Posted on 07/06/2013 3:58:03 PM PDT by neverdem
The democracy fetish would be worth having if it were about promoting real democracy. Instead, as illustrated by media coverage of the military coup that ousted Egypt’s popularly elected Muslim Brotherhood president, we’re still confusing democratic legitimacy with legitimate democracy.
The latter is real — a culture of liberty that safeguards minority rights. Attaining it is a worthy aspiration, but one that requires years of patient, disciplined, and often unpopular work. The former is an illusion — the pretense that if a Muslim country holds popular elections and elects totalitarian Islamists, voila, it has a “democracy,” and progressives the world over will regard it as such.
The confusion is nowhere better illustrated than in neoconservative commentary, where two most admirable premises — the transcendent power of freedom and the imperative of confronting evil — are seemingly at war with each other. Thus do the Wall Street Journal’s editors recount the rise and fall of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, elected Egypt’s president just a year ago, in the flush of Spring Fever:
His election was the best feature of his rule, which had descended into incompetence and creeping authoritarianism. Mr. Morsi won the election narrowly over a Mubarak-era political leftover, but he soon reinforced fears that the Brotherhood would use its new power to build an Islamist dictatorship. He tried to claim near-absolute powers by decree to force through a draft constitution written by Islamists and boycotted by everyone else.
No, not exactly.
Doesn’t that sound a lot like the Democrats in the Wisconsin legislature? Remember: They lacked the votes to defeat Governor Scott Walker’s collective-bargaining reform, so they tried to derail it by boycotting the democratic process — an act of sabotage the Journal’s editors’ rightly rebuked. But there’s a huge difference. Lacking Wisconsin’s democratic culture, Egypt’s ostensibly democratic process was a farce. That’s why Egypt’s obstructive democrats were heroes, while Wisconsin’s obstructive Democrats were rogues.
Democratic processes — elections, referenda, constitution-drafting — must be conditioned on a preexisting democratic culture. Otherwise, in a majority-Muslim country like Egypt, you end up giving totalitarianism the patina of democratic legitimacy. Quite predictably, when Morsi put the draft constitution to a countrywide democratic vote, the vast majority of Egyptians used their self-determining liberty to enshrine liberty-devouring sharia as their fundamental law.
The cognitive dissonance is dizzying. Yes, as the Journal’s editors note, Morsi was narrowly elected over Ahmed Shafiq, a Mubarak-era holdover. But why was that? It was because the forces of true, pluralistic democracy in Egypt are so fledgling and weak that they could never have defeated Islamic supremacists on their own. They had to turn to the old regime.
In the free elections leading up to Morsi’s election, there was no greater ignominy than being a Mubarak holdover. In those elections, real democrats and progressives were thrashed by Islamic supremacists. They lost 78 percent to 22 percent in a referendum on constitutional amendments that allowed the parliamentary and presidential elections to go forward. They were swamped again in the parliamentary elections that gave Islamic supremacists a three-to-one hammerlock on the legislature and thus on the constituent assembly that wrote the new constitution.
By the time the presidential election came round, authentic democrats, including members of persecuted religious minorities, had no choice but to pin their hopes on a Mubarak holdover — just as this week, they had to rely on a coup by a military still threaded with Mubarak holdovers. It was the only realistic chance they had at a semblance of the rights that true democracy implies.
They lost anyway, even though the transitional military rulers, in a most undemocratic maneuver, tried to stack the deck in their favor by disqualifying on bogus grounds the more popular Muslim Brotherhood figure, Khairat al-Shater. The comparatively unknown Morsi was supremacist Islam’s Plan B. But we are talking about Egypt, where Western democracy is unabashedly condemned by such figures as Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the revered sharia jurist. In that Egypt — the Egypt that is — Plan B was good enough to win.
Morsi’s “democratic” logic was bulletproof: His actions were “sovereign” because he was elected by the people; the constituent assembly warranted sovereign protection because it had been appointed by a parliament elected by the people; and the old-regime judges should butt out because the draft constitution would be submitted to the sovereign people, to decide for themselves in an up-or-down vote. If you accept the Arab Spring fantasy that a liberty culture is bred by free elections, then Morsi was using his power to protect Egyptian democracy.
Of course, we should not accept the Arab Spring fantasy. But that does not make the Journal’s editors wrong — just rash. They want what we should all want: a truly democratic Middle East. But let’s not kid ourselves — it is going to take a very long time to get there.
Core neoconservative principles are not really at odds. The power of freedom is transcendent. But real freedom cannot be rushed. Democratic culture has to take root, which is a long-term project in an anti-democratic society. As a foundational matter, there must be abiding societal commitments to freedom of conscience, the equal dignity of every person, economic liberty, the rule of law, and self-determination irrespective of sharia. Only then will liberty be promoted by free elections — they are the end of the evolution, not the beginning.
We disfavor military coups because we are a liberty-loving people who defend civil rights. In Egypt, at this stage of its development, liberty lovers remain outnumbered. The massive protests against the Muslim Brotherhood administration are an encouraging sign that Egypt’s democrats are growing in strength, but they should not be mistaken for a wholesale rejection of sharia supremacism. Right now, the authentically democratic ranks remain modest; bear in mind that it was only seven months ago that the sharia constitution was overwhelmingly approved. At this point, a military coup — and an enlightened military leadership that maintains order while giving civil society the time and space to evolve — is the only chance freedom has. It is by no means certain that Egypt’s military is up to this daunting task, but it remains the best hope.
The neocons have also always been right that evil must be confronted and defeated. Yet that cannot happen unless evil is recognized as such. We must not rationalize Islamic supremacism and its sharia system as something they are not — as virtuous, or at least moderate — just because, given the choice, Islamic societies will vote for them. Egypt’s real democrats are trying to tell us that there are no moderate totalitarians. We would do well to listen.
— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy.
“Simply put, the American people are expected to legitimize their tyrants with elections”, which is what we did last election.
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Didn’t OBOZO tell his ‘hand picked’ government in Egypt they must listen to the ‘will of the people’?
Does than mean that if we could ‘muster up’ 30 or 40 million people to PEACEFULLY march on 1600 PA AVE he would abdicate the throne?
Of course, the press being what it is, we would have to gather 100 million people to get the Liberal Media to acknowledge ‘we’ had 30 million present.
‘Calypso Louie’ gets maybe 300 thou and it is called a ‘Million man march’..
The Moslem brotherhood's rise reminds me of the Bolsheviks in 1917 and the Ayatollah in 1979
In both cases, a dictator is overthrown by a rag-tag bunch of opposition forces, but then the most ruthless and fanatical party defeats the others because it has a strong core-message even if in raw numbers it is smaller than the others
I’m sorry, but by that standards (MSM in the USA), the USA doesn’t stand a chance of keeping it’s democratic values....
It would be more accurate to say the Nazis rose to power via democracy. In the Weimar Republic, with its multitude of parties, NO party ever won an actual majority.
The 44% won by the Nazis was the largest vote for any party in the history of the WR.
Look where the USA is and where it's going. We don't stand a chance.
It seems to me that hairs are being split here. The statement, “The 44% won by the Nazis was the largest vote for any party in the history of the WR,” doesn’t mean very much in view of the actual amount of time the Republic lasted ... by then just over 13 years. Hitler came to power through a plurality, as I said.
What is remarkable is how divided Germany was along political, social, and economical lines. Because someone actually put forth a concrete plan to the voters for the nation to go forward in a united fashion, as under the old monarchy, the plan itself was not examined too carefully. Suffice it to say that “hope and change” would have worked just fine as a slogan for the NSDAP platform of 1933.
Any kind of a plan in the midst of chaos looks pretty good. Unfortunately, there was no mechanism in place to allow the voters to fine tune the plan. And Hitler had no intention of letting anyone fine tune anything. In this the comparison to the events in Egypt is not far off the mark. Someone put forward a plan in the midst of chaos. It was a plan that, as also in 1930’s Weimar Germany, tugged on certain of the nation’s religio-historical heartstrings in order to deliver power to one party, which itself never had any intention of either sharing power with anyone else ever or of being servants of the people.
In a sense, Egypt really dodged a bullet, considering Morsi won a significant majority of votes. Unfortunately, there are more bullets coming.
I quite agree. In fact, it would make a fine slogan for any of the evil dictators of the past (or present).
Possibly I'm reading something into your comments that you're not actually implying, but often when people say the Nazis got "only" 44% of the vote, they are trying to imply 56% were opposed to the Nazis, which is what it would mean in USA with our basically two-party system.
The Nazis got 44%, while their allies the German National People's Party, the actual conservatives (a very different conservatism from the American version) got 8%. So they had a majority right there.
The Socialists and the Commies got 31%, and they were the only two parties drastically opposed to the Nazis.
The remaining 12% was split up among smaller parties, the Bavarian Party of which was closer to the Nazis than to their real opponents, and the Centre Party (Catholics) of whom were willing to cut a deal. Or thought they were.
You may be entirely correct to say I'm picking a nit, but I think it is a legitimate nit. My point is that Hitler and the Nazis came to power via democratic means, and got a considerably larger mandate for "hope and change" than any other party or leader had ever gotten in the 7 (more or less) free elections held by the Weimar Republic.
Hitler's power was democratically legitimate. Once he got that power, he promptly dispensed with the democracy, but his rise to power was quite democratic.
Well, I don’t see that we have much to disagree about ... mostly just word choices. But, as a historical note, to be counted among the conservatives you say were allied to the Nazis (not quite) were many if not most of the people who later attempted to assassinate Hitler. Their attraction to the Nazis, if such it can be said to be, was chiefly based on their aversion to the communists rather than their affinity to the Nazis ... as time would show.
Quite true. However, it is also fair to point out that their "opposition" to Hitler didn't go beyond the grumbling stage until the Nazis weere clearly losing the war. IOW, they weren't opposed to the Nazis as much as to being invaded and occupied by commies.
Which is entirely understandable but doesn't make them paragons of morality either.
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