Bukele’s Popularity Is No Mystery

I f I take just one lesson from the recent reelection of popular El Salvador boss-man Nayib Bukele with some 85 percent of the vote — in what by all accounts was a free and fair race, at least by Latin American standards — it would be: “Most sh** just isn’t that hard to figure out. Don’t overthink life, especially the really important things.”

Bukele’s path to electoral success was, frankly, a pretty simple one. During his last term, he basically stopped crime — by locking up criminals, many of whom sported tattoos on their faces basically reading I am a criminal. We will return to the statistics surrounding this policy in a moment, but the truly remarkable thing about the Bukele strategy is not that it worked but that many people (including almost all Respectable Experts) denied that doing any such thing was possible.

El Salvador has had a violent-crime problem for a very long time — at one point recording an insane rate of 103 homicides per 100,000 citizens per year — due to military-level conflicts between gangs like MS-13 and the 18th Street Clique. For most of this period, often on the advice of Western confidantes, the San Salvador–based national government adopted a “moderator” strategy toward the warring sects, sitting them down for “truce” talks as though they were legitimate states, and allowing members extensive access to incarcerated leaders.

The behavior of El Salvador’s elite bears an eerie resemblance to a position often taken by intellectuals, journalists, and TV-news readers here in the United States. In a swipe at my sometime field of writing, conservative media personality Matt Walsh recently — and accurately — noted that a major paper in the discipline of criminal justice argues that locking up or even executing criminals does not reliably prevent crime. Even more absurdly, during the height of the circa-2020 “BLM” hysteria following the Ascension of George Floyd, the New York Times ran a full-page op-ed entitled “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.”

What harm, after all, could that do?

A disgusted Bukele — no fool, and quite aware of much of this discourse — scoffed and did the exact opposite. His government sought and received from the legislature a state-of-emergency declaration under which the rights of association and legal representation were suspended, the amount of time citizens could be held without charge was increased, and the authorities were allowed to monitor citizens’ communications without a warrant. Using soldiers and professional policemen, he began arresting young men with gang tattoos who were reported to be criminals by one or more taxpayers, and incarcerating them in terrifying prisons carved out of mountainsides and jungles. In Reality World, this approach worked very well, because of course it did.

While Bukele has been pilloried by the sorts of people who write checks to global civil-liberties organizations, his 2024 reelection was greeted with literal street dances by regular El Salvadorans. This seems understandable, following one of the steepest crime drops in recorded history. In-country murders alone fell from 38 per 100,000 citizens per year in 2019, when he assumed the presidency, to just 2.4/100,000 last year — below the murder rate for the United States, and far below our sub-group rates for African Americans, Latinos, whites in the South, males overall, and quite a few other groups.

The unsurprising evidence that using tough cops to stop crime . . . stops crime exists basically everywhere, outside of a few dusty academic monographs. Trends in policing, and their effects, are quite visible — sometimes depressingly so — in the national crime data itself. Per center-right think tanker Mona Charen and the purely empirical Disaster Center listings of crime data, overall violent crime in the United States increased by close to 500 percent during the “Great Society” era of 1960s and 1970s social liberalization. Between 1963 and the eventual Bukele-like rise of New York City’s Guiliani and Bratton (and their Chicago, etc. equivalents) around 1993, murders rose from 8,640 to 24,530, rapes surged from 17,650 to 106,010, and plain robberies jumped from 116,470 to 659,870.

The same pattern of surging crime in response to police pullback or defunding is visible in agonized local-news reporting every time this happens. During 2015’s first wave of Black Lives Matter riots, a memorable headline in Chicago’s DNAinfo paper read simply: “Police Stops Down by 90 Percent as Gun Violence Skyrockets.” The consequences of such social whimsy are equally grim and trackable: Data in this link are age-adjusted, but the African-American homicide-victimization rate appears to have roughly doubled during the past decade of street antics.

Incentive-driven patterns of human behavior quite as basic as “More cops (or armed and trained home-owners) mean less crime” can be unpacked almost everywhere. Over the past six-to-seven years, for example, the number of illegal aliens crossing the U.S. border has increased from 526,901 in 2017 to 1,956,519 in 2021, 2,766,582 in 2022, and 3,201,144 in 2023. This constitutes a total, overall, recent-past increase of 608 percent.

To explain this trend, we can simply notice that President Biden repeatedly promised to relax U.S. control of the border while campaigning, has largely done so while in office, and has completely eliminated the old Trump-era “remain in Mexico” policy, which required migrants to file their largely fraudulent asylum claims from another country. And, so, a surge! Whatever you want to formally call an analysis at this level, it is not rocket science.

Similarly, we do not have to look to pornography or later-wave feminism — although it is not exactly back-breaking work to critique either of those things — to explain the remarkable surge in citizens currently identifying as transgender, “poly-queer,” and so forth. A basic methodological point here indicates that the obvious is again true: The huge majority of those newly identifying as trans (~3 percent of all people in some age classes) or LGBTQ overall (20 percent or more) are under 21, if not under 18 — hardly the demographic for XXX-obsessed feminists, thank God and the law, but exactly the demo for students. Again, the exact opposite of Aztec mathematics explains what we see in reality: Tell millions of impressionable young people that they can and probably should do a fun-sounding thing which will terrify their parents, and many will.

Ask almost any similar question in modern life — does a father in the home matter? Is IQ real, and variant among people? — and any sane quantitative or qualitative analysis seems to confirm what common sense tells us (yes, and yes). But, this reality brings up a related and very important question: Why do so damned many people seem to deny the very obvious? Why are there dozens of sociologists passionately arguing that you simply cannot stop crime by arresting and prosecuting criminals?

This is an opinion, but my take would be: This phenomenon occurs because reality is very politically incorrect — especially harsh on the blank-slate ideology preferred by the current academic elite. The best actual explanation of crime and crime control — humans are a predator species, many people (especially young males) are “bad,” and the best way to stop people from brawling and screwing in public is to terrify them with threats of harm or jail — strikes many Good Citizens who are more empathic than your Gentle Writer as so unpleasant that it must be untrue. Some people, indeed, would probably prefer a fairly high risk to themselves and their children to the “brutality” needed to prevent it.

To skilled mathematicians in these camps, it must be — it is, from several private conversations — very tempting to simply not adjust for something or other and thus never have to truly discover reality. As I noted a week or so en el pasado, crime, rather than “racism,” will never ever be the thing that explains higher black arrest rates if you . . . just don’t put crime rates in your model. Boom! Voila!

I recommend never ever doing that, and going with the Bukele strategy instead. If, as a leader, you find yourself in a situation where “two academic papers” conflict with “all historic understanding of human nature,” go with the latter.