Excellent analysis as ever, Richard. One thing I'd emphasise is the unique savagery of the gangs in question, which I think has an important bearing on this argument.
Following this story on Twitter, I keep seeing affluent American liberals complaining about 'creeping fascism' etc. receiving replies from actual Salvadoreans saying things like, 'Shut the fuck up, these people cut off my uncle's head for not paying extortion money and left it in our doorway.'
Bukele hasn't mass arrested a bunch of muggers and low level drug dealers; what he's done is more akin to putting ISIS in a giant prison complex, and the blessings of Allah be upon him for doing so.
I suspect that emphasizing the unique savagery of the gangs in question actually works against Richards primary point here, which is that there's always some kind of trade off. It isn't true that the violence in question has to be spectacular and cinematic before we are allowed to do something about it.
Huh? Brutality matters. We are not discussing a "broken window" approach to crime. We are asking how the trade off of some innocents caught in the dragnet weighs against ending thug ruled regions by taking aggressive actions to lock up violent offenders often and for long periods of time. The violence is the thing; the argument intensifies with the levels of violence made possible by a soft state.
The rhetorical argument intensifies, yes, but the math based argument is just math. That's what cost benefit analysis means. If the gangs in El Salvador were committing arson or regular muggings at some terrifically high rate, at some point treating them the way they are being treated now would still be the rational decision. Getting amped up about lurid and sensational stories about heads in doorways isn't the point at all and you seem to have missed it.
I will try to curb my enthusiasm for lurid details. Meanwhile, your math wizardry seems to elide the fact that the brutality of crimes committed is central to understanding the trade-off in this case.
As the original commenter pointed out, the savagery is central to owning libs on Twitter. It is not at all important for understanding the point that Richard was trying to make. Indeed, the crime in Chicago that he leads the article with usually doesn't involve very many severed heads. The media here, which you may notice isn't exactly on the side of cracking down on crime, wants you think that things have to be sensationally awful in to be worth doing something about. The mediabrained libs on Twitter can be silenced with an appeal to this kind of brainwashing. You get to choose for yourself whether you are capable of interacting with this subject on a level higher than the old example of "they were throwing babies out of incubators!"
I take your point. And that's fine. But I've yet to see any reason to retreat from my position that it is the violent inflection of the crimes that raises the stakes in a deep comprehension of costs and benefits. I am objecting to the degree to which violence has been defined down. Violent crime is universally despicable and I remain unconvinced that calculating crime numbers in a model sealed off from the everyday world speaks to the depth of this type of very real decadence. This is to your point and the other chap's, not RH.
"If a developing country sees violence skyrocket to the point where citizens can’t live normal lives, we generally consider that an internal political issue, invisible to the rest of the world. If the same nation becomes too zealous in fighting crime, however, human rights goes to the top of the agenda as an international concern that brings with it diplomatic and economic pressure" - Boom, nailed it.
Isn't that just the difference between failing to do something and doing something? That's not a double standard, those are two very different concepts
The danger I see in Bukele's move is that it gives cops a huge amount of power and creates a danger of them acting like gangs. If a cop here in Canada decides to shake me down, he can arrest me for nonsense, but I get a defence lawyer and there's a whole process etc. and he might get in real trouble. Let's say a bunch of cops in El Salvador decide to start taking protection money from the neighbourhood. Apparently they can just throw you in prison, and there's no due process to protect you*
*Maybe if you don't have tattoos this is harder. I guess if criminals all agree to tattoo themselves you need less due process.
At any rate, Bukele's ideological predecessor here was Duterte, and I remember reading about police shakedowns and arbitrary detentions in the Philippines in his rule. The funny thing is there was a lot of press coverage of his very popular war on crime (which was also interesting because there was no racial angle, a nice disproof of the idea that all resentment of crime was code for racial resentment) and then the press got bored of talking about him after a year or two. Did everything become safer in the Philippines, or did police extortion gangs become common? What happened? Anyone know?
There must always be an actor who holds the monopoly on violence, or at least some group of actors warring over control of it, and there is never any guarantee that this actor will not wield that power in an abusive manner. In fact, it's guaranteed that they will to some extent or another. One simply has to hope to minimize the amount of abuse that is perpetrated. And when things get bad enough under a particular actor, it becomes entirely reasonable to take a chance on switching to a new one, because the bar for improvement has been set so incredibly low.
This is obviously the case here where the government is rescuing the people from literal modern day barbarians and the actual murder rate statistics clearly bear out the positive results.
It seems like the answer is for the largest gang around to be controlled by the majority of the population. And if that population is high-minded it extends their protection to the minority groups within their territory and if not, those groups are screwed. There have been more or less stable societies where the "rulers" are externally focused and local control of violence is ceded to criminal dons, or local aristocracy (they distinction is one of nomenclature rather than form, methinks). You also have state control, be it in the liberal or authoritarian mold. I can easily see one preferring authoritarian rule to anarchic, open-gang warfare, or even "civilized" criminal rule with noblesse oblige norms in place. Even better would be liberal state control, but that isn't always the choice on the table and these things have hierarchies of tradeoffs.
Most broken societies these days are low-trust societies. Increasing the state's power is not, in itself, a cure for a low-trust society. There is, in fact, no simple cure to a pervasive culture of low-trust, with a widespread expectation of corruption and self-dealing.
In such a culture, the state and its officials will normally be corrupt. But in most such cases, a powerful centralized state is still better than a weak one.
Mancur Olson's contrast between being ruled by "stationary bandits" (who have at least some interest in society's continued productive function) or "roving bandits" (who have no such stake and care little what they leave behind after their raping and pillaging) comes to mind here. "Power and Prosperity" remains a good read.
Of course, if the central authority is weak, it's entirely possible that factions within the police, military, or paramilitary organizations will become "roving bandits" who snub their noses at efforts by the central authority to rein them in. But the central authority is incentivized to get them under control if at all possible, and I think actions like El Salvador's probably enhance the central government's ability to do so by pursuing a broadly popular mandate that centers around crushing internal threats to its monopoly on violence.
Have there been any societies where stable, liberal rule evolved out of weak-rule? Or has there generally been a cycle of strong rule, maybe abused, that established norms and institutions, that then cede authority more broadly to control the apparatus to greater concentric rings of stakeholders?
On the one hand, you could argue that stable liberal rule is something that for the most part only exists in Western Europe (or perhaps NW Europe) and among its settler diaspora, and there it exists basically without exception, regardless of how centralized and powerful those states' administrations were in 1500 or 1700 or 1900.
Is Japan truly a liberal democracy, or would the LDP be compared to "illiberal" populist right parties like Fidesz if it were located in Europe? But Japan is of course much richer and more productive than Hungary, and maybe that's the part that we really care about.
I suppose I don't buy into the idea that inhabitants of poor countries should be sold on adopting stronger states on the basis of that being the path to converging with advanced economies. Maybe that will work, but probably not. Places that have always been poor and backward will most likely continue to be poor and backward for the foreseeable future. The question of choosing leaders who will centralize authority and crack down on crime is really about the near-term trade-offs of doing so.
Not saying there are zero differences between NW Europe and Central Europe or East Asia, but I think an Anglo would find very little to be outraged about while living in Hungary and Japan, in terms of rights, freedom and what not. Both countries have normal elections, in both you can criticize the government all you want, in both you can join an opposition party or create one, both have due process, and so on. Also, Hungary's economy is in the process of catching up, so its economy is doing very well, like the rest of Eastern Europe, but Fidesz does seems to have a problem with corruption.
On your point about a strong central state asserting its monopoly on the use of violence being better than the alternatives, I think post-Soviet Russia is a good example of this. The weakening of the Russian central state did not lead to a utopia of voluntary organizations or market solutions as anarchists and libertarians propose, but to oligarchs robbing the country, killing journalists and their enemies, and to extreme high levels of violence, for some years Russia was one of the most violent countries in the world for homicide, but also high levels of use of drugs, and other dire social consequences. The recovery of central state power in Russia accompanied the country's recovery, and was seen by Russians as a positive development. Ukraine also suffered the same with the Soviet collapse and weakening of the central state, which left the country in a state of underdevelopment, oligarchization and weakness, which included not having a decent military by 2014. Belarus, on the other hand, avoided the worst from the chaos of the 1990s by maintaining a strong central state.
So whether it's in El Salvador and Latin America, or the post-Soviet space, the idea that weakening the central state leads to market or communities or whatever showing up and doing a better job, it's just belied by reality again and again.
I think it's also probably fair to say that a system can be illiberal or perhaps "less liberal", up to a point, without really chafing at the freedom of the average person, and I would say the postliberal thinkers on the right are generally pursuing a society that is still basically "free", but with a little more glue holding it together.
My sense of Hungary is that an Anglo there probably won't experience the "less-liberal" features under Orban's administration unless he's working in media or is a political activist for the opposition. In which case, while he won't be unpersoned or even threatened, he will feel certain censorious pressures coming from the central government that he's unaccustomed to. There are of course still censorious pressures against the opposition in the West, but they originate with what Moldbug called "The Cathedral", not so much the central government except insofar as it's influenced by The Cathedral.
Your points on the former USSR aligns with my understanding as well.
I think this, shall we say, undemocratic pressure from the Orbán government is just pure opportunism and attachment to power. I don't see it as being about social harmony or stability, unlike Singapore, where you could argue that Singapore's authoritarian aspects serve such purposes. Of course, Singapore does things like banning everyone from hating each other consistently, but restrictions on speech is not something the right wing in the West is in the mood to advocate, for obvious reasons.
Honestly, if your ideal or at least good society is somewhere between the Visegrád countries and the US in the 90s or Utah in the 2000s, I don't know why you would call yourself postliberal.
I guess they do it for marketing or something, but I feel like you're just contributing to the destruction of words, meanings and history by just forgetting that the US in the 90's or Germany during the 70's, or Australia in the era of the White Australian Immigration policy, or whatever example you want to use, they were all liberal countries.
Definitely. There have been neurological studies of cop and convict brains that show that the average cop’s brain is very similar to that of the average prisoner, the one difference being that cops had higher IQs. ASPD (Antisocial Personality Disorder) is over represented in both police and prisoners.
If we want more policing, than it follows that we need more police accountability. Otherwise we’d just have a group of people that can lock us up if we piss them off or if they’re having a bad day.
Agreed. Things have to be really really bad to give more power to law enforcement in most of the developing world as well as most big US cities. The question on the other side of RH is what would society be like if most of the gangbangers were locked up and the cops have unlimited power to extort? The latter sounds like a problem with sensible solutions once law and order has some foothold, at least in US cities.
The only other analysis I’ve seen of the total cost of crime was on the EA forum, which arrives at 7-11% of US GDP. These analyses also don’t factor in negative externalities like NIMBYism and ensuing economic potential from density, which I’ve seen estimated as costing potentially a trillion dollars annually.
The difference between crime and density is that density has tradeoffs. It is immiserating and this works against its "line go up" benefits. NIMBYism is a sane, rational impulse to protect one's basic quality of life. If I were given the option to increase my income by 15% or even 30% but in exchange I had to live in a tiny apartment in a dense "walkable" neighborhood and give up car ownership, I'd say no in an instant with no need to think further on it.
Crime has no positive effects to counter its negatives. There is no tradeoff to be had.
I’m not sure this is the place to talk about the pros and cons of density, but the point is that one of the most common justifications against density is that by allowing an apartment building or multi-family complex, your neighborhood will be more accessible to undesirables who will bring crime and lower property values. If crime were eradicated and that concern didn’t exist, many people would prefer to live in denser, walkable neighborhoods and the line would go up. It wouldn’t get rid of all of it, for example, your issue with density is not based on that argument. But it would get rid of some of it, and the line would therefore go up.
This is fair. At the same time, I suspect the crime-fear aspect of NIMBYism is part legit but part motivated reasoning, since it's frowned upon in well-heeled circles to explicitly argue on the FYIGM "I don't want to be near poors" basis. Sure, some will be more comfortable living near poors if the poors aren't criminal, but some won't want to live around poor people regardless, and for some the crime argument is just a front for other reasons they won't explicitly voice.
The biggest problem with the current approach is that when Bukele leaves office, another administration might release a lot of these thugs and things will go back to it was before. The "three strikes" laws in the US worked for a while and then it didn't because prosecutors stopped enforcing those laws for "diversity, equity, and inclusion" reasons.
Using the death penalty on all the gang members will make sure these people never come back and never have children that will follow in their father's footsteps. But this is probably not on the menu even for Bukele.
Well, it should be obvious when you frame it in terms of internal rebellions. Breaking out your fighters from prisons and internment camps is a timeless tactic of insurrections everywhere, for obvious reasons. The Taliban was doing it constantly. Once it took the country back, the rest of them were freed.
For this reason, central governments always and everywhere would love to be able to execute rebels summarily, but obviously that can carry political costs.
A powerful organized crime syndicate isn't quite the same thing as an insurrection, but as a threat to the state's monopoly on violence, it's also not that different. Presumably any politician who released all these men would be more or less owned by organized crime.
Who’s to say he doesn’t have a plan for a successor, and even if he doesn’t is any president that isn’t a gringo puppet really going to want to drop such a popular policy? It’s theoretically possible but not likely.
Leaving aside the likely humanitarian disaster that would result from reintroducing the criminals back into society, releasing them would result in a pretty good natural experiment for crime and prisons when the murder rate shoots back up.
This experiment is happening right now in the US. Look at all the criminals being released from prisons in California. They've also effectively decriminalized robberies under $1000. The state is unlivable.
I'd never thought in these terms until this article, that we regard the outrageous levels of crime and murder in places like South Africa and (until recently) El Salvador as a purely internal issue - very sad, something to deplore, but not something that awakens the ire of Congress or arouses NGOs. Only when the rights of the accused as at stake does the West get involved.
This seems very backwards: it's not to say that habeas corpus and a right to a fair trial shouldn't be protected (they should), but before that happens the rights of the majority, law-abiding population to live without an undue risk of murder and crime are also key human rights. Aside from murder, this article mentions extortion - extortion is primarily an economic crime but to live under it is so much worse than just losing money. It's never knowing when the amount due will change, or when you'll be "billed", and it's knowing that there's no point in saving or opening a store because it'll all be gone, and unless you can get your kids to El Norte it's just going to happen to them as well.
I am uncomfortable with locking up accused people, not yet guilty, indefinitely. I think limits on being held without bail are appropriate. But it's clear from the West's reaction to El Salvador that we're due for a correction. If such draconian action correlates with improvement in society to such a vast extent, it's clear that the rights of the majority to live in a society not riven by crime have been breached for too long. Where we're Amnesty and Freedom House then?
A twitter commenter @ItsTheLawForYou replied to your tweet with this:
"Left wing America has a terrible problem of centering all issues as if they were
happening in peaceful rich America. It
seems like El Salvador knows what it needs."
Very true. Also sad that poor minorities in the US basically have to suffer through depolicing when they'd be better off with police cracking down on criminals. But those are the policies they want so 🤷.
Do they? I had the sense the 'defund the police' crowd skewed more white-affluent. You know, people who wouldn't have to live with the consequences in their neighborhoods.
Yes, but the people who live in those neighborhoods are willing to deal with the consequences as evidenced by who they vote for, not to mention the falling homicide clearance rate. It sounds good on paper, but the rubber hits the road when it’s your own kin that you don’t want interacting with police even if it means letting them run around terrorizing the neighborhood.
“They” certainly do not want those policies. See https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-retain-local-presence.aspx. Instead, we have a coalition of wealthier black Americans and actual criminals, along with their white progressive “allies,” chanting “defund the police.” This coalition does not speak for the community. It simply uses its superior resources and cultural capital to create that false impression, while drowning out the voices of the people actually impacted by these policies.
Yes black americans answer polls that way. But they continue to elect politicians that refuse to stop crime. They continue to tolerate protesters after every incident that leads to the death of a young black man in a police altercation, no matter the actual circumstances. I think there is a disconnect between what they say they want and what they are willing to do about it. And if anyone proposes doing something beyond "mental health" or whatever, they get branded a racist or uncle tom.
Sure, white progressives don't help things, but there are black cities all over the south with majority black representation, with outcomes similar to Detroit or Chicago. They could overwhelm the white progressives and install black officials who are tough on crime but they don't. Perhaps it has to do with Democrat party loyalty and they're taking queues from national progressives, idk.
They don’t even have to be big cities. There are plenty of small southern cities (i.e. less than 10K people) with the same pattern. The NYT recently did a piece on a small town in Arkansas that imposed a curfew as an attempt to get shootings under control. Per Wikipedia, the town is 90% black. In classic NYT fashion, the headline has the words “rural” and “Arkansas” with an old white guy in the thumbnail. Pretty sure Richard even pointed out the absurdity of this considering how honest the actual article was. But of course the core readership would never read beyond the headline.
You’d think a town of a few thousand people would be able to get this kind of problem under control without tiptoeing through the tulips. This only reinforces that there’s simply no desire to do anything but gestures and keeping fingers crossed. Personally, without Dads to set an example or at a bare minimum, discipline their sons when they misbehave, there’s no mechanism to make the required cultural changes. And there will be no dads until women demand it which is the dirty little secret.
Wrong. They all want more police, just not when their own son/cousin/nephew punches out a store clerk because “he’s really a good kid”. The same people who answer these polls also know who casually discharged a handgun into the middle of a party but will tell no tales to police. The reason crime is so bad in certain areas is because the people who live there are fine with it, or see the implications for solving the problem as worse than living with it.
>The point here is that much of what sounds like reasonable advice in a first world nation is simply unrealistic in a country in the position of El Salvador.<
It seems like it is increasingly unrealistic for first world nations as well--or at least, for large cities in the United States (I admit to neither knowing nor caring very much about how other first world nations stack up). If El Salvador was able to lower its murder rate well below that of Detroit, one wonders why the same policies shouldn't be applied in Detroit. Of course, if we are being honest, I think we all know why they won't be.
>Is the Bukele crackdown justified in cost-benefit terms? One can’t answer this question from first principles in the way that human rights activists and many in the media would like.<
Well, you can if you consider "the human rights of criminals" to be of infinite benefit, such that any amount of cost incurred is always acceptable. "Human rights" activists and those in the media (but I repeat myself) will tend towards this single-factor analysis of the situation, with their views based on US race politics (the idea being that it is wrong to treat criminals harshly because they are likely to be black) and then simply transposed into any applicable situation without thought.
You are correct to point out that an all-or-nothing single-factor view of the world is typically not the one that actually makes the most sense, but we human beings struggle with nuance. If we are asked to weigh between two competing considerations, that is much more difficult than simply knowing ahead of time based on first principles which one is always correct. There is the added problem that those most likely to be politically active are those most likely to be, well, activists. And activists by definition are motivated by some sort of single-issue worldview, i.e. environmental activists, who are immune to any cost-benefit analysis of fossil fuels and face no countervailing group of "fossil fuel maximalists" to balance out their zealotry.
The crackdown is obviously right, and there is absolutely nothing to discuss. People who are conflicted about this are reprobates. What is more worth discussing is what made the crackdown *feasible*. The answer is that crime got so out of control, and so monopolised by one paramilitary gang, that you could just go around looking for anyone with this gang's tattoos on him, put him in jail without trial, and no-one else cares. Anti-gang policing in America is chronically hobbled by the "he a good boi, he was gonna turn his life aroun' problem. In El Salvador, it looks like people hate MS 13 so much that they don't care if their own son gets interned without trial forever.
So in short, a case of the worse the better. The question now is how to create similar conditions of popular support for an anti-gang crackdown before letting your entire country go to hell. (Spoiler, you can't without regime change, so political punditry is all grift).
Crime is out of control in parts of the US of A but it has nothing to do with “gang violence” and thus is not as easy to isolate. Gang violence would make our current crime surge look dignified by comparison, since gangs imply some level of organization. You think the Atlantic and the NYT would be using the term “gang violence” if it was an honest portrayal of the problem? They don’t, because it is a euphemism for grown men shooting each other at social events over TikTok beefs.
I don’t think any analysis of El Salvador’s experience with crime is complete without explaining what happened in the 5 years before Bukele. That’s where the action was. Does anyone know?
That doesn't make sense to me. The crackdown here seems to have begun in 2022 by suspending some constitutional rights, but at that point the homicide rate was already down to 8% of it's 2015 peak at that point. Not only it can't be the cause of the drop, but it can also be that the drop in 2022-2023 is just a continuation of whatever was happening before and has nothing to do with this particular measure.
Excellent analysis as ever, Richard. One thing I'd emphasise is the unique savagery of the gangs in question, which I think has an important bearing on this argument.
Following this story on Twitter, I keep seeing affluent American liberals complaining about 'creeping fascism' etc. receiving replies from actual Salvadoreans saying things like, 'Shut the fuck up, these people cut off my uncle's head for not paying extortion money and left it in our doorway.'
Bukele hasn't mass arrested a bunch of muggers and low level drug dealers; what he's done is more akin to putting ISIS in a giant prison complex, and the blessings of Allah be upon him for doing so.
I suspect that emphasizing the unique savagery of the gangs in question actually works against Richards primary point here, which is that there's always some kind of trade off. It isn't true that the violence in question has to be spectacular and cinematic before we are allowed to do something about it.
Huh? Brutality matters. We are not discussing a "broken window" approach to crime. We are asking how the trade off of some innocents caught in the dragnet weighs against ending thug ruled regions by taking aggressive actions to lock up violent offenders often and for long periods of time. The violence is the thing; the argument intensifies with the levels of violence made possible by a soft state.
The rhetorical argument intensifies, yes, but the math based argument is just math. That's what cost benefit analysis means. If the gangs in El Salvador were committing arson or regular muggings at some terrifically high rate, at some point treating them the way they are being treated now would still be the rational decision. Getting amped up about lurid and sensational stories about heads in doorways isn't the point at all and you seem to have missed it.
I will try to curb my enthusiasm for lurid details. Meanwhile, your math wizardry seems to elide the fact that the brutality of crimes committed is central to understanding the trade-off in this case.
As the original commenter pointed out, the savagery is central to owning libs on Twitter. It is not at all important for understanding the point that Richard was trying to make. Indeed, the crime in Chicago that he leads the article with usually doesn't involve very many severed heads. The media here, which you may notice isn't exactly on the side of cracking down on crime, wants you think that things have to be sensationally awful in to be worth doing something about. The mediabrained libs on Twitter can be silenced with an appeal to this kind of brainwashing. You get to choose for yourself whether you are capable of interacting with this subject on a level higher than the old example of "they were throwing babies out of incubators!"
I take your point. And that's fine. But I've yet to see any reason to retreat from my position that it is the violent inflection of the crimes that raises the stakes in a deep comprehension of costs and benefits. I am objecting to the degree to which violence has been defined down. Violent crime is universally despicable and I remain unconvinced that calculating crime numbers in a model sealed off from the everyday world speaks to the depth of this type of very real decadence. This is to your point and the other chap's, not RH.
"If a developing country sees violence skyrocket to the point where citizens can’t live normal lives, we generally consider that an internal political issue, invisible to the rest of the world. If the same nation becomes too zealous in fighting crime, however, human rights goes to the top of the agenda as an international concern that brings with it diplomatic and economic pressure" - Boom, nailed it.
Isn't that just the difference between failing to do something and doing something? That's not a double standard, those are two very different concepts
The danger I see in Bukele's move is that it gives cops a huge amount of power and creates a danger of them acting like gangs. If a cop here in Canada decides to shake me down, he can arrest me for nonsense, but I get a defence lawyer and there's a whole process etc. and he might get in real trouble. Let's say a bunch of cops in El Salvador decide to start taking protection money from the neighbourhood. Apparently they can just throw you in prison, and there's no due process to protect you*
*Maybe if you don't have tattoos this is harder. I guess if criminals all agree to tattoo themselves you need less due process.
At any rate, Bukele's ideological predecessor here was Duterte, and I remember reading about police shakedowns and arbitrary detentions in the Philippines in his rule. The funny thing is there was a lot of press coverage of his very popular war on crime (which was also interesting because there was no racial angle, a nice disproof of the idea that all resentment of crime was code for racial resentment) and then the press got bored of talking about him after a year or two. Did everything become safer in the Philippines, or did police extortion gangs become common? What happened? Anyone know?
There must always be an actor who holds the monopoly on violence, or at least some group of actors warring over control of it, and there is never any guarantee that this actor will not wield that power in an abusive manner. In fact, it's guaranteed that they will to some extent or another. One simply has to hope to minimize the amount of abuse that is perpetrated. And when things get bad enough under a particular actor, it becomes entirely reasonable to take a chance on switching to a new one, because the bar for improvement has been set so incredibly low.
This is obviously the case here where the government is rescuing the people from literal modern day barbarians and the actual murder rate statistics clearly bear out the positive results.
It seems like the answer is for the largest gang around to be controlled by the majority of the population. And if that population is high-minded it extends their protection to the minority groups within their territory and if not, those groups are screwed. There have been more or less stable societies where the "rulers" are externally focused and local control of violence is ceded to criminal dons, or local aristocracy (they distinction is one of nomenclature rather than form, methinks). You also have state control, be it in the liberal or authoritarian mold. I can easily see one preferring authoritarian rule to anarchic, open-gang warfare, or even "civilized" criminal rule with noblesse oblige norms in place. Even better would be liberal state control, but that isn't always the choice on the table and these things have hierarchies of tradeoffs.
Most broken societies these days are low-trust societies. Increasing the state's power is not, in itself, a cure for a low-trust society. There is, in fact, no simple cure to a pervasive culture of low-trust, with a widespread expectation of corruption and self-dealing.
In such a culture, the state and its officials will normally be corrupt. But in most such cases, a powerful centralized state is still better than a weak one.
Mancur Olson's contrast between being ruled by "stationary bandits" (who have at least some interest in society's continued productive function) or "roving bandits" (who have no such stake and care little what they leave behind after their raping and pillaging) comes to mind here. "Power and Prosperity" remains a good read.
Of course, if the central authority is weak, it's entirely possible that factions within the police, military, or paramilitary organizations will become "roving bandits" who snub their noses at efforts by the central authority to rein them in. But the central authority is incentivized to get them under control if at all possible, and I think actions like El Salvador's probably enhance the central government's ability to do so by pursuing a broadly popular mandate that centers around crushing internal threats to its monopoly on violence.
Have there been any societies where stable, liberal rule evolved out of weak-rule? Or has there generally been a cycle of strong rule, maybe abused, that established norms and institutions, that then cede authority more broadly to control the apparatus to greater concentric rings of stakeholders?
Switzerland maybe? Even the US?
On the one hand, you could argue that stable liberal rule is something that for the most part only exists in Western Europe (or perhaps NW Europe) and among its settler diaspora, and there it exists basically without exception, regardless of how centralized and powerful those states' administrations were in 1500 or 1700 or 1900.
Is Japan truly a liberal democracy, or would the LDP be compared to "illiberal" populist right parties like Fidesz if it were located in Europe? But Japan is of course much richer and more productive than Hungary, and maybe that's the part that we really care about.
I suppose I don't buy into the idea that inhabitants of poor countries should be sold on adopting stronger states on the basis of that being the path to converging with advanced economies. Maybe that will work, but probably not. Places that have always been poor and backward will most likely continue to be poor and backward for the foreseeable future. The question of choosing leaders who will centralize authority and crack down on crime is really about the near-term trade-offs of doing so.
Not saying there are zero differences between NW Europe and Central Europe or East Asia, but I think an Anglo would find very little to be outraged about while living in Hungary and Japan, in terms of rights, freedom and what not. Both countries have normal elections, in both you can criticize the government all you want, in both you can join an opposition party or create one, both have due process, and so on. Also, Hungary's economy is in the process of catching up, so its economy is doing very well, like the rest of Eastern Europe, but Fidesz does seems to have a problem with corruption.
On your point about a strong central state asserting its monopoly on the use of violence being better than the alternatives, I think post-Soviet Russia is a good example of this. The weakening of the Russian central state did not lead to a utopia of voluntary organizations or market solutions as anarchists and libertarians propose, but to oligarchs robbing the country, killing journalists and their enemies, and to extreme high levels of violence, for some years Russia was one of the most violent countries in the world for homicide, but also high levels of use of drugs, and other dire social consequences. The recovery of central state power in Russia accompanied the country's recovery, and was seen by Russians as a positive development. Ukraine also suffered the same with the Soviet collapse and weakening of the central state, which left the country in a state of underdevelopment, oligarchization and weakness, which included not having a decent military by 2014. Belarus, on the other hand, avoided the worst from the chaos of the 1990s by maintaining a strong central state.
So whether it's in El Salvador and Latin America, or the post-Soviet space, the idea that weakening the central state leads to market or communities or whatever showing up and doing a better job, it's just belied by reality again and again.
I think it's also probably fair to say that a system can be illiberal or perhaps "less liberal", up to a point, without really chafing at the freedom of the average person, and I would say the postliberal thinkers on the right are generally pursuing a society that is still basically "free", but with a little more glue holding it together.
My sense of Hungary is that an Anglo there probably won't experience the "less-liberal" features under Orban's administration unless he's working in media or is a political activist for the opposition. In which case, while he won't be unpersoned or even threatened, he will feel certain censorious pressures coming from the central government that he's unaccustomed to. There are of course still censorious pressures against the opposition in the West, but they originate with what Moldbug called "The Cathedral", not so much the central government except insofar as it's influenced by The Cathedral.
Your points on the former USSR aligns with my understanding as well.
I think this, shall we say, undemocratic pressure from the Orbán government is just pure opportunism and attachment to power. I don't see it as being about social harmony or stability, unlike Singapore, where you could argue that Singapore's authoritarian aspects serve such purposes. Of course, Singapore does things like banning everyone from hating each other consistently, but restrictions on speech is not something the right wing in the West is in the mood to advocate, for obvious reasons.
Honestly, if your ideal or at least good society is somewhere between the Visegrád countries and the US in the 90s or Utah in the 2000s, I don't know why you would call yourself postliberal.
I guess they do it for marketing or something, but I feel like you're just contributing to the destruction of words, meanings and history by just forgetting that the US in the 90's or Germany during the 70's, or Australia in the era of the White Australian Immigration policy, or whatever example you want to use, they were all liberal countries.
Definitely. There have been neurological studies of cop and convict brains that show that the average cop’s brain is very similar to that of the average prisoner, the one difference being that cops had higher IQs. ASPD (Antisocial Personality Disorder) is over represented in both police and prisoners.
If we want more policing, than it follows that we need more police accountability. Otherwise we’d just have a group of people that can lock us up if we piss them off or if they’re having a bad day.
Agreed. Things have to be really really bad to give more power to law enforcement in most of the developing world as well as most big US cities. The question on the other side of RH is what would society be like if most of the gangbangers were locked up and the cops have unlimited power to extort? The latter sounds like a problem with sensible solutions once law and order has some foothold, at least in US cities.
We have a serious under-incarceration problem.
The only other analysis I’ve seen of the total cost of crime was on the EA forum, which arrives at 7-11% of US GDP. These analyses also don’t factor in negative externalities like NIMBYism and ensuing economic potential from density, which I’ve seen estimated as costing potentially a trillion dollars annually.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cPDptuFTiCLr8XXkL/cause-exploration-prizes-crime-reduction
https://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5901041/nimbys-are-costing-the-us-economy-billions
The difference between crime and density is that density has tradeoffs. It is immiserating and this works against its "line go up" benefits. NIMBYism is a sane, rational impulse to protect one's basic quality of life. If I were given the option to increase my income by 15% or even 30% but in exchange I had to live in a tiny apartment in a dense "walkable" neighborhood and give up car ownership, I'd say no in an instant with no need to think further on it.
Crime has no positive effects to counter its negatives. There is no tradeoff to be had.
I’m not sure this is the place to talk about the pros and cons of density, but the point is that one of the most common justifications against density is that by allowing an apartment building or multi-family complex, your neighborhood will be more accessible to undesirables who will bring crime and lower property values. If crime were eradicated and that concern didn’t exist, many people would prefer to live in denser, walkable neighborhoods and the line would go up. It wouldn’t get rid of all of it, for example, your issue with density is not based on that argument. But it would get rid of some of it, and the line would therefore go up.
This is fair. At the same time, I suspect the crime-fear aspect of NIMBYism is part legit but part motivated reasoning, since it's frowned upon in well-heeled circles to explicitly argue on the FYIGM "I don't want to be near poors" basis. Sure, some will be more comfortable living near poors if the poors aren't criminal, but some won't want to live around poor people regardless, and for some the crime argument is just a front for other reasons they won't explicitly voice.
The biggest problem with the current approach is that when Bukele leaves office, another administration might release a lot of these thugs and things will go back to it was before. The "three strikes" laws in the US worked for a while and then it didn't because prosecutors stopped enforcing those laws for "diversity, equity, and inclusion" reasons.
Using the death penalty on all the gang members will make sure these people never come back and never have children that will follow in their father's footsteps. But this is probably not on the menu even for Bukele.
That's a decent argument in favor of the death penalty that I've never thought of before.
Well, it should be obvious when you frame it in terms of internal rebellions. Breaking out your fighters from prisons and internment camps is a timeless tactic of insurrections everywhere, for obvious reasons. The Taliban was doing it constantly. Once it took the country back, the rest of them were freed.
For this reason, central governments always and everywhere would love to be able to execute rebels summarily, but obviously that can carry political costs.
A powerful organized crime syndicate isn't quite the same thing as an insurrection, but as a threat to the state's monopoly on violence, it's also not that different. Presumably any politician who released all these men would be more or less owned by organized crime.
Who’s to say he doesn’t have a plan for a successor, and even if he doesn’t is any president that isn’t a gringo puppet really going to want to drop such a popular policy? It’s theoretically possible but not likely.
Leaving aside the likely humanitarian disaster that would result from reintroducing the criminals back into society, releasing them would result in a pretty good natural experiment for crime and prisons when the murder rate shoots back up.
This experiment is happening right now in the US. Look at all the criminals being released from prisons in California. They've also effectively decriminalized robberies under $1000. The state is unlivable.
At least here in Mexico, I know plenty of people who closed their business due to extortion from the cartels. You're basically taxed twice.
I'd never thought in these terms until this article, that we regard the outrageous levels of crime and murder in places like South Africa and (until recently) El Salvador as a purely internal issue - very sad, something to deplore, but not something that awakens the ire of Congress or arouses NGOs. Only when the rights of the accused as at stake does the West get involved.
This seems very backwards: it's not to say that habeas corpus and a right to a fair trial shouldn't be protected (they should), but before that happens the rights of the majority, law-abiding population to live without an undue risk of murder and crime are also key human rights. Aside from murder, this article mentions extortion - extortion is primarily an economic crime but to live under it is so much worse than just losing money. It's never knowing when the amount due will change, or when you'll be "billed", and it's knowing that there's no point in saving or opening a store because it'll all be gone, and unless you can get your kids to El Norte it's just going to happen to them as well.
I am uncomfortable with locking up accused people, not yet guilty, indefinitely. I think limits on being held without bail are appropriate. But it's clear from the West's reaction to El Salvador that we're due for a correction. If such draconian action correlates with improvement in society to such a vast extent, it's clear that the rights of the majority to live in a society not riven by crime have been breached for too long. Where we're Amnesty and Freedom House then?
Thank you.
A twitter commenter @ItsTheLawForYou replied to your tweet with this:
"Left wing America has a terrible problem of centering all issues as if they were
happening in peaceful rich America. It
seems like El Salvador knows what it needs."
Very true. Also sad that poor minorities in the US basically have to suffer through depolicing when they'd be better off with police cracking down on criminals. But those are the policies they want so 🤷.
Do they? I had the sense the 'defund the police' crowd skewed more white-affluent. You know, people who wouldn't have to live with the consequences in their neighborhoods.
Yes, but the people who live in those neighborhoods are willing to deal with the consequences as evidenced by who they vote for, not to mention the falling homicide clearance rate. It sounds good on paper, but the rubber hits the road when it’s your own kin that you don’t want interacting with police even if it means letting them run around terrorizing the neighborhood.
To the contrary, the people in those neighborhoods vote against their problems, but they are part of regions where the majorities vote against them.
“They” certainly do not want those policies. See https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-retain-local-presence.aspx. Instead, we have a coalition of wealthier black Americans and actual criminals, along with their white progressive “allies,” chanting “defund the police.” This coalition does not speak for the community. It simply uses its superior resources and cultural capital to create that false impression, while drowning out the voices of the people actually impacted by these policies.
Yes black americans answer polls that way. But they continue to elect politicians that refuse to stop crime. They continue to tolerate protesters after every incident that leads to the death of a young black man in a police altercation, no matter the actual circumstances. I think there is a disconnect between what they say they want and what they are willing to do about it. And if anyone proposes doing something beyond "mental health" or whatever, they get branded a racist or uncle tom.
Sure, white progressives don't help things, but there are black cities all over the south with majority black representation, with outcomes similar to Detroit or Chicago. They could overwhelm the white progressives and install black officials who are tough on crime but they don't. Perhaps it has to do with Democrat party loyalty and they're taking queues from national progressives, idk.
They don’t even have to be big cities. There are plenty of small southern cities (i.e. less than 10K people) with the same pattern. The NYT recently did a piece on a small town in Arkansas that imposed a curfew as an attempt to get shootings under control. Per Wikipedia, the town is 90% black. In classic NYT fashion, the headline has the words “rural” and “Arkansas” with an old white guy in the thumbnail. Pretty sure Richard even pointed out the absurdity of this considering how honest the actual article was. But of course the core readership would never read beyond the headline.
You’d think a town of a few thousand people would be able to get this kind of problem under control without tiptoeing through the tulips. This only reinforces that there’s simply no desire to do anything but gestures and keeping fingers crossed. Personally, without Dads to set an example or at a bare minimum, discipline their sons when they misbehave, there’s no mechanism to make the required cultural changes. And there will be no dads until women demand it which is the dirty little secret.
Wrong. They all want more police, just not when their own son/cousin/nephew punches out a store clerk because “he’s really a good kid”. The same people who answer these polls also know who casually discharged a handgun into the middle of a party but will tell no tales to police. The reason crime is so bad in certain areas is because the people who live there are fine with it, or see the implications for solving the problem as worse than living with it.
Solipsism is the defining trait of the Leftist.
>The point here is that much of what sounds like reasonable advice in a first world nation is simply unrealistic in a country in the position of El Salvador.<
It seems like it is increasingly unrealistic for first world nations as well--or at least, for large cities in the United States (I admit to neither knowing nor caring very much about how other first world nations stack up). If El Salvador was able to lower its murder rate well below that of Detroit, one wonders why the same policies shouldn't be applied in Detroit. Of course, if we are being honest, I think we all know why they won't be.
>Is the Bukele crackdown justified in cost-benefit terms? One can’t answer this question from first principles in the way that human rights activists and many in the media would like.<
Well, you can if you consider "the human rights of criminals" to be of infinite benefit, such that any amount of cost incurred is always acceptable. "Human rights" activists and those in the media (but I repeat myself) will tend towards this single-factor analysis of the situation, with their views based on US race politics (the idea being that it is wrong to treat criminals harshly because they are likely to be black) and then simply transposed into any applicable situation without thought.
You are correct to point out that an all-or-nothing single-factor view of the world is typically not the one that actually makes the most sense, but we human beings struggle with nuance. If we are asked to weigh between two competing considerations, that is much more difficult than simply knowing ahead of time based on first principles which one is always correct. There is the added problem that those most likely to be politically active are those most likely to be, well, activists. And activists by definition are motivated by some sort of single-issue worldview, i.e. environmental activists, who are immune to any cost-benefit analysis of fossil fuels and face no countervailing group of "fossil fuel maximalists" to balance out their zealotry.
12 of the worlds 50 most dangerous cities are in america. What do they have in common? It starts with a capital D: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-visit-karenland-fupaz-part-e69
Dindus.
Demokkkraps!
Doritos?
The crackdown is obviously right, and there is absolutely nothing to discuss. People who are conflicted about this are reprobates. What is more worth discussing is what made the crackdown *feasible*. The answer is that crime got so out of control, and so monopolised by one paramilitary gang, that you could just go around looking for anyone with this gang's tattoos on him, put him in jail without trial, and no-one else cares. Anti-gang policing in America is chronically hobbled by the "he a good boi, he was gonna turn his life aroun' problem. In El Salvador, it looks like people hate MS 13 so much that they don't care if their own son gets interned without trial forever.
So in short, a case of the worse the better. The question now is how to create similar conditions of popular support for an anti-gang crackdown before letting your entire country go to hell. (Spoiler, you can't without regime change, so political punditry is all grift).
Crime is out of control in parts of the US of A but it has nothing to do with “gang violence” and thus is not as easy to isolate. Gang violence would make our current crime surge look dignified by comparison, since gangs imply some level of organization. You think the Atlantic and the NYT would be using the term “gang violence” if it was an honest portrayal of the problem? They don’t, because it is a euphemism for grown men shooting each other at social events over TikTok beefs.
I don’t think any analysis of El Salvador’s experience with crime is complete without explaining what happened in the 5 years before Bukele. That’s where the action was. Does anyone know?
“In a first world country where crime is manageable, maybe you can tolerate such blatant mockery of the larger society...”
“First world” is just a proxy for race. If the West ends up with even more crime and lost GDP, it will be due to unwise immigration.
In one of the videos you shared, Bukele says "we should do what successful countries are doing, not what they tell us to do."
This tells you probably everything you need to know about the failure of the "spread democracy" doctrine.
Looking at that murder graph it's interesting: Bukele was elected in 2019 but the graph shows homicide peaking in 2015. What's the story behind that?
That doesn't make sense to me. The crackdown here seems to have begun in 2022 by suspending some constitutional rights, but at that point the homicide rate was already down to 8% of it's 2015 peak at that point. Not only it can't be the cause of the drop, but it can also be that the drop in 2022-2023 is just a continuation of whatever was happening before and has nothing to do with this particular measure.