Democracy Is Not the Answer

To understand how we got to the point that spending hundreds of millions of dollars to support a government run by people who have been at war with us for almost a century is a policy that most foreign policy experts endorse, it helps to take a brief trip back in time.

In the last century, our big three wars, the two we fought and the one we didn’t, were against enemies who were seen as being distinguished by a lack of democracy, with the Kaiser, the Fuhrer and the Commissar embodying the antithesis of the American system.

The Democratic Party, which stood at the helm during both hot wars, was able to link its brand to the wars by defining them as struggles for democracy. The process of de-nationalizing war from a conflict between nations and ethnic groups was only partly realized in WW1, but was largely achieved in WW2, and made post-war reconstruction and alliance easier. National and ethnic grudges were replaced by ideological platforms. If the trouble was a lack of democracy, then all we needed to do was defeat the tyrant’s armies, inject democracy and stand back.

Democracy also made it easier to turn liberals against the Soviet Union. The liberals who had believed in a war for democracy in Europe had difficulty tossing it aside after the war was over. And that emphasis on democracy helped make a national defense coalition between conservatives and liberals possible.

This strategy was effective enough against existing totalitarian systems, but suffered from a major weakness because it could not account for a totalitarian ideology taking power through the ballot box.

The assumption that because the Nazis and the Communists rejected open elections that they could not win open elections was wrong. Democracy of that kind is populism and totalitarian movements can be quite popular. The Nazis did fairly well in the 1932 elections and the radical left gobbled up much of the Russian First Duma. The modern Russian Communist Party is the second largest party in the Duma today.

Democratic elections do not necessarily lead to democratic outcomes, but the linkage of democracy to progress made that hard to see. The assumption that democracy is progressive and leads to more progress had been adopted even by many conservatives. That fixed notion of history led to total disaster in the Arab Spring.

Cold War America knew better than to endorse universal democracy. Open elections everywhere would have given the Soviet Union more allies than the United States. The left attacked Eisenhower and Kennedy as hypocrites, but both men were correct in understanding that there was no virtue in overthrowing an authoritarian government only to replace it with an even more authoritarian government; whether through violence or the ballot box.

As time went on, Americans were assailed with two interrelated arguments. The left warned that the denial of democracy was fueling Third World rage against the United States. And on the right we heard that tyranny was warping Third World societies into malignant forms. The left’s version of the argument directed more blame at America, but both versions of the argument treated democracy as a cure for hostility.

The argument that democracy had made the Muslim world dysfunctional was always chancy. The best counterargument to it was that second and third-generation Muslims in Europe were often more radical than their immigrant parents. If democracy were a cure for Islamism, it was working very poorly in London, Oslo and Paris.

The assumption of the argument was that the tyranny that a people were living under was unnatural while the outcome of a democratic election would be natural. And yet, if a people have been warped for a thousand years by not living under a democracy, how could they be expected to choose a form of government that would not be warped? Was there any reason to expect that such efforts at democracy would not lead to tyranny?

The Arab Spring has taught us to question the idea that democracy is an absolute good. Initially the outcome of the Palestinian Arab elections that rewarded Hamas was thought not to apply to the wider region. That assumption proved to be wrong. We now know that Hamas’ victory foreshadowed the Muslim Brotherhood’s victory. And we know that Islamists have the inside track in elections because they represent a familiar ideology that has not been discredited in the minds of a majority of Muslims.

We can no longer afford to be bound by a Cold War argument against Communism that has outlived its usefulness, especially once liberals turned left and defected from a national security consensus. Universal democracy has proven to be about as universal a panacea as international law or the United Nations.

Classifying ideologies as democratic or undemocratic has blinded us to their content and gives our enemies an easy way to take power while leaving the champions of democracy voiceless. Too many Republicans were flailing after the Muslim Brotherhood’s victory in Egypt; unable to articulate a reason why the United States should not support a democratically elected government.

Democracy was once viewed, rightly or wrongly, as a form of American Exceptionalism. But reducing that exceptionalism to open elections misses the point. It isn’t open elections that make Americans special; it’s Americans who make open elections special. Instead of looking to systems, we should look to values. Instead of looking to governments, we should look to peoples.

The assumption that exporting democracy also exports our values is clearly wrong. It isn’t democracy that makes free people; it’s individual responsibility. Democracy with individual responsibility makes for a free nation. Democracy without individual responsibility is only another name for tyranny.

We have spent too much time looking at systems, when we should have been looking at values. We have wrongly assumed that all religions and all peoples share the same basic values that democracy can unleash for the betterment of all. That has clearly been proven to be wrong.

If we had looked instead at a poll which showed that 4 out of 5 Egyptians believe that adulterers should be stoned and thieves should have their hands cut off, we would have known how this democracy experiment was going to end and how much damage it would do to our national interests.

It’s time to stop putting our faith in democracy. Democracy for all is not the answer. Responsibility for all is. Our responsibility is not to agnostically empower other people to make the choices that will destroy our way of life, but to make those choices that will keep our way of life alive.

> "A Republic, if you can keep it" --Benjamin Franklin

A minor point, but Franklin was distinguishing it from a monarchy, not a democracy. [Original lack of punctuation retained] "A lady asked Dr. Franklin Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy. A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it." [From the notes of Dr. James McHenry, delegate to the Convention]

> If we want to be precise we would call that what we have which is a Constitutional Republic formed specifically to temper democracy in favor of individual liberty.

I agree, and I’m in favor of that (but it’s tempering the representative democracy that’s present in the government itself).

I don’t think it’s a good idea for the right to let the left have exclusive possession of the word ‘democracy’ (which I’m sure has favorable connotations for most Americans). I prefer to use such terms as ‘tyranny of the majority’ for the oppressive intrusion of the majority into the affairs of the individual, and to use ‘representative democracy with protections for individual rights’ as a good term.

I have no problem with the term ‘Constitutional Republic’ either because that’s the form it takes, but if people on the right start out by saying they’re against democracy, in the eyes of most persons they already have two strikes against them. Then they have to talk their way out of that hole. It’s easier just to say I support democracy, but a democracy with provisions to protect the rights of the individual (a Constitutional republic with a bill of rights). Without those rights, a democracy can become a tyranny of the majority. People can easily understand that.

but in my opinion it doesn’t have to be to qualify as a kind of democracy.
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Democracy in theory isnt negative or intentionally and ultimately oppressive. It is in practice. Individual rights are enumerated in the Constitution of course as already mentioned. And still a Constitutional Republic is distinct from a Democracy, even as they share some commonality in political process and representative govt. Rule of law checks Democracy and administrates governance via the spectacular framework of Federalism, so it is a distinct form. Nice chat, but tapping on this tablet is unwieldy...

>Democracy is the road to socialism— Karl Marx

That line has not been found in any published work by Marx. Marx opposed “liberal democracy” (that is, the conservative limited-government democracy of the time). Later Communist regimes were dictatorships of a small elite, and merely used the term “’democracy” as a cloak to cover what was really going on (also “People’s Republic” — there’s that word ‘republic’ again :-).

Both ‘republic’ and ‘democracy’ are used loosely by different groups to mean all kinds of things. Only the specifics determine what’s really meant.

The main take-away is that democracy as a pure value can be quite destructive if exported without all the trimmings and qualifications our system placed upon it.

In fact, our Founders correctly recognized that unbridled democracy would destroy our republic. And to the extent that the low-information voters have as much say in elections as conscientious, taxpaying citizens with a stake in ownership of our land and responsibility for the maintenance of what they own, it’s undeniably true.

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