There are few things more dangerous than a noble idea wrapped in good intentions that fails to match human reality.
Albert Camus, the French philosopher and 1957 Nobel Prize winner for literature, observed that the apparent welfare of humanity is often the alibi of tyrants. French philosophers are often wrong about most things, but on this point Camus hit the mark.
The intelligentsia and commentariat’s counterpart in government, academia and the NGO world is the elite policy class. They write with enough footnotes to sound morally untouchable. They speak with enough solemnity to present themselves as the professional conscience of the world. But follow the trail from intention to outcome, and too often one arrives at a broken economy, unsafe streets and ordinary people trapped in precisely the misery from which these policies were meant to rescue them.
That is why the recent turnarounds in Argentina and El Salvador are so uncomfortable for the polished world of policy talk.
At the outset, one must say that these are not identical countries. Nor are Javier Milei and Nayib Bukele identical leaders. Argentina’s crisis was, and remains, primarily economic. El Salvador’s was a crisis of violence, gangs and state authority retreating from entire neighbourhoods. Milei is the libertarian economist with a chainsaw aimed at state waste. Bukele is the hard law-and-order populist who used emergency powers to break gang rule.
Their methods, ideologies and constitutional contexts differ dramatically. Yet their successes share one truth that eludes the “reasonableness” of mainstream orthodoxy, namely that their plans worked where the elite consensus insisted they could not.
In Argentina, Milei inherited a country exhausted by inflation, fiscal fantasy and the comfortable lies of Peronist economic management. The state spent what it did not have, printed money it could not afford, subsidised what it could not sustain, and called all of this “social justice”.
But the result was not justice. It was poverty, insecurity and a currency in which ordinary people could not safely store the fruits of their labour.
Milei’s answer to this was economic simplicity and honesty.
His government did not pretend that budget deficits do not matter. It did not buy into the lie that a bloated welfare state can create prosperity by decree. It recognised that poverty is not solved by a bigger state, more slogans and more subsidies that quietly bleed a productive economy dry. In other words, it allowed common sense to prevail in government. But, as my dad always dryly says, common sense ain’t that common.
The reaction to Milei’s sweeping reforms was predictable. He was denounced as cruel, reckless and extremist. His chainsaw became, for critics, the symbol of heartless politics. Yet Argentina recorded its first financial budget surplus in 14 years in 2024. Inflation, though still high by normal standards, began falling sharply. Argentina’s official statistics agency later reported that annual inflation had dropped to 31.5% in 2025, its lowest level since 2017. Poverty also fell dramatically, from 52.9% in the first half of 2024 to 28.2% in the second half of 2025, according to the country’s official figures.
Of course, Argentina has not suddenly become Switzerland. Millions of Argentines remain poor, and the pain of reform is real and will continue for some time. Some analysts also warn that part of the improvement may be affected by short-term statistical shifts and inflation effects, and may therefore not be as permanent as the headline numbers suggest.
But the lesson for South Africa is that Milei confronted economic reality instead of managing decline in the name of compassion. And once reality was finally confronted, the country began moving in a positive direction.
El Salvador tells a different, but related, story.
For years, El Salvador was one of the most violent countries on earth, even more violent than South Africa. In 2015, its murder rate was about 105 per 100,000 people. For context, South Africa’s rate that year was about 33 per 100,000. These are the levels of violence the policy elites often write about, but rarely experience personally behind their walls and private security.
In El Salvador, as in South Africa, communities were ruled by fear: children growing up under the shadow of gangs, small businesses being extorted, families listening to gunshots at night. Public spaces were surrendered to criminals.
Bukele’s answer was not another round table on the socio-economic causes of violence, accompanied by meek interventions that would move the needle only slightly. His answer was to take back the authority of the state by force.
After a wave of gang violence in March 2022, his government introduced emergency powers and launched a comprehensive campaign against gangs. Right on cue, the international human-rights chorus focused mainly on the alleged violation of criminals’ rights. The rights of victims, the families who were extorted, the children who grew up in fear, and the communities held hostage by gangs tend to disappear remarkably quickly from such conversations. It cared more about the rights of criminals than of those they terrorise.
Critics, including international human-rights groups, rightly raise concerns about due process, fair trials, prison conditions and the weakening of democratic checks and balances. But despite the criticism, tens of thousands of suspected gang members were arrested, and the result was safer streets for the majority of El Salvador’s citizens.
A society that defeats criminal terror by normalising arbitrary state power may win peace in the short term while undermining the institutions that must protect freedom in the long term. That warning should not be dismissed. But neither can the outcome and improved lived reality for normal people be ignored. El Salvador’s government says the murder rate fell to 1.3 per 100,000 people in 2025. Compared with the dark days of 2015, that is not a marginal improvement. It is an extraordinary one.
The mother whose child can now walk safely to school does not live inside the policy paper of a Western think-tank. The shopkeeper who no longer pays protection money to gangs does not experience “authoritarian aesthetics” as an academic topic. The family that can sleep through the night without gunfire is not primarily interested in whether the correct vocabulary of progressive criminology has been used.
They are experiencing the most basic human right of safety.
The mainstream commentariat often treats order, fiscal discipline and consequences as morally suspect, while compassion itself is treated as a virtue. But real compassion is not measured by how impressively a government condemns crime. In this context, compassion is ultimately measured by whether fewer people are murdered.
There is a constant attempt to force ordinary people to suspend their common sense. We are told, again and again, not to see what is plainly true. We are told that firm action against urban decay is inhumane, even when illegal occupation, neglect and lawlessness clearly serve nobody’s interests. Not those of the occupiers, not those of the surrounding community, and not those of the town or city. We are told that it is “progressive” to treat crime mainly as a social symptom, even when ordinary people are held captive in their own neighbourhoods by gangs, extortionists and drug dealers. We are told that this is somehow a form of compassion, provided it is packaged in the correct moral language.
But it is not compassion. It is the mirage of virtue. It is pretty language used to cover up something harmful to everyone involved.
The same pattern repeats itself across almost every field of public policy. When crime suffocates communities, firm action is treated as suspect. When economic mismanagement destroys the poor, fiscal discipline is described as cruel. When public spaces decay, the restoration of order is described as hard-hearted. And when ordinary people say what they can see with their own eyes — that chaos is chaos, decay is decay, crime is crime — the commentariat scolds them and tells them they do not really understand what they are seeing.
It brings to mind Orwell’s warning that the final command of ideological power is always to reject the evidence of your own eyes and ears. That is precisely the temptation of modern policy language: to redescribe reality for so long that people feel ashamed to tell the truth out loud.
This happens because the elite policy class is especially vulnerable to luxury beliefs: ideas that confer status on the elite while imposing costs on ordinary people. The wealthy can afford soft theories of crime because they live behind walls, alarms and private security. They can afford economic romanticism because they hold assets in stable currencies, send their children to private schools and always have an exit plan. They can describe disorder as complexity because they are insulated from its consequences.
The poor cannot.
The poor pay immediately and physically for bad ideas. They do not need another elite performance of empathy. They need a working economy, competent police, functioning schools, effective courts and accountable government.
That is the lesson from Argentina and El Salvador. Not that South Africa, or any other country, should simply import Milei or Bukele. Countries differ, as do their constitutions, institutions and histories. No one should treat the rule of law or the limits of state power lightly.
The real lesson is that reality must once again be allowed to discipline ideology.
If a policy makes the poor poorer, it does not become compassionate because it is described in compassionate language. If an approach to crime leaves communities at the mercy of gangs, it is not humane simply because it avoids difficult choices. If a government spends beyond its means until inflation destroys workers’ wages, it is not pro-poor.
South Africa has a political class fluent in compassion but often poor in results. We have policies defended in the name of the poor that do not create jobs for the poor. We have endless rhetoric about safety while criminals govern entire communities more effectively than the state. We have frameworks, commissions, strategies, committees and declarations — but too little courage to make things work.
Common-sense politics is not simplistic politics. It is politics tested by outcomes. Are fewer people poor? Are fewer people murdered? Are more people employed? Are children learning more? Are families safer? Is the state doing the basic things a state is supposed to do?
The things the elite policy class says it wants — less poverty, safer communities, more dignity — are often achieved faster by bold, practical reformers, precisely because they are less obsessed with the rituals of elite approval.
Milei and Bukele are imperfect leaders in imperfect countries using imperfect methods. But they have exposed a perfect hypocrisy: the refusal of many commentators to recognise improvement when it arrives in the wrong ideological uniform.
The fact remains that fewer Argentines are poor, and fewer Salvadorans are being murdered. That is what matters.
[Image: Max Kleinen on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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