Evo Morales’s Party’s Massive Victory Is a Rebuke to US Elites Who Hailed the Coup
Immediately after last year’s right-wing coup in Bolivia, US elites, including many liberals, celebrated or excused the putsch against Evo Morales. Yesterday’s resounding electoral win for Morales’s party is a rebuke to all of their bloviating nonsense — and a massive triumph for democracy in Bolivia.
Demonstrators hold flags with the face of former president Evo Morales ahead of presidential elections on October 14, 2020 in El Alto, Bolivia. (Gaston Brito Miserocchi / Getty Images)
November 10, 2019 was a day of celebration in the citadels of US punditry and elite policymaking. Evo Morales was gone. The populist dragon had been slain. No longer would the “pink tide” stalk their imaginations.
The US right, veterans of defining democracy as its opposite, hailed the coup against Morales as a popular victory. According to the Wall Street Journal, the putsch represented a “democratic breakout in Bolivia.” The Trump administration praised the military for “abiding by its oath to protect not just a single person, but Bolivia’s constitution” and confidently predicted that “we are now one step closer to a completely democratic, prosperous, and free Western Hemisphere.
One of the most jubilant in the cheering crowd was Yascha Mounk — stenographer of the liberal center, doyen of populist studies. “Evo Morales’ resignation is not a coup,” Mounk said in a Twitter missive on November 11. “[I]t is one of the few big victories democracy has won in recent years.” He expanded on that bold claim in an Atlantic article the same day:
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