Middle East “Democracy.” By Thomas Sowell. Real Clear Politics, April 2, 2013.
Sowell:
The
Obama administration treated the creation of “democracy” in the Middle East as
a Good Thing. Ironically, those who created the United States of America viewed
democracy with fear—and created a Constitutional republic instead.
Everything
depends on how you define democracy. In its most basic sense, democracy means
majority rule. But there can be majority rule in a free country or in a country
with an authoritarian or even a dictatorial government.
In this
age of sloppy uses of words, many people include freedom in their conception of
democracy. But whether democracy leads to freedom is an open question, not a
foregone conclusion.
In the
United States, when the Union army of occupation withdrew from the South, years
after the Civil War, majority rule returned to the Southern states—and the
freedom of blacks was drastically restricted from what it had been under
military rule.
Those
who applauded the spread of democracy in the Middle East seemed to assume that
the “Arab Spring” meant greater freedom. But there was no reason to assume that
beforehand—and certainly no reason to believe it after the fact. Christians in
Egypt have already lost whatever security they had under Hosni Mubarak.
The
idea that “all people want freedom” is one of those feel-good phrases that some
people indulge in. But you do not get a free country just because everybody
wants freedom—for themselves. You can have a free country only when people are
willing to let other people have freedom.
Nazis
were free to be Nazis under Hitler and Communists were free to be Communists
under Stalin and Mao. But nobody else was free.
Toleration
for others is a precondition for a free society—and it is hard to think of more
intolerant societies than most of those in the Middle East. There have been
female heads of state in some other Islamic countries, but not in the Middle
East.
Democracy
in the Middle East context means majority selection of which individuals get
the power to oppress. Why would anyone have seriously believed that it would
mean anything more than that? Certainly not from the history of the region.
Too
many people tend to think of democracy as a consumer good, so that high voter
turnout on election day makes them happy. But the purpose of an election is not
to make people feel good about participating. Its purpose is to select the best
leaders available, to whom the well-being, and ultimately the lives, of the
people can be entrusted. That is serious business.
Voting
is not an end in itself. Had there been universal access to the ballot in
Europe centuries ago, in an age of mass illiteracy, it is very unlikely that
this would have led to freedom, and far more likely that the continent would
have collapsed into confusion and anarchy—and been ripe to be enslaved by
conquerors with more realistic governments.
Restrictions
on who can vote have been based on assessments of who can best choose the
nation’s leaders. Those assessments have varied from country to country, and
from one era to another, and no doubt some restrictions make more sense than
others. But the fundamental point here is that elections have far more serious
purposes than participation.
Most
Western nations had freedom long before they had democracy. Women have been
voting in the United States less than a century. But, even before women could
vote in England or America, they had freedoms that women in many Middle Eastern
countries can only dream about today.
“Arab
Spring” democracy has certainly not increased women’s freedom, nor was there
ever any reason to expect that it would.
Why
then was Barack Obama so hyped over his “achievement” in having helped put new
rulers into power in the Middle East? First of all, this is a man with a
monumental ego, to whom every avenue to self-aggrandizement is welcomed,
whether it is ObamaCare or realigning the Middle East.
Either
or both may end in utter disaster for others, but that is hardly a deterrent to
Obama. What some see as a failure of his Middle East policy is a success in
carrying out his vision of a historic realignment. The lives that are lost and
the increased dangers of international turmoil are to him just “bumps in the
road” on the path to his place in history.
