President Nayib Bukele in El Salvador declares martial law and arrests tens of thousands of gang members. In Argentina President Javier Milei is taking “a chain saw” to the bloated federal bureaucracy both to reduce the budget deficit and inflation and to scale back the over-regulation of life in his country.
Why do I see these actions as significant? Because both of these countries are poster children for the abuses that their present leaders are trying to address.
El Salvador has been struggling with violence for many decades. After a thirteen-year civil war gangs ran wild over the countryside and the murder rate was astronomically high. Bukele has cut the murder rate by at least 50%. As draconian as the method he used to accomplish this clean-up was, the people support his results.
In Argentina rampant hyperinflation has been going on for decades. Milei ran on the promise that he would fix the economy. And the people of Argentina elected him because at this point no one else has spoken the truth about why their country which has so much potential is an economic basket case.
Latin America is supposed to be hopelessly corrupt and unfixable. Well, maybe things can change. When the basket cases of the world start getting their acts together, maybe something is happening to the old world. Maybe there is even a little hope.
It’s certainly true that some of these actions aren’t particularly legal. Bukele used martial law and unconstitutional powers to arrest the gangs. There is talk that many innocent men were swept up in this dragnet. Well, maybe what we are looking at is the rise of the strongman. Could this lead to dictatorship? Maybe. But when democracy fails you spectacularly you have to try something. You go to Plan B.
And what does this tell me about the world at large and the United States in particular? It may mean that results are beginning to outweigh lofty ideals and good intentions in the minds of the people. After all that is sort of how Donald Trump and Brexit got their victories. People want results and they want the truth. Both of these seem to be in very short supply from the politicians and bureaucrats that rule in the Western democracies. Now, the United States isn’t as chaotically lawless as El Salvador was nor as economically mismanaged as Argentina. But we’re headed in those directions at a brisk clip. Maybe a sea change is in the cards.
And maybe it won’t be that long. 2024 will be an important election. If Trump gets elected there’s still a small chance, he can purge the bureaucracy of its deep state cronies in order to restore control over the government to the duly elected officials. But if Kamala Harris is installed in the White House, then we can say definitively that United States is no longer a functional republic but rather an oligarchic junta that cares almost nothing for the welfare of the people.
If Harris is running this country, even as a puppet of the oligarchy, I assume the country will suffer a catastrophic decline with rampant violence and economic and fiscal instability at a level that will spark essentially a popular upheaval. And regardless of how it is clothed in constitutional language, there will be revolutionary changes in how things get done.
Of course, I could be completely wrong and Kamala could turn out to be a wise and effective ruler who turns her term into a golden age. But after enough yellow school bus speeches and other brilliant clap-trap, I kind of doubt it.
We seem to be speeding toward destiny.