A daydream for life’s nightmare.

This line is wrong in every way that matters:

"The left’s position is easy to understand – a socialist was removed from power, by their arch enemy Trump."

That isn't explanation. It's mere caricature.

It starts by pretending the left supported Maduro. Large parts of the left have explicitly condemned Maduro as authoritarian, corrupt, and catastrophic for Venezuela. Opposition to Trump's intervention was never about loyalty to Maduro. That's a strawman, and it exists for one reason only: to avoid engaging with the real objections.

Those objections were never "our guy lost". They were about US-led regime change, and the simple fact that the US has an appalling record when it comes to foreign interventions: Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya. You don't need to admire a dictator to oppose the method used to remove him. Conflating those two positions isn't a mistake. It's a dodge.

There's also a lazy bit of tribal shorthand doing work here. "Socialist" is treated as a team jersey rather than a contested label. Maduro isn't opposed because he's insufficiently socialist, nor defended because he's nominally one. Reducing a broad ideological spectrum to team colours might pass on talkback radio, but it isn't an argument.

And then there's the projection. Leyonhjelm accuses the left of tribal thinking while indulging in it himself. He assumes opposition to Trump must be driven by hostility to Trump, rather than by concerns over legality, precedent, civilian harm, executive overreach, or the routine, well-documented failure of foreign interventions.

Worst of all, the line undercuts his own libertarian case. If he actually wanted to persuade libertarians, he would grapple with the strongest counter-argument, not sidestep it:

Why should libertarians trust a powerful state to impose liberty abroad, given its incentives, its track record, and its insulation from the harm it causes? Instead, we get a cartoon left that can be dismissed with a sneer.

So no, the left's position isn't "easy to understand". It's just easy to misrepresent.

No need to read beyond that sentence. Save your time.