Paradox of Tolerance -- Part 2

Kidnapping Foreign Leaders Edition

I wrote about Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance, and it seems more relevant than ever now in light of current events.

The idea is you can be tolerant, but if you tolerate intolerance, tolerance is gone. So you must not tolerate intolerance, assuming your goal is a tolerant society.

When people complain (as I have in the past) about Nayib Bukele in El Salvador almost certainly violating rights (even alleged gang members are innocent until proven guilty), you get to a contradiction: if the tolerant system wherein everyone gets full due process under the law has been destroyed and abused beyond recognition, then you might have to use supra-constitutional force to secure the rights and freedoms of your law abiding citizens, i.e, to re-create conditions for a tolerant society. Or, as applied to foreign policy, if a neighboring country is actively harming and undermining your own, you might have to use force that violates its sovereignty.

Whether El Salvador (I’ve never been there) was really in such a situation that justified the widespread incarceration of its gang members, I don’t know for sure. And whether Nicholas Maduro was really doing everything he’s alleged to have done and in so doing had a material impact on the security of our votes or the health of our citizens, I also don’t know. Governments that use extra-legal powers to achieve desired ends are notoriously deceitful and self-serving in the justifying their actions. Any policy, no matter how unethical or authoritarian, will be defended as involving “national security” or even “public health.”

But it’s also naive and misguided not to acknowledge the principle in itself: namely, that if circumstances are such that the institutions themselves are no longer capable of delivering justice and/or protecting the liberty of the people, then you cannot restrict your actions to what’s legal within their own rules. You must make an exception and be intolerant to this intolerance, so to speak, to break the rules in order to restore their functionality and original purpose.

It cannot be correct, for example, that one should rely on captured courts to ensure due process or comply with international law if those institutions are coopted, broken and ineffective. In El Salvador, it has been reported, the murder rate was the highest in the world, and regular people were terrified to go about their daily lives. In such a failed system, invoking due process and human rights toward gang members would be to perpetuate the virtual imprisonment of the ordinary citizen, even if (as I have little doubt) at least *some* of the alleged gang members were incarcerated unjustly and even many who were actually vicious and dangerous criminals were likely imprisoned without sufficient due process.

The question as to whether Bukele in El Salvador over the last few years, or Trump in seizing Maduro this week, were justified in doing what they did can and should be argued. That Trump and his appointed officials say the mission was necessary is obviously not good enough.

But what I’m seeing now is people who seem to believe that even if Venezuela were deliberately and materially harming the US that Trump needed to play within the rules, even if those harms were set up in such a way as to circumvent them, i.e., via a base of hostile operations off US shores, but within reach of them due to the cooperation of US immigration authorities from the prior administration, whether or not such cooperation was in some cases well-meaning.

It’s trivial to lead a functional country with strong institutions where the rule of law is sufficient to its task. Where great leaders emerge is when the country is dysfunctional, and the institutions are broken.

Whether that’s what Trump (or Bukele) is doing/has done remains to be seen. As I said, every government that breaks the rules is self-serving and deceitful in its justifications for doing so. But it is also plainly not the case that one should never break the rules when those rules have been subverted beyond the point where they no longer function to serve the people.

There can be no law to guide us when the law itself has been subverted against its original purpose. Perhaps the best guidepost one has in these cases is the manner in which the law has been broken — was it done judiciously, humanely and proportionally? Was it the minimum extent to which it could be broken, like a surgeon removing a tumor, rather than a butcher hacking at an animal carcass? Or like removing Maduro only, leaving the rest of Venezuela and its people so far untouched rather than destroying all of Iraq, half a world away, for fear of a phantom threat?