Little noticed in the tumult and terror that now grips the planet is something that will nonetheless be long remembered as a turning point in history. That is, the world has been swinging to the left ever since the U.S. Supreme Court inserted George W. Bush in the White House in 2001. This is no accident of timing or coincidence. This is the direct result of the man's presence as the titular leader of the world's most powerful nation.
You wouldn't know this, of course, if you relied on American media, or got sidetracked by the antics of religious fundamentalists of all faiths, but it's a demonstrable fact.
In our own "back yard," we've seen the landslide victory, three years ago, of the leftist union leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva as Brazil's president. In November 2004, Uruguay broke with 170 years of "tradition" to elect its first professed left-wing president, a medical researcher named Tabare Vazquez. In January of this year, the "Centre-Left" Michelle Bachelet was elected Chile's first woman president, soundly defeating a conservative businessman. Last week, in Costa Rica, the presidential race came down to a virtual tie between two leftists, Oscar Arias and Otto Solis.
This week, we've witnessed an ongoing presidential election in Haiti, where at press time Rene Preval, a champion of the poor (which means all but about 150 Haitians), had a commanding lead over his opponent, a wealthy factory owner. In Mexico, the leftist Andres Manual Lopez Obrador has a lead in the polls heading in to July's presidential election there. And, though Canada's recent election gave conservative Stephen Harper a narrow victory as prime minister, his reign will be brief. Within weeks of taking office, Harper is already under fire for appointing former corporate lobbyists to cabinet positions. So it goes.
The looming presence behind all this, at least in the Western Hemisphere, is, of course, Venezuela's twice-elected president, Hugo Chavez, a "democratic socialist" who has implemented his "Bolivarian Revolution" throughout Latin America, and even found time to help America's poor, on whom Bush has turned his back, by supplying heating oil and gas at reduced prices (tank up at Citgo rather than Exxon, to aid this effort). Whatever one may think of the mercurial Chavez, he gets things done, unlike his nemesis, George, a demonstrable failure at everything.
Even where the elections are not so simply delineated between left and rights, the candidates backed by Bush always lose by wide margins. Most notably, in Iraq, where Bush's main man, Ahmad Chalabi, received less than 1 percent of the vote. And those in power are the Islamicists, the very people we didn't want taking control of Iraq. Ditto in the Palestinian state, where Hamas just won resounding victories.
On and on it goes, where it stops nobody knows. But one thing we do know is that George W. Bush is the best thing to happen to left-wing politics around the world since the end of the Cold War.
