There is a line by Friedrich Hölderlin that should be inscribed in every leader’s office: “What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely the fact that man has tried to make it his heaven” (Hyperion, or the Hermit in Greece). It is a slap of reality that reminds us that when politics dresses itself in absolute redemption, what usually peeks out from underneath is the abyss.
Today we see this phenomenon embodied in two figures who, although they seem like polar opposites, drink from the same source of intolerance: Nicolás Maduro and Donald Trump.
Let’s be clear: there is no battle here between “good” and “evil.” That is a trap for those who prefer propaganda to reflection. What we have are two ways of understanding power that have ended up suffocating their people. Both have demonstrated that when a ruler decides that dissent is treason and that human rights are an obstacle to their plans, the result is always the same: disaster.
In Venezuela, the supposed “paradise” of Maduro’s social justice has degenerated into a humanitarian tragedy that has expelled millions from their homes. In the United States, Trump’s nostalgic “paradise” has undermined the truth and blown up civil coexistence. Both have broken the toy of democracy from within, forgetting that ethics is not an accessory, but the engine of any healthy society.
However, we must focus on the scale of the damage. The case of Trump represents a global outrage that we cannot ignore. It’s not just the polarization it has sparked in his country, but the dangerous consequences of his policies on a global scale. When the leader of the world’s most influential power disregards international law and acts unethically, the message it sends is lethal: the end justifies the means. That expansive wave of contempt for the established order and for the peoples that comprise it has emboldened tyrants and weakened global peace in a way that will take decades to repair.
In the end, both Maduro and Trump teach us that politics without limits becomes a sect where only the direct beneficiaries of the regime profit. For the rest of the citizens, what remains is the hell of living in a State, in a world that no longer protects us, but uses us. Democracy breaks when the “heaven” promised by a leader becomes the perfect excuse to trample on the dignity of the other. And in that lack of ethics, unfortunately, they are both masters.
Now, once we have strived not to demonize one and sanctify the other, we must know two things. Let those who rejoiced at Maduro’s fall forgive me, but the first is that the North American leader “doesn’t give a fig” about the suffering of the Venezuelan people. He is not a liberator but an opportunistic scoundrel. The second, of greater significance, is that there is a difference in scale that we cannot ignore: while Maduro’s drama suffocates the Venezuelan people—a people to whom I hold a deep affection after my six years there as a missionary—the Trump phenomenon carries a danger of global dimensions: the unequivocal ability to drag us all towards a Third World War. As they say in my country, “Almost nothing.”
Jesús Lozano Pino
English version translated with AI