Friday, October 31, 2025
To Bukele
As Bukele, and to a lesser but still significant extent, Trump, have shown is that so-called "intractable" problems are not insoluble, but rather require intestinal fortitude to solve.
We don't need to adopt the tactics that Bukele was forced to use to rebuild his broken society, but unless we get our act cleaned up, we (and Great Britain) will have to one day or face the collapse of our society. Britain is much farther along the path to societal collapse due to its even more enthusiastic embrace of Islamists and coddling of their sensibilities, but if we follow the path of our liberal elites, we may someday face the choice of severe crackdowns that will make raids on Home Depots look quaint.
Further, as El Salvador and, again, to a lesser but significant extent, America show, the longer you let problems fester, the harsher one has to be to solve them. Bukele's success in cleaning up El Salvador required using extraordinary means, but the result has been a much freer El Salvador despite the necessity of using harsh tactics.
The same has been true for solving our border crisis. Weakness caused the crisis, but Trump has shown that all the tools were available as long as the executive was willing to use them. The biggest obstacle to success has been our elite, not the inability of our institutions to do what needed to be done.
Societies are much more fragile than the elite seems to think. One of the things our Founders and the people who built our country understood was that building and maintaining a free society was hard and took real maintenance. Our current elite has inherited a society that was built over generations and is squandering the inheritance at an alarming rate, assuming that it exists as a permanent structure, and not a carefully balanced practical project.
