuelan leader Delcy Rodrguez has been on DEA's radar for years

[DJ Synikus Makisimus]

4. Your analysis is correct, but that's not popular perception.

After more than 150 years of training (at least since Haymarket, probably before), US politicians know that all they have to do is say "leftist," "socialist," or "communist," Like Pavlov's dog, most Americans will salivate and agree that "those people" must be destroyed, giving license to pro-capitalist authoritarian wannabes like Hoover, Nixon, Reagan, and Trump. Promising to save people from "enemies" is a tried and true pathway to power. I'm not even going to mention popular perception of "anarchists," who are actually non-authoritarian.

This predicament of association hasn't been helped by left movements that might start with good intentions but fall under the spell of leaders with authoritarian tendencies. Beginning with Lenin's proclamation of the "vanguard party," perhaps foreshadowed by Daniel DeLeon's iron rule of the Socialist Labor Party in the USA, politically savvy authoritarian types have used the advancement of the proletariat to justify their seizure of power. Remember, Felix Dzerzhinsky was there from before the founding of the USSR. While Kronstadt should have demonstrated what the Bolsheviks were about, it either wasn't enough or too late, depending on one's perspective.

Of course the right pretty much always favors a "strong leader" unapologetically. "How can we possible exist without leaders?," they ask. People "need" someone higher in rank to tell them what to do, apparently.

It's hard to break the hierarchy that is civilization. One might speculate that we have to be de-civilized to do so, though it's ever so hard to imagine what that might look like. After 6000 or so years of civilization's "world system," we seem to have been taught there's nothing else. I suspect that until we do, however, we're stuck in the endless repetition of the Townsend Law ("meet the new boss, same as the old boss&quot .

Spoiler alert: I don't think a reversion to hunting & gathering or swidden horticulture is likely to work.