Don't Stop Now (Opening Pandora's democratic box)

National Review ^ | April 1, 2005 | Victor Davis Hanson

[RWR8189]

With the encouraging news of change in the air in Lebanon, Egypt, and the Gulf, coupled with a solidification of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, there has arisen a new generation of doubters. Not all are simply gnashing their teeth that their prognostications of doom were wrong, but rather often reflect genuine worries about the viability of emerging democracy in the Middle East.

Concerns about illiberal democracy run the gamut. Some fear that Islamists will hijack democracy and install Islamist or other such theocracies. Others worry that the veneer of voting gives legitimacy to otherwise autocratic societies and leaders that will hide their crimes behind the sanction of the "people. "

There is also a vast body of research, both historical and sociological, that suggests democracy is the aftermath of a long slow evolution toward egalitarianism and economic liberalization. Ancient Greek democracy, for example, was an expansion on earlier consensual government. It did not in itself spring forth at Athens in 507 B.C. from the head of Zeus. The revolution that started in 1776, we sometimes forget, was possible because of nearly two prior centuries of English relatively liberal colonial rule, under which small landowners and shopkeepers enjoyed property rights and participated in local councils despite a distant king.

So what makes Americans think we can plop down a democracy on the ashes of Saddam's Gulag, or see free elections in a Beirut that was once the Murder, Inc. of the 1970s and 1980s? How can we even imagine that Dr. Zawahiri's dream of theocracy won't follow from the end of the Mubarak dictatorship?

[RipSawyer]

>>>It's human nature.>>>>


True, I suppose the really amazing part is that the United States of America ever actually came into being, not the fact that we have steadily evolved toward dictatorship. I still doubt that any TRULY free nation has ever existed but in concept only and possibly not even in concept.

[jb6]

I don't honostly think a truly "free" nation can exist. Human nature won't allow it. There will always be forces trying to take it all at every opportunity.

I think that we must thank the continued British threat for the evolution of the United States from a collection of 13 small nations under a very ineffective and loose confederacy to 13 states under a semi loose Federation.