Death of a Republic: An Impression

For some 160 years, runs the myth now being mass-programmed into Computer Liberalism, Chile was that other stable haven of constitutional government in the New World. A marvelous model republic, always innovative, always in the forefront. The pet of John Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, its economic reforms and social measures so advanced that hardly a layer in the welfare cake was left to the imagination. Why, just 11 years ago, President Eduardo Frei, the Christian Democrat, campaigned on further reform and achieved even more enlightened progress, redistributing land, building schools and hospitals, using government as best he could to implement his profoundly held Catholic social doctrines (not to be confused with Catholic claptrap about the supernatural and such). Frei retired from office in a nimbus of glory. Yet before the year was out, he was being referred to, by some, as Chile’s Kerensky. Chile lost, perhaps forever, her republic, and fell into revolutionary ruin—-and then, in reaction, counterrevolutionary . . . well, call it reconstruction.

Huh?

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F. Reid Buckley

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For some 160 years, runs the myth now being mass-programmed into Computer Liberalism, Chile was that other stable haven of constitutional government in the New World. A marvelous model republic, always innovative, always in the forefront. The pet of John Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, its economic reforms and social measures so advanced that hardly a layer in the welfare cake was left to the imagination. Why, just 11 years ago, President Eduardo Frei, the Christian Democrat, campaigned on further reform and achieved even more enlightened progress, redistributing land, building schools and hospitals, using government as best he could to implement his profoundly held Catholic social doctrines (not to be confused with Catholic claptrap about the supernatural and such). Frei retired from office in a nimbus of glory. Yet before the year was out, he was being referred to, by some, as Chile’s Kerensky. Chile lost, perhaps forever, her republic, and fell into revolutionary ruin—-and then, in reaction, counterrevolutionary . . . well, call it reconstruction.

Huh?