You talk often about the persistence of the social-democratic ideal in Latin America. How do you account for that persistence?
It’s a paradox. Or a contradiction. When one considers the deep currents of reaction and dehumanization that exist in the region, how do we account for the opposite, the endurance of a profound humanism and sociality? “Humanism or barbarism” goes one version of the slogan, but in Latin American it’s been humanism and barbarism, with one a reaction to the other. One reason for the endurance of a humanist, social-democratic left, one absorbent enough to take in demands related to gender, race, and sexuality, has to do with, I think, the fact that Spanish colonialism’s moral crisis came early with the conquest. The critique launched by dissenters was frontal and all-encompassing, and when independence from Spain finally came, many of those who led that movement understood “emancipation” (even if they didn’t always act on that understanding) in its fullest sense, to include, potentially at least, all forms of oppression. And then there was the Spanish Catholic Empire itself, which claimed to be universal even as it created a colonial regime founded on the administration of difference. That reconciliation, of universalism and difference, both as an idea and a social reality, is, I think, the foundation of Latin American social democracy.
The Anglo experience was different. Evasion and denial were English settlement’s hallmarks. And remained so for centuries. No ethical dilemma accompanied the destruction of the continent’s indigenous people. When a moral crisis over chattel slavery did finally come, in the 1800s, it abstracted Black-skin bondage as a singular, exceptional evil. This, as the historian David Brion Davis wrote 50 years ago, had the “great virtue” of providing an “ideal” and “clear-cut” model of evil, which was useful for abolitionists when it came to fighting it but a hindrance to later historians and activists when they tried to relate it to the persistence of “other species of barbarity and oppression.” Latin America’s democrats have been more open (not all, to be sure, but an impressive many) to seeing the connections, to incorporating “other species” into a panoramic vision of struggle.