Democracy’s Perils and the State of the World as of now
I don’t believe in Democracy, which is to say that the word is an abstraction whose pure essence does not exist in real life with competing components in it that collapse on themselves. Approach one ideal, and another ideal recedes over the horizon.
The term “tyranny of the majority” comes to mind, by way of explaining why it is that an election does not a democracy make. I hear that Hitler was duly elected, occasionally the proper qualification is put in place — no, no he was basically appointed, more frequently not. The deal here is that the will of the majority is all good and well so long as it doesn’t mean the minority are shoved into ovens. A sense of pluralism must fall into the picture somewhere.
For the purpose of dissolving this scape-goat tendency away (Homosexuals aren’t having much of a good time in Iraq these days), I hear that democracy requires a genuine middle class, or perhaps the idea that the vibrancy of a nation ought be defined by that standard as opposed to the the ruling class. A pop quiz: what do you think of when you think of Ancient Egypt? What do you think of when you think of America in, say, the 1950s? King Tut and Hula hoops respectively, or some iteration of those themes that brings out the consumerist bias in us all.
The whiff of aristocracy, or King Tut, comes through in the United States’s system of government with the in some corner’s famous Alan Greenspan quote that he felt it was his responsibility to maintain a degree of worker insecurity. Other examples exist, and I may well need to pull together a blog burst of some sort.
Move to Hugo Chavez, champion of the poor, for the flip-side in the stumbling to a coherent democracy. John Dean wrote a book recently that claims Authoritarianism is the province of right-wing politics’ adherents, aptly assigning, say, lingering yearnings for communism in Russia to the right by way of “tradition” — the same will probably be true in a hypothetical post-Castro Cuba, if it can get past the USA stamping it into a neo-liberal mold of basically giving Cuba back to United Fruit. Hugo Chavez is something of a classic populist model of a leader in a third-world nation (whither that middle class?) — he reminds me, and apparently Greg Palast who’se a bit more sympathetic to both figures here– of Huey Long. More importantly, he’s example A of John Dean’s left-wing authoritarian figure — what else would he be?
Muslims, I’ve heard whimpered about as well as cynically disputed by the Bush Administration, cannot hold a democracy — it is against their religion. Truth be told, democracy is at root against every religion, and why you don’t want religious clerics (elected or otherwise) running your nation. Put Pat Robertson in charge of this nation and see what happens. Pluralism dissipates on contact.
Lebanon is a democracy. Or so I hear. Bush says it is, and claimed it as one of the triumphs of his Doctrine of War. Hezbollah, I guess, has acted in the political process of Lebanon as, say, Tammany Hall did in New York: at bottom and at its most benevelont, a social service network for the needy — beyond that, something else. Not a precise or even useful analogy beyond the narrowest precepts, but what are you going to do? I mentioned Hezbollah on this blog in 2004, by way of correcting Patty Murray’s 2002 statements which showed up predictably in her opponent’s campaign to unseat her. (Patty Murray has a Different View of Osama Bin Laden)
Israel, I hear, is a nation we need to throw 1,000 or 10,000 percent support behind, whatever they choose to do, because it is, I hear, the only democracy in the middle east. Except for Lebanon. And Turkey (which I think is more Muslim than Lebanon). I sense also that it is about to become chic to throw American support around the Kurds, and their desire to form what’d be a more democractic than their Sunni and Shiite counterparts in Iraq — Kurdistan. That would bring about some strife with Turkey — not a war, mind you, because, as I heard, it is impossible for Democracies to go to war against each other.
Land back to Lebanon and Israel and I guess you get around that rule by that rule with “They’re fighting Hezbollah — a Country within a Country!” Or rather, Israel is turning the nation toward supporting Hezbollah, thus subverting that original theme of the perils of Democracy and that country within a country more fully merges with the country proper, and thus Lebanon is no longer a democracy, so that steadfast rule of Democracies never ever fighting each other (in neoliberal parlence by way of Tom Friedman — conflates the two — two nations with McDonalds have never gone to war with each other — by now a rule long gone) is safely averted.