Overview

Documenting the rise and disillusionment of El Salvador’s postwar activists in the face of populist authoritarian politics. The conclusion of El Salvador’s long civil war, in 1992, was supposed to bring about equality and political freedom. Leftist insurgents laid down arms, and the government formally embraced liberal ideals. Yet today, El Salvador is ruled by an authoritarian president who came to power via unconstitutional means. What went wrong? Anthropologist and journalist Ellen Moodie embedded with indignados—young middle-class protestors, demanding that the government live up to its liberal commitments—to better understand the course of political change since the civil war. Yet the “post-postwar” generation is only the latest demographic disappointed with liberalism in practice. Their revolutionary predecessors responded to a twentieth-century “racial liberalism” that saw descendants of colonists “civilizing” Indigenous people while dispossessing them of lands and mobilizing them for labor. Today, the failure to make good on the promises of postwar liberalism has inspired robust support for strongman Nayib Bukele. Moodie argues that El Salvador’s case, though inflected by local concerns, is not unique. Rather, it is another stark demonstration of how liberalism’s imaginary social contract gives rise to populist authoritarianism.

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9781477334003

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Reviews

""Indignant Liberalism refuses to dwell on established critiques of liberalism's failures, instead focusing on why a group of middle-class, postwar youth in El Salvador took to the streets to defend fundamental liberal ideals, and the stakes of this movement for broader political projects of liberation. Moodie's careful and astute exploration of liberalism's possibilities, however fraught, enables her to answer crucial questions about the rise of illiberalism in El Salvador and elsewhere, moving us beyond the usual story of authoritarian inheritances."" - Christopher A. Loperena, City University of New York, author of The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras ""A tour de force that draws on decades of longitudinal ethnography and an expansive array of often under-cited and never-before-cited texts in English, Indignant Liberalism is an empirically groundbreaking and theoretically sophisticated assessment of El Salvador's longue durée of liberalism and the central role of the urban middle class."" - Irina Carlota Silber, City College of New York, author of After Stories: Transnational Intimacies of Postwar El Salvador

Author Information

Ellen Moodie is an associate professor of anthropology and director of Global Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace and Central America in the New Millennium.

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