Bukele's Rebuke
Privilege and ignorance have misled elites
Nayib Bukele was re-elected as president of El Salvador… the first time anyone has ever been democratically reelected in that country. An educated, pro-Western, tech-friendly, apparently honest person wins a free and fair election in a troubled and historically violent country on a groundswell of love and grassroots enthusiasm. Liberals must be glad, right?
The liberals of 20 years ago would probably be cautiously supportive. The liberals of today are generally not. That is because the liberals of today are not really liberal or progressive (in the sense of someone who wants society to continue in certain directions and has faith in the concept of human technological and cultural progress) or even socialists (in the sense of people who believe in the organized state management of society and the market to distribute resources and eliminate need).
The ‘liberals’ of today are rather Leftists, and a fairly new kind. I privately call them ‘negationists’ because the one central theme running through their ideas is to oppose the status quo and the idea of institutional order in all its forms. Those who have read my writing will recognize the familiar villain of Critical Theory. That is the source of these ideas.
Feminine men are great! Feminine women are the status quo and so are regarded with a kind of reluctant acceptance, at best (masculine men are a different story-they are dangerous and toxic and the efforts to radically change their nature is well underway). Imposed racial or sexual (etc) quotas for hiring and selection are great! Meritocracy and even the basic concepts of fairness or competency are tools of oppression. Abolition of homework and workdays and standards is great! Foci on tasks and responsibilities are akin to fascism and should be eroded at every turn. Racial selectivity and awareness are great! The concept of color blind policies and laws (the most liberal of ideas until a few decades ago, and one that Martin Luther King Jr. gave his life to achieve) are actually veiled white supremacy. Trans and nonbinary and the increasingly weird conceptions of gender and identity are great! Traditional sex roles, which have been defining features of every recorded human society for 8,000 years are suspect and… you guessed it: oppressive. Polyamory and childlessness and abortion (yes, even abortion) are great! Regular and stable heterosexual marriages, and two-parent families (which are statistically the most effective manner in which to raise children by far are retrograde and suspicious. Perhaps they shouldn’t be banned but they definitely shouldn’t be praised and encouraged.
All of these positions are literally just inversions of the institutions and norms which have gotten us to this point. I might take their believers more seriously if they didn’t engage in normal romantic relationships and hold jobs and pay utility bills and fill out employee evaluations while spouting this nonsense. The whole ball is literally just a massive, writhing complex of luxury beliefs. Pay attention to a curious detail: no alternatives or workable, incremental improvements are ever suggested. There’s no alternate vision for society, no program of action. All the Left now has is some vague ideas about ‘heteronormativity’ and ‘equity’ and ‘hierarchies’ and ‘decolonization’. These don’t even rise to the level of proposals. They’re just blurry, graduate-school nonsense… created and spread by tens of thousands of people who have barely left a classroom in their entire lives.
I suspect that so many impractical and romantically abstract ideas are flourishing at this point in human civilization because they can. We have an entire elite class who live safely separated from crime and poverty and violence. It’s our misfortune that those same people happen to run our universities and (to some extent) government agencies and hedge funds and media companies (although their grasp appears to be slipping).
This brings me to the happy update with which I opened this brief proto-essay. Bukele has always offended those elites because he ignores their abstract imperatives for rights and reforms and social levelling. He is an uncomfortable reminder that society is fundamentally based on real things and people, not wishes and ideas, and without safety and order nothing else can function.
I also value civil liberties and the rights of the accused… but I understand that these are luxuries, available only to orderly and ethical societies. They are ignored in most places in the world. I don’t expect gratitude that they live in a society in which men keep the lights on and women continue to replenish our population and men and women enforce law and order and raise those children into productive and stable citizens from the Left. I just wish they understood the depth of their ignorance… and, ironically, their privilege.
If their ideas were implemented today, in full, tomorrow our civilization would begin to implode and within a month the colleges and paychecks and urban apartments and yoga studios which define the shapes of the lives of those Leftists would be nothing but bittersweet memories. That is why we should oppose these ideas.
