On December 17, Chileans voted once again on a new constitution, opting to reject—for the second time in two years—an attempt at constitutional revision. Rejecting a highly conservative text, voters chose to keep the dictatorship-era constitution for the time being. A political saga that began amid immense hope has now devolved into a dismal disarray that’s left countless Chileans tired and frustrated.
Here in the United States, we face an equally bleak political outlook. According to a recent Pew Research Center report, 25% of U.S. adults feel that neither of the nation’s two major parties represents them adequately enough. Some 63% of Americans express little to no confidence in the future of our political system.
Both the United States and Chile, in other words, find themselves at the center of what we can call a “Crisis of Representation,” a growing disconnect between citizens and the institutions that claim to represent them.
Each time Chileans took to the street, they sang louder and danced harder. The more their voices resonated, the harder they became to ignore.
This crisis has spared few countries. In 2019, major pro-democracy mass mobilizations erupted in nearly half—44%—of the world’s nations, an all-time high that surpassed previous records set during the fall of the USSR and the Arab Spring. People all over the world are demanding dignity and democracy. People all over the world feel that their voices are going unheard.
The U.S. and Chile share other links as well. Chile, according to the U.S. Department of State, rates as “one of the United States’ strongest partners in Latin America.” Our countries have maintained diplomatic relations for over two centuries and share proud, longstanding democratic traditions.
Yet this relationship has not always been positive. To say merely that the U.S. has “meddled” in Chilean politics would amount to a gross understatement. The CIA and Nixon administration stood behind the “first 9/11,” the September 1973 military coup that violently uprooted Chile’s then 143-year-old democracy. The U.S. would go on to prop up dictator Augusto Pinochet’s regime for nearly two more decades—17 years of rape, torture, and murder.
The Pinochet years essentially birthed what we now call “neoliberalism.” The conservative U.S. economist Milton Friedman and his disciples used the captive Chile as a testing ground for our world’s now-dominant right-wing economic ideology. Under Pinochet’s neoliberalism, inequality deepened and worker power dwindled. Chileans found themselves forced to operate as consumers not citizens.
Since Pinochet’s ousting by plebiscite in 1990, the neoliberal economic model has continued to constrain Chilean democracy, just as neoliberalism has in the United States and many other countries across the globe. Today, the U.S. and Chile rank among the world’s most unequal nations.
Even so, according to Freedom House, Chile has been gettingmore democratic since 2020, with one of the highest rankings of any democracy in the world: 94. The United States has only becomeless democratic, with an 83 ranking. Here in the United States, we clearly have a lot to learn from the recent Chilean political experience.
Twenty-first-century Chile has been a progressive success story. Starting in the mid-2000s, three cycles of protest changed everything. Chile’s 2006 Penguin Revolution, 2011 Chilean Winter, and 2019 Social Explosion each began with student protests and developed into mass movements. Each cycle grew larger than the last, forcing politicians to pay ever greater attention to the widely shared popular demands.
Before the December 17 election, I spoke with two 31-year-olds, the psychologist Gustavo Ignacio Mancilla Andrade and the professor Jose Luis Escalona Muñoz, about their experiences as student leaders in the Valparaíso region.
“2006 made us realize that change was possible,” Jose told me. “2011 was chaotic at first, but soon we became highly........