The steel cage match!

Time to break out the nuance, it looks like — particularly if you happen to be a labor-friendly leftist AND a supporter of the idea that socialism has failed largely because it hasn’t been correctly attempted. Because not only has Nobel Peace Prize winner and utopian socialist Lech Walesa committed the unpardonable sin of praising Ronald Reagan for freeing Poland from communism, but he has now turned his attention to the rapacious (and capricious) policies of populist / socialist Venezuelan oil baron Hugo Chavez, a man admired by many on the American left, particularly those in the “progressive” movement. From “Lech Walesa calls Venezuela’s Chavez a demagogue”:

The founder of Poland’s Solidarity freedom movement today called Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez a demagogue who eventually will have to pay for his populist policies.

Lech Walesa, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former Polish president, said Chavez is offering Venezuelans things “that don’t belong to him.”

“I consider Chavez a demagogue and a populist, who says one thing and does another,” Walesa said at a news conference. […]

“There will come a time of truth, and then (Chavez) will have to pay for everything he has done” […].

Chavez, who has been blessed with high oil prices for most of his eight years in power, insists his socialist policies have improved the lives of poor Venezuelans and typically dismisses his critics as tools of his foes in the U.S. government.

Walesa founded and led the Solidarity trade union that helped topple communism in Poland in 1989.

The former Polish leader also said Cuba’s Fidel Castro must be “forced” to move the country toward greater integration with the world economy.

“We all have to force Castro to improve his system … and that means globalization,” he said.

Or, as neo-isolationist and populist Democrats like to call globalization, “outsourcing” inspired by “hegemony.”

A proto-utopian labor socialist promoting free international trade; members of the Democratic party in the world’s beacon of freedom joining ranks with nativist paleocons, advocating for neo-isolationist trade policies.

Up is down. Black is white. Donnie is Marie.

Tell me. Will Walesa suffer the same kind of purge from the movement that befell staunch liberals (on social issues, he was ranked by the National Journal as more liberal than Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid) like Joe Lieberman?

And if so, can we just write it off to “political passion”? Or is there indeed (pace Digby’s smug protestations to the contrary) a tendency among the self-styled “fiercely individualistic” progressive hive mind to excommunicate and demonize those who break from the “unified message” that the movement deems most important at any given time?