Bukele’s Lesson on the ‘Great Man Theory’ of History

The key sentence in TIME magazine’s profile and interview of Nayib Bukele is a simple question to the interviewer: “How can I ask the Salvadoran people, who often have modest meals of beans and tortillas for dinner, to pay taxes to provide meat and chicken to prisoners who have murdered their family members?”

Walk the streets and ask around if this sentiment makes sense. If you pay taxes, do you think the money should benefit those who are legally and morally inferior to you? The question itself is absurd, but the modern liberal worldview does not allow for such a strict hierarchy. Are citizens better than illegal aliens? Are normal, law-abiding people better than those who break the law? Do they all deserve the same treatment, under the vague and increasingly unjust umbrella of “human rights,” just because they share the happy coincidence of a genetic and chromosomal similarity with a fellow ape?

These are not hypotheses. The postwar world is defined more than anything else by the vague superstructure of the human rights complex. Its organs stand above democratic mandates. They also stand above politics itself. Wars do not end as they used to, because wars are not fought as they were before World War II. Wars that do end—Grozny, Sri Lanka—do not follow postwar norms of behavior. States that ignore human rights and NGOs discourage mass migration, as was recently demonstrated when Saudi Arabia went so far as to shoot illegal immigrants rather than invite them in. The difference is most striking in the areas of crime and disorder.

In Bukele’s case, it’s a positive change for El Salvador. As TIME reported,

At 43, he has reshaped a country that was once the murder capital of the world, turning it into a safer place than Canada, according to Salvadoran government data. Bukele’s policy of mano dura—an iron fist—led to an aggressive crackdown on brutal gangs, jailing 81,000 people and dramatically reducing the murder rate. After decades of violence, fear and extortion, citizens can move freely in formerly gang-controlled “red zones,” lounge in parks and go out at night. El Salvador now bills itself as the “land of surfing, volcanoes and coffee,” hosts international events like the Miss Universe pageant and draws tourists and cryptocurrency enthusiasts to coastal enclaves like “Bitcoin Beach.” The transformation helped Bukele win re-election earlier this year; his approval rating now sits above 90 percent, according to the latest CID Gallup poll.

And for that, he was rebuked by the U.S. government, with Kamala Harris tweeting, “We have serious concerns about democracy in El Salvador.” Bukele ignored all that, fighting the drug cartels and criminals in a manner reminiscent of a pre-war, pre-NGOcracy world. As Bukele’s security minister himself put it, his government kicked out the NGOs and “then studied the enemy, as in any war,” with handbooks cataloging gang tattoos, graffiti and slang to identify suspects’ affiliations. “There are many priests… but few are exorcists.”

These aren’t new, perception-altering philosophical insights. Bukele lays out his “philosopher king” view of the larger ethics of punitive deterrence: “We don’t put them in jail to punish them. We put them in jail to get them off the streets. They can’t be on the streets. They can’t be in the community besieging their neighbors. We capture them and remove them from society by putting them in a cell.”

A very simple logic. George Savile, the first Marquess of Halifax, would have agreed: “Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but horses must not be stolen.” The restoration of order by a legitimate leader is not “authoritarian”; it is in fact the most basic function of statesmanship that would have been recognized by anyone in the previous 6,000 years of human government and history. One of the reasons we have a crisis of legitimacy in our time and the longing for strong men is that men have forgotten that basic norm of government because liberals have convinced themselves that they are not bound by the laws of nature and that history itself has ended. They have convinced themselves that arbitrarily defined “rights” based on shared humanity trump government or peace.

Bukele deserves a pat on the back: he is bringing back the “great man theory” of history by exerting his influence and opposing structural, irresponsible forces.

The post Bukele’s Lesson on the ‘Great Man Theory’ of History appeared first on The American Conservative.