OK, so Hungary didn’t work out. What other small, corrupt nation can right-wingers emulate as their model for a future America?
Well, damn. They are fixating on my family’s homeland of El Salvador. How absolutely flattering. Yup.
It is constantly disconcerting how often conservatives boast about America being the greatest country in the world and then qualify it with “but we should really be more like [tiny authoritarian nation with a negligible GDP] because they have it right.”
Republicans have moved on from the flop in Budapest to focus on El Salvador, where Nayib Bukele has set himself up to be president for life. This neo-fascist hero has co-opted the separation of powers, heavily relied on the military for internal policing, and built the world’s largest prison, which happens to be a concentration camp where the US sends many of its former residents to die. In El Salvador, authorities can detain anyone without a warrant, deny them access to legal counsel, and suspend the right to assembly. Independent media is nonexistent, and the state promotes “a cinematic version of Bukele” to create a cult of personality.
All of this is peachy keen with American right-wingers, who see Bukele as “an aspirational figure” and “yearn to implement his authoritarian transformation of El Salvador” in the United States.
On behalf of my family, let me say that we do not want America to become El Salvador. We would like more pupusas, but that’s about it.
Of course, it’s not just hardcore right-wingers who are flirting with despotism. Around the world, in “both developing and developed countries, democracies are facing historic tests” as polls show “mounting public apathy from voters, particularly young people, and growing disenchantment with the ideals of liberal democracy itself.”
Compared to just a few years ago, Americans are less likely “to see a democratically elected government as ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ important to the United States’ identity as a nation,” and there is a “growing rejection of the basic principles of democracy and human rights, and increasing support for authoritarian populism among people who feel that concepts like democracy and human rights and due process have failed them.”
To be fair, maybe democracy has failed them. After all, in this bastion of democracy, we are under the thumb of old men who hold disproportionate power over us and are quite overt about their contempt for anyone who was foolish enough not to be born rich and male.
But do we really want to be El Salvador? Have we given up on the American Dream (whatever the hell that is) and replaced it with the Authoritarian Settle?
If so, that will be a compromise that we soon regret.
