With a Pocketful of Democracy
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
The age of the encyclopedia salesman and the
vacuum cleaner salesman peddling heavy bundles of
books and snakelike cables door to door is done. But
the age of the democracy salesman has taken its
place.
No longer do bright young lads tote along
everything there is to know about the letter E in
one omnibus volume or demonstrate how the latest
Suck-O-Zoom can get stains out of any carpet as an
introduction to the wonders of free enterprise.
Instead, if they haven't been sidetracked by the
siren lure of the dot com or the minimum wage job,
they, like the late Christopher Stevens, jet off to
foreign climes with FDR's Four Freedoms under one
arm and a local dictionary under the other to
convince the natives that their lives will be freer,
brighter and shinier with the Demo-O-Vote as the
arbiter of their holy wars.
Like a lot of salesmen, the democracy salesman has
never really stopped to wonder why any of his
prospective customers should want to buy democracy
for only twelve easy payments of bloody civil war?
Born in a society where democracy has been idolized
for the last century, where cleanliness and
godliness may have gone by the wayside, but
democracy is still one of those faded old virtues
that the arbiters of the Living Constitution haven't
taken out back and put a bullet in its head in
between elections and commercial breaks, they have
never thought to consider that anyone might not want
their democracy.
In an amoral society, democracy is one of the few
things left to us by dead white men that is held to
be a virtue, rather than a vice. It goes
unquestioned because to most people it represents
the power of the common man over his rulers, even if
the common man no more rules his rulers than he did
some two-hundred years ago. But democracy for the
grandfathers of the salesmen goes deeper than fact.
It represents a classless society where one man is
as good as another and there are no lords or kings.
This however is not the effect of American
democracy, it is rather the cause of American
democracy, particularly in its Jacksonian flavor.
And that old Scots-Irish flavor can be served
locally, but it can't be exported. The ballot box is
not a society of rugged individualists, it is not a
classless society where no one bends a knee before
lords or the ascension of the common man. Those are
features you can see in the showroom, but they don't
come with the device.
In our democracy salesmanship we never really
troubled to ask ourselves why the Muslim world would
want democracy and what it would do with it. Saddam
Hussein bought 4000 Playstation game consoles, not
because he was trying to train suicide bombers on
copies of Sonic the Hedgehog, but because some of
its components could be used in weapons. Those
Muslim groups most interested in democracy were
looking to weaponize it as well.
To the Muslim world, democracy did not mean
individualism, it meant majority rule. Our democracy
salesmen conceived of the Muslim world divided
between the rule of its dictators and the will of
its people.
The innate assumption in that use of "the people" as
applied to people of different religious and ethnic
backgrounds is very American. When used by the left,
"the People" carries it with the ominous resonance
of a collectivization that transcends all individual
attributes. But when used by that old fashioned
creature, the pre-post-America 'American' it throbs
with the assumption that the people of a free
society will unite around their freedoms, rather
than around their identities. That assumption may be
outdated, but it is still what we expected Iraqis
and Egyptians to do. And our salesmen never really
got around to asking what being a people meant to
Iraqis and Egyptians, rather than Americans.
The Muslim world is not divided between the
dictators and, that construct, the people. It is
divided between the possible dictators that
different groups within it champion.
There is no conflict between Assad and the Syrian
People, because there is no Syrian people. There are
Neo-Shiite Alawites and Sunni Salafists battling it
out in the ruins of major cities, over the bodies of
Christians, to decide who will rule Syria. The Sunni
Muslim Brotherhood might win an election, but that
election would not elevate it as the choice of the
people, but as the choice of a sectarian coalition
whose religious affiliates happen to be in the
majority. Peoplehood is an illusion in places where
there are too many peoples, too many guns and the
government is the way that one group forces its will
on another.
Democracy, under such circumstances, is a way for
the majority to assert its identity as the defining
national identity. And once that's done, future
elections become optional. Egypt's election was no
more about the ascension of the common man or
individual freedom than Saddam Hussein was busy
playing with his Playstation in the hole while
waiting for the Americans to come and get him. Like
the American elections of 2012, it was about
entitled groups elevating a totemic figure on a pole
that represented their identity. And when group
identity is asserted as national identity, then
elections come down to demographic contests where
group power, not ideas or policies, is the true
prize.
Group votes don't lead to human rights, they lead to
group privileges. They lead to rights for some and
no rights for others. They lead to a group state
where group membership is citizenship and lack of
group membership is treason. And that is exactly
what the Arab Spring has given us;an Egypt where
religion defines citizenship and a Syria where
religion determines who you'll be shooting at. This
is Muslim democracy and it's a foolproof recipe for
civil war and tyranny, in any order.
Dictatorship is democracy and democracy is
dictatorship. Elections don't lead to a marketplace
of ideas and smooth transitions, but to populist
power grabs that eventually end in new revolutions.
When no one group emerges as the winner, then there
is a transitional period of chaos that some
mistakenly assume are the birth pangs of democracy,
but actually act as the prelude to the rise of a new
tyranny. Where the population is do divided and the
military is so inept that no such tyranny is
possible; you end up with Lebanon. Perpetual civil
war.
There might be a way out of this conundrum, but
parachuting elections into the region is not the
answer. Nor is getting rid of the dictators only to
replace them with new dictators. And really why
should we expect Egyptians or Iraqis to be able to
do what millions of our own citizens cannot? When
our country is ruled by a man who commands
demographic bloc votes, then who are we to tell
Egyptian Muslims not to act like them?
And that raises the final question. Who are we
really selling democracy to and why? The Arab Spring
stampeded otherwise sensible people into believing
that they had to buy into an inevitable trend or be
left behind. But there was no inevitable trend. Not
even Islamism is truly inevitable. The inevitable
progress of history is a progressive myth. History
is not the inevitable outcome of a philosophy, but
the accumulated interpretations of past events.
History did not arrive in the Arab Spring, it was
manufactured, shipped and uncrated in Tahrir Square
by legions of hardworking activists and reporters.
And the history isn't going where they expected it
to. And it won't even go where the Islamists expect
it to. Because there are two kinds of democracy. One
is the tame democracy of the ballot box where people
vote in a fixed pattern. And then there is the wild
democracy of crowds, of the chaotic interactions
between popular needs and patterns of power. The
overgrown territories of that wild democracy is
where inevitable history goes off to die.
We were told that the end of the era of dictators
had arrived. And here is Morsi squatting on a brand
new throne while the mobs cry for his head in Tahrir
Square. The inevitable history has become caught in
its own circularity in a region where events have a
way of repeating themselves, even more so than they
do on the outside. The era of dictators has neither
begun nor ended. It merely goes on existing for as
long as people go on crying for freedom when they
really mean power.
The United States sought to end the cycle of
violence by replacing dictators with elections, but
it was a doomed course of action considering how
close the United States has been drifting to
electing dictators. American politics has had its
ups and downs, but it has been relentlessly
polarized for the last twenty years with no end in
sight.
All the efforts invested into promoting democracy
abroad might have been better employed by working
safeguard the character of a nation that is capable
of choosing its representatives through elections,
rather than using those same elections to ratify its
tyrants. Egypt will be Egypt and Iraq will be Iraq.
It is up to their people to find a way out of their
cycle of violence and tyranny. Our task is to make
certain that America remains America and that we do
not find ourselves in the same cycle as the
protesters challenging tyranny in Tahrir Square.