Nicolás Maduro does not want American companies to profit, and therefore he becomes undesirable. Once again, the Western press calls him a dictator. But the more reflective reader may pause and ask: how exactly do we know when someone is a dictator? By what standard do we distinguish the dictator from the legitimate ruler?
A popular myth insists that legitimate government exists only when the governed have freely consented to be governed. Everything else, we are told, is dictatorship. The problem is that by this measure, every government in every era has been dictatorial. When voter turnout hovers around fifty or sixty percent, and the ruling party wins sixty percent of that vote, the government in power represents roughly one-third of the population. We can hardly assume that historical “dictators” enjoyed less support. Stalin and Hitler were almost certainly loved by more than a third of their people — and we can say the same, without hesitation, of Klement Gottwald (communist leader of their most violent period in Czechoslovakia).
A more reliable measure of who counts as a democrat or a despot seems to lie elsewhere — not in the will of the people, but in the opinion of other state leaders. A “democratic” politician is the one whom other heads of state recognize as such. A “dictator” is the one those same leaders decide to label as a dictator. The citizens themselves have no say in the matter.
Recognition abroad, however, can be achieved in only two ways.
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The statesman submits — that is, he accepts the conditions imposed by Washington, allows American corporations to profit, and is duly proclaimed a democrat.
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The statesman resists. In that case, two outcomes are possible: if he is overthrown, it proves he was a dictator. If he withstands every assault, then he is not a dictator at all, but a king, a founder of a dynasty, or simply a president who endured.
The defining mark of a dictator, then, is neither cruelty nor ambition, but insufficient strength and resolve. Maduro will have to show that he possesses both — the strength and the willingness (yes, even the brutal kind of willingness) — to prove that he is not a dictator.