What if we tried winning?

"I have a great conviction: power is not to be saved, it’s to be used."-President Nayib Bukele

For the last six months, this war has been demonstrating what we all should have already known: Israel’s main problem is that it’s run by professional losers. Don’t believe me?

“We have tried everything but eliminating Hamas,” said Gantz, who is a former IDF chief of staff and a former minister of defense.

The idea of going out there and winning just never occurred to this guy or any of his bosses. One critique of Adam Smith’s theory of the division of labor asked what sort of person will be produced by decades of putting heads on pins. We can see exactly what sort of person rises to the top in an establishment whose business for the last five decades has been to lose on command.

What choice do we have? We are a small country with no natural resources aside from phosphates and some offshore natural gas. We are surrounded by scary enemies. We have no choice but to bow before the international community and the Rules-Based Order, the NPR people. One rule of the Rules-Based Order is that beating your enemies is a violation of their human rights. Beating them quickly is very bad-you know who did a blitzkrieg? Beating them slowly is also very bad-you know who besieged Leningrad?

"Our mistake was made a few months ago, when we listened to the US," Danon told Kan Reshet Bet. "We changed the modus operandi in Gaza and took our foot off the gas pedal. That brought pressure on us. Today the international community is saying that it's taking too much time."

In general, the rule is that you’re not allowed to win. You just need to beat your enemies enough to bring them to the negotiating table, mediated by Rules-Based Order itself. The subject of the negotiation is always the same: how much you owe your enemies for beating them and the ways in which you will help them recover so that they can attack you better next time.

Anyone willing to make a career of servicing this farcical industry is doomed to a slow Metamorphosis. Gantz didn’t wake up a giant cockroach one day, he spent decades working hard to become one, admiring his emerging prothorax and labial palps in the mirror every day. It’s a little bit gross at first but you get used to it and the pay’s great, plus everyone treats you with respect-especially the Americans.

“…a section of the 35th Bgd. (Para’s) and do tactical field exercises with them as a common soldier. This to me is a very impressive act on his part…Troops also get the feeling that he is in touch with them.”-a very impressive act, indeed!

It seems impossible for things to be other than what they are. The modern managerial state which runs Israel is all-pervasive and distributed. Its values are those of 2019-era NPR. Winning is impossible, and even if it were possible, would be immoral-problematic, even. The apparatus mobilizes instantly against any perceived threat to its entrenched position or ideology, marshalling all of the resources at its disposal. Since it controls the game-theoretical coordination mechanisms, its enemies can not unite against it, nor coordinate their actions in the long term. Any attempt to attack any part of it is met with the resistance of all of it, as we saw with the judicial reform protests. Any apparatchik must go with the flow and reap the rewards, or be crushed.

The only problem with all of this is that it involves a protracted national suicide. Is another path possible for Israel? I believe it is, and I have an example to prove it: the greatest Palestinian leader of all time, President Nayib Bukele.

Bukele came to power in an El Salvador which had spent a decade in a proxy civil war on behalf of the US and USSR. Refugees who repatriated from the US had brought back a culture of Satanic organized crime which made ISIS look like a Japanese tea ceremony. The post-civil war peace was worse than the war had been. El Salvador had the highest murder rate in the world. The gangs outgoverned the state, which was ruled by and for the benefit of an oligarchy through two entrenched corrupt parties. The parties worked with the gangs, which delivered votes and in return were allowed to run wild; even if their leaders were imprisoned, they enjoyed prisons with hotel-like conditions from which they could continue to run their organizations. This arrangement was supported by the Rules-Based Order, the Catholic church, the United States and everyone else who mattered. This group did not include the Salvadoreans burying the mutilated bodies of their relatives who’d been sacrificed by the gangs. In short, El Salvador existed in a state of entrenched, permanent, systemic failure enshrined in its institutions. Then, like in a movie, a hero appeared and everything changed.

Nayib Bukele started off as a normie prog politician and rose to mayor of San Salvador, which position he used to launch a rebellion against his own party, the FMLN, which expelled him for shitpoasting IRL.

I can sympathize

Bukele then ran for president, won, and effectively implemented martial law and a state of emergency, crushed the gangs both on the streets and in prison, lowering the murder rate to the lowest in the Western hemisphere, all while maintaining an approval rating above 90%. He marshalled that popular support to crush the two major political parties, adopted Bitcoin as legal tender and reserve currency, streamlined entrenched bureaucracy at the municipal level, cracked down on American influence networks and so on. In other words, Bukele successfully carried out a right wing revolution.

It is hard to overstate the profound and revolutionary nature of this phenomenon. All previous attempts to overthrow the modern managerial state from the right had failed. This is because, military juntas aside, they’ve all involved LARPing as leftist revolutionaries with the polarity reversed: ideological preparation of the field by charismatic leaders emitting propaganda, a vanguard of law-breaking rebels causing property damage and attacking enemy personnel and infrastructure, publicity stunts, street theater, attempts to enter the political apparat as outsiders, institutional capture. Needless to say, this was all doomed to failure, because it ignores the institutional environment, which is friendly to leftist revolutionaries but hostile to rightist reformers. Trump’s swamp is an accurate figure of speech; any outsider finds himself under constant and coordinated attack from thousands of directions by everything from tiny malarial mosquitoes, leeches and candiru fish to giant anacondas and crocodiles. His reactions are weak and clumsy and only invite further attack, culminating in a fiasco like January 6th.

The juntas were more successful in the short term, using the military’s superior cohesion and access to firepower to capture key institutions by force, but doomed in the long term; they were never cool, and all the cool people in their country were mentally aligned with the overthrown apparat. As Pinochet could tell you about commies, you throw them off the ramp and they climb back in through the window and put you on trial. You can do anything with bayonets except to sit on them, and you can’t order people to admire you at gunpoint.

What Bukele did was completely different. He was a hip businessman who made a brief career start as a machine politician and then flipped it into actual leadership. Before accessing power, he did not waste time writing books or making speeches; it is not clear whether he even had an explicit ideology. He did not try to build up a militia or a political mob, nor engage in street theater. Once he had been elected to a an office which offered enough power to leverage, he did not waste time attempting to compromise with the apparat but rather used his powers to the utmost to achieve immediate goals which were relevant to every single normal Salvadoran. Having achieved those goals, Bukele used the credibility earned to achieve larger goals. At every single point he could easily have failed, likely resulting in his political career or even life ending. At every point he tried to win and neither compromised nor let the scale of the project intimidate him. Most importantly, he did all this while being cool.

Crucially, Bukele’s lack of a background in the security services was an asset. It takes decades to rise to a rank high enough to launch a revolution; by this point, one has compromised himself repeatedly. Any revolution launched at gunpoint lacks inherent legitimacy; it must rely on the international community, the New York Times, for legitimation, and no right wing revolution can be legitimized. Bukele used his legitimate power to issue legal orders to the military and police, rather than conspiring with their leadership; the fact that the military and police rank and file were ecstatic at finally being ordered to defeat the scum tearing apart their country was the cherry on the cake. The episode of the 9th of February, when the legislative representatives of the two entrenched parties united to defeat Bukele’s efforts against the gangs, is illuminative here: Bukele clearly demonstrated that he could wield extrajudicial power if it were necessary, but that it would not be necessary. The opposing political parties would be shown the door in the next elections.

An offer they couldn’t refuse

Since consolidating his power, Bukele has continued to lead the country firmly, establishing law and order everywhere. His bet on Bitcoin has paid off as its price has risen. He used his party’s control of the legislative assembly to replace judges of the Supreme Court and the Attorney General with ones less likely to cause problems, and ignored US protestations (to be expected, since just as in Israel, the Salvadoran judges acted as American satraps). The new Supreme Court unsurprisingly found it constitutional for Bukele to run for re-election, to additional protests by the US and the remainder of the political apparat.

In short, Bukele has acted as a classical philosopher king, slaying the monster which had been terrorizing the realm and overthrowing the corrupt oligarchs which had been collaborating with that monster. Throughout the process, he has focused on speaking truth and behaving as a God-fearing man.

This vignette gives us a hint as to the shape which our hopes must take here in Israel. A leader needs to emerge. This leader will not likely come from the top of the military or the secret services. He will not have distinguished himself as an ideologue or a religious authority. He will use the power of his office to harshly and directly address a burning concern (terrorism and crime) shared by the majority of the citizens, in the process demanding loyalty of the security forces, and use his success to increase his power, which he will use for further visibly successful projects. Very quickly, this will lead him into conflict with the power networks, and he will directly leverage his popular support and executive power over the police to successfully confront those networks. By understanding that “power is not to be saved, it’s to be used”, and by a single-minded focus on winning, he will be able to defeat his opponents, whose careers have been spent in saving power, colluding, subverting and managing conflicts with the enemy rather than defeating him. Having defeated them, he will dismantle their power bases in such a way that they can not be rebuilt, leaving him free to reform the country.

Admittedly, this seems a tall order. But if El Salvador, a small, poor country not particularly renowned for intellectual achievement, can do it, so can we. In any case, we don’t have a choice-our decades of coasting along as a mediocre oligarchic satrapy in a bad neighborhood, relying on the generosity of our American patrons and the comedic incompetence of our enemies are coming to an end. We will have to make drastic changes to survive. It’s either the professional losers or us.