"Caesarism" In El Salvador
The point is, you can only spout platitudes about civil rights, due process, and freedom-of-whatever before someone asks, “Are we going to do something?”
I’ve got a lot more to say about El Salvador that didn’t make it into my last post. There really is only so much you can say in a single post before the writer exhausts both himself and the readers!
Among the most important things I left out was this Twitter thread written by Alex Stanczyk. I recommend you read the whole thing, because he summarizes the situation in El Salvador better than I could, but I wanted to highlight what I believed to be some of the more important points he made:
I don’t know how clearly I put it in my last posting, but yes, El Salvador has gone from being absurdly violent to having some semblance of law and order. It proves that crime is among the simplest problems for government to solve, given political will, not to mention it’s arguably the most important task for government to handle.
What Stanczyk speaks of was the main topic of my last piece. I’d say in the U.S., the prevailing public sentiment falls into #s 2, 3, and 4. Decadence, accompanied by a heavy dose of racialized indoctrination, has caused millions of Americans to believe that enforcing the law against something other than masks and pandemic lockdowns constitutes a moral atrocity. Even those who are more reasonable in their thinking still find it hard to swallow the fact, at some point, you need to bring down the hammer. This is how you end up with anarcho-tyranny: the belief that crime is a product of a society unable and unwilling to accommodate the deviant.
Stanczyk then quotes a number of Salvadorans on what they think of their country’s war on crime. It’s not what American leftists think. In fact, what Salvadorans think and what the American elite think couldn’t be further apart:
I came back from visiting Colombia early last month. Colombia is a much safer country than El Salvador, but you still won’t see most people walking around with their phones out. Why? Because it immediately makes you a target for criminals.
On Twitter, someone replied to tweet of mine saying as much: most Salvadorans like what the government and President Nayib Bukele have done. They also insist most of the critics aren’t Salvadoran, just outside observers who have no skin in the game, yet nonetheless think they’re entitled to strong opinions on the matter. Like I said in my last post, these outsiders, which include top U.S. officials, didn’t worry about El Salvador one bit until they started locking up criminals en masse. I ask once more, why is that?
Again, read Stanczyk’s thread to learn a thing or two about what life was like in El Salvador before the state really began cracking down on crime. Talking about due process and the rights of the accused goes out the window when you’re living under effectively lawless conditions, subject to the unrelenting brutality of criminals who see no value in your existence, let alone their own. Given how dramatically crime dropped in the country, it’s safe to say the people in prison aren’t innocent (just look at those tattoos - those are gang members), nor are they good people who just had a bad day and were done badly by the system.
Sometimes, I wonder if it’s better or worse living in a country that filled with people like this versus living in a place like El Salvador:
Okay, I’m kidding, of course I’d rather live in a country where people can spout stupid nonsense and deny reality to their heart’s content without consequence. I posted that screencap to show how decadent and delusional people in the developed world have become about what happens when you don’t uphold the rule of law. People like that have never lived in a state of brutal lawlessness and, therefore, cannot relate with those who have. There’s nothing wrong with that - it’s a good thing to not have to live in places like El Salvador - but such people shouldn’t act like Anglo-American rules of fair play for criminals ought to apply in a country where criminals have had their way for as long as they have. That’s their privilege talking.
Finally, there’s no talking about this story without mentioning the popularity of El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele. The exent of his contribution to the literal death of crime in the country remains an open question, but one thing he absolutely hasn’t done is ease off on the gas pedal. If anything, he’s revved up to full speed. Whatever foreigners think of El Salvador, there’s no question Salvadorans love him for it. A January 2023 poll revealed a stunning 90% of respondents regarded Bukele favorably, with past polling showing him having scored as high as 96%. This isn’t a statistical anomaly, either - his approval ratings have been consistently above 75% like no other president in the country’s history.
Approval ratings that high are the kind that raise suspicion, including mine. However, it can also serve as an indicator of how bad conditions must be that there’s literally nothing to argue about when it comes to the efficacy of a leader or policy. El Salvador, unlike the U.S., is beset by far more fundamental issues and cannot nit-pick the way we do. So it’s no a big surprise to me that such an overwhelming percentage of Salvadorans, many whom were likely crime victims or knew them, have cast their lot with President Bukele. It’s similar to how Peruvians felt about notorious President Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s, during one of the worst periods of the country’s long-running internal armed conflict.
Even at this late hour, the U.S. is still overall a better place than El Salvador. However, unlike El Salvador, the U.S. has no will to do anything about its mounting pile of problems. In fact, state, society, and even the military all seem committed to making certain the problems get much worse through a combination of gaslighting (denial), anarcho-tyranny, and indoctrination of an ideology endorsing national disintegration (Woke leftism). Just look at San Francisco - there’s no way to describe what’s happened to this city other than to describe it as collapsed. This is South Africa-levels of degeneration:
Which brings us to the topic of “Caesarism.” Named for the most famous of rulers, the concept refers to the thinking that a strong, autocratic leader is sometimes necessary when a state finds itself in a crisis it cannot resolve through business as usual. Closely wedded to this line of thought is that democracy and representative government is useless if it cannot resolve problems threatening to unravel a society.
Is President Bukele a modern-day Caesar? Listen to what he has to say here, paying particular attention to what he says about Germany following World War II:
You’re not going to find a single American leftist who’d disagree with what happened in Germany following World War II. In fact, we know the Left, if they could get away with it, would do everything possible to ensure Woke leftism had total cultural supremacy (they pretty much already do) and excise any trace of non-leftist thinking from our society. We also know the Left would seize guns legally-owned by Americans in accordance with the Second Amendment rights (they wouldn’t do anything about guns owned by criminals, though) to ensure their political rivals are at the complete mercy of the state. After all, that’s what it takes to get rid of a problem, right?
The point is, you can only spout platitudes about civil rights, due process, and freedom-of-whatever before someone asks, “Are we going to do something?” More important, we’re quickly headed down a road where the Regime will likely play fast-and-loose with the Constitution in an effort to have its way, while still attempting to maintain a veneer of constitutionality and lawfulness. I’m not sure that’s any different from authoritarianism. I don’t want to sound like I’m suggesting the Right ought to beat them to the punch, but it’s to say that those in power aren’t working in our best interest and, as time goes on, will increasingly work against us. You can love democracy all you want, but it’s not going to always love you back. It definitely won’t solve the problem of apathetic or malicious governance.
Rod Dreher of The American Conservative (whose days at the outlet are numbered, unfortunately), says this about Bukele’s Caesarism:
It's going to take a leader like Viktor Orban, or Nayib Bukele (and it will probably be more like Bukele: a prominent conservative commentator once joked to me, but he wasn't really joking, that things won't turn around in this country until "President Gonzales" takes over). It's not that everything Orban or Bukele does is justified or suited for the United States. What I mean is that it's going to take a strong, confident leader who knows what he believes, has the focus and follow-through to form and carry out a plan, can communicate effectively, is not intimidated by his enemies.
There is no reason we can't have that within the current constitutional order. Let me be clear: I absolutely do not want a strongman who runs roughshod over the Constitution to achieve his goals. But we don't need one; we just need someone who has the vision, the intelligence, and the courage to de-wokify America. If you're going to read this post and say that Dreher wants to reproduce Bukele exactly in America, you're an idiot. What I'm saying is we need a leader who grasps the true nature of the woke threat to our civil and constitutional order, and who is willing to do what it takes to roll it back, without fear or apology. As I explain in Live Not By Lies, we have been dealing in this country with a fundamentally totalitarian ideology, one that has taken over stealthily by disguising itself as therapeutic help for victims of society's past bigotries. Wokeness is deeply enmeshed in the institutional structures and cultures of the United States. Our leading universities have had two decades now to train young people in this racist, bigoted ideology -- an ideology that, by the way, values loyalty to its own teachings over basic competence, scientific and otherwise.
America is still a federation and it’s a country the size of the continent. So it’s unlikely that the approach taken by someone like Bukele is likely to have the same results here. Maybe Caesarism isn’t possible at the federal level, but what about at the state and local level? Look at what Governor Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida, to both sterling appraisal among supporters and strong condemnation from detractors. Almost a century ago, Governor-then-Senator of Louisiana Huey Long gained Caesar-like status through his policies involving the robust use of government to help those he represented recover from the Great Depression.
What I hope everyone understands is that, if things continue to get worse in this country, someone will have to try something different. After all, as the title of this blog clearly states, we might not be at that point where drastic action is needed, but you can see it coming.
What do you think? Is Caesarism possible at the federal level? What about at the state and local level?
Max Remington is a defense, military, and foreign policy writer. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentLoyalist.
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There were many Caesars after Julius Caesar so an American Caesar has multiple role models to choose from. The American Republic ended long ago, and I think we are well into the Age of Caligula and Nero.
Methinks the diversity hires at Langley are cooking up another color revolution.