This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Read it. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the 'Bukele only succeeded by cutting deals with gang leaders' has been a rising argument of the last year, but also mostly a cope argument from his political opposition which writes to the Anglophone audience and tries to undercut Bukele claims to success.
There's a couple significant weaknesses in the article, both on its own front and on it's meta-context.
On its own it has some significant gaps which indicats it's being written for a foreign audience rather than local analysis, one of which is the total lack of acknowledgement of geography and demographic dispersion when comparing El Salvador versus its regional neighbors, and what that means in general.
Central American countries are geographically small relative to their larger neighborhood giants, but in terms of state control of the interiors they are even smaller, with extremely limited government ability to exert control / contest usage of significant parts of the territories. You can't even meaningfully drive from western Honduras to eastern, which is why eastern Honduras has a reputation for being where drug smugglers fly or sail to en-route to the US. The amount of territory to retreat to, and the dispersal of small-but-present human terrain, means that gangs outside of the capital have plenty of space to hide / influence / establish themselves in when the government isn't asserting itself, particularly via leveraging political rivalries / alternative power centers outside of a ruling party's maximal influence.
El Salvador, by contrast, is basically just a city state centered on San Salvador. The country is the size of New Jersey, and the overwhelming majority of the population is within the capital region. If you get kicked out of San Salvador, there is no alternative power center to hide in the shadows of, and the government doesn't have the sort of federational subdivisions that limit jurisdiction and reach in the same way a larger country does. As a result, anti-gang successes in the capital are far more effective for nation-wide effectiveness than in other countries.
This is absolutely an argument against the Bukele model in other countries- but rather than leave that as a point that what can work in one location may not work in another, the argument has to be flipped to insinuate that what doesn't work in other places thus must not be working in El Salvador, and thus undercut the legitimacy of the Bukele administration. It's not enough for something Bukele did to be unsuitable for elsewhere- it must be a mark against Bukele.
This is similar to the reversal of argument used to insinuate that a decrease in gang weapons seized in 2023 compared to 2022 indicates a failure rather than success, first by framing it as a failure to meet a higher standard of success (gangs weakened, but not outright defeated). Gangs actively hiding their arsenals is a good indicator, it implies they (a) feel the need to, and (b) indicates they previously didn't feel a need to- but this is framed in a way to undercut rather than support the administration which led to this effect. Even the repeated returning to 'but he talks with gangs' doesn't acknowledge what would be also relevant facts to the regional audience: that everyone has to in some form, and that his alternatives were widely considered to be worse. Bukele's anti-crime bonifides and ability to go against the normal democratic insittutions was in no small part possible because many of those institutions were considered to be corrupt and even complicit with the pre-Bukele gang activity levels.
This isn't the only place where the article transitions from a commentary on crime or nominally informative analysis to more audience-shaping agendas. It is, for example, absolutely true that Bukele expanded the Supreme Court, which the article notes... but what's also true, and not noted, is that the Court issue came about in the context when the opposition tried to stonewall and prevent globally- and regionally-normal COVID-19 policies. Rather than recognize Bukele's (actually-is!) concering actions in the context of a domestic political back-and-forth, it is presented as baseless beyond what it implies in isolation for authoritarianism. It is also absolutely true that Bukele is open to Chinese investment... but what's also true, and not noted, is that Bukele is open to anyone's investment. Chinese investment is not a domestically or regionally controversial prospect, but Bukele's failure to go beyond even what the opposition or close American allies would do is presented as a moral/strategic vice.
And this is without the various tangents and allusions to things that matter of an implicitly-American audience, but are bizar if the audience is expected to be more aware of a Central American perspective. The crypto-jabs, the Xinjiang province analogy, or the pejorative references to relations with other regional actors considered bad by the American audience- these are American preoccupations, not local concerns.
None of this is indicative of particular insights of the local situation as opposed to relying heavily on anglophone source biases... which is unsurprising. The article's author is a Florida-based contributor to American foreign policy media. He is writing to his anglophone audience, but especially one dominated by a particular subset of state department / international academics of a generally left-persuasion, and what a lot of that audience wants is narrative justification to undercut Bukele.
Thanks for your insight, I did suspect that this article would be presenting just one side of the argument
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link