MS-13 Threatens the Legitimacy of Salvadoran Government
19th July 2018
The ‘problem’ with MS-13 is the same as the ‘problem’ of the Yakuza in Japan: Both groups would effectively disappear if you just rounded up everyone with their distinctive tattoos and executed them. The reason the problem is a problem is that the people in charge aren’t willing to take the obvious action that would solve the problem.
This is a problem that all authorities, such as governments, have. Authorities have to abide by the rules; rule-breakers don’t feel obliged to do that. So long as the authority self-constrains by abiding by the rules, they are at a disadvantage.
This is why authoritarian and totalitarian regimes are always so apparently more orderly than others. Those in control of the regime only abide by the rules when they judge that it is to their advantage to do so. In the normal course of events, that is the case; most people are happier living under an authority that obeys the rules. If this rule-breaking is only indulged in when the group faces an existential threat by non-regime rule-breakers (‘criminals’), then most people will wring their hands and privately breathe a sigh of relief.
The difficulty arises when those in control of the regime don’t restrict themselves to breaking the rules only in the face of an existential threat, but whenever they feel like it; and that destabilizes the group as badly as, if not more so, than the existential-threat-group. Both the Nazis and the Communists run into this problem damned near every time. This is what gives rise to the term ‘kleptocracy’, which more often than not characterizes such regimes.
This is not a new problem — the Roman Republic died because there was no effective way to deal with an existential internal political threat other than by obviously breaking the rules; and the Roman Empire died because this system eventually degenerated into one where the rules were defined as ‘whatever the people in charge want them to be’ (under the rationalization salus populi suprema lex, which begs the question of who defines what ‘salus’ means).
Modern societies try to avoid this problem through some combination of democracy and ‘checks & balances’. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Alexander Pope summed it up: ‘For forms of government, let fools contest; That which is best administered is best.’ No matter what the legal structure might be, if the people in charge of enforcing the rules just routinely ignore the rules, then you might just as well not have any rules, because the result is the same. So the key factor is the attitude of the people enforcing the rules. And that’s a cultural matter.
So the key is culture. My chief objection to Social Justice Warriors and their fellow travelers is that they feel perfectly justified in ignoring the rules when doing so helps them to attain their utopian end-state; they are the poster children for ‘the end justifies the means’. This is at odds with traditional American culture. That’s why it is perfectly accurate to characterize Social Justice Warriors as both unAmerican and anti-American (although of course they would deny it and really really feel offended by it, although distinguishing it from the myriad other things by which they are really really offended is often difficult).