Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

It’s a different country, but the same question: who does a government serve?

By now it seems clear that with the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and his wife, the Trump crime organization didn’t topple a regime in Venezuela so much as acquire one, in a deadly takeover that swapped the CEO but seems willing to keep the board in the form of Maduro’s former VP, Delcy Rodríguez and her loyalists, as long as they’ll manage the populace while the new owners raid the store.

It’s too soon to tell much about how the Trump takeover will work out, but while the money media focus entirely on the boardroom, the story with the most lessons for the rest of us lies outside of it, with Venezuela’s experiment attempting to shift who actually wields power in the state.

Chávez’s Bottom-Up Bet

In a slip, at his press conference Saturday announcing the snatch-and-grab invasion, Donald Trump said Venezuela was “a great country twenty years ago.” He didn’t mean it, but plenty might.

Twenty years ago, a popular military officer called Hugo Chávez was president. Chavez sought to redistribute power downwards by pouring state funds into bottom up architecture: “Bolivarian Circles”, communal councils, and communes were funded to manage local resources, build popular confidence and essentially, run neighborhoods. Neighbors could directly decide on projects, manage........

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