Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Will The Middle East Uprisings Lead To Democratic Governments?

According to Thomas Sowell, the answer is probably not. It does prick one's heart to see evil and tyrannical dictators being ousted by the people that they have been ruling. But as has been noted on this blog, the uprisings are not completely about a repressed people rising up demanding freedom. A major driving force behind these uprisings were "gut-level economics" and inflation that is in part the result of the recent actions know as QE 2 by the Federal Reserve. So what is likely to be the end result of these uprisings? Will it lead to free representative-democracies or the same repressive regimes? Sowell:

Those who see hope in the Middle East uprisings seem to assume that they will lead in the direction of freedom or democracy. There is already talk about the "liberation" of Egypt, even though the biggest change there has been that a one-man dictatorship has been replaced by a military dictatorship that has suspended the constitution.

Perhaps the military dictatorship will be temporary, as its leaders say, but we have heard that song before. What we have also heard, too many times before, is the assumption that getting rid of an undemocratic government means that it will be replaced by a freer and better government.

History says otherwise. After Russia's czars were replaced by the Communists, the government executed more people in a day than the czars had executed in half a century. It was much the same story in Cuba, when the Batista regime was replaced by Castro and in Iran when the Shah was replaced by the Ayatollahs.

It is not inevitable that bad regimes are replaced by worse regimes. But it has happened too often for us to blithely assume that overthrowing a dictator means a movement toward freedom and democracy.

The fact that Egyptians or others in the Middle East and elsewhere want freedom does not mean that they are ready for freedom. Everyone wants freedom for himself. Even the Nazis wanted to be free to be Nazis. They just didn't want anybody else to be free.

There is very little sign of tolerance in the Middle East, even among fellow Muslims with different political or religious views, and all too many signs of gross intolerance toward people who are not Muslims.

Freedom and democracy cannot be simply conferred on anyone. Both have preconditions, and even nations that are free and democratic today took centuries to get there. [[What are these preconditions? Basic fundamental philosophical beliefs held by the people of that nation.]]

If there was ever a time when people in Western democracies might be excused for thinking that Western institutions could simply be exported to other nations to create new free democracies, that time has long passed.

It is easy to export the outward symbols of democracy-- constitutions, elections, parliaments and the like-- but you cannot export the centuries of experience and development that made those institutions work. All too often, exported democratic institutions have meant "one man, one vote-- one time."

We should not assume that our own freedom and democratic form of government can be taken for granted. Those who created this country did not.

As the Constitution of the United States was being written, a lady asked Benjamin Franklin what he and the other writers were creating. He replied, "A republic, madam-- if you can keep it." Generations later, Abraham Lincoln also posed it as a question whether "government of the people, by the people and for the people" is one that "can long endure."

Just as there are nations who have not yet developed the preconditions for freedom and democracy, so there are some people within a nation who have not. The advance toward universal suffrage took place slowly and in stages.

Too many people, looking back today, see that as just being biased against some people.

But putting the fate of a nation in the hands of the illiterate masses of the past, many with no conception of the complexities of government, might have meant risking the same fate of "one man, one vote-- one time."

Today, we take universal literacy for granted. But literacy has not been universal, across all segments of the American population during all of the 20th century. Illiteracy was the norm in Albania as recently as the 1920s and in India in the second half of the 20th century.

Bare literacy is just one of the things needed to make democracy viable. Without a sense of responsible citizenship, voters can elect leaders who are not merely incompetent or corrupt, but even leaders with contempt for the Constitutional limitations on government power that preserve the people's freedom.

We already have such a leader in the White House-- and a succession of such leaders may demonstrate that the viability of freedom and democracy can by no means be taken for granted here.

If governments do emerge that are not friendly to America and the West, this could lead to higher oil prices and oil being used as a weapon by these new governments against their enemies. It seems that there is a lot going on under the surface and a lot of connections with other political groups here in America and around the world that are influencing these riots.

6 comments:

  1. It wouldn't surprise me if Obama could care less if an anti-America leader were elected in Libya or Egypt. It would go along with his anti-colonial theme.

    "We are not going to be in the business of picking leaders or dictating how that transition ought to evolve, so we will be, as we have throughout the region, supportive of the people's aspirations,"-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice said.(foxnews.com)

    Obama will support the aspirations of this 98% Islamic population's desires. Why should America enjoy cheap oil from a country that has been devastated by thousands of years of the West's exploitation?

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  2. I don't know why America would not start producing its own oil, especially now. This is a national and world security issue because if oil production is altered on a permanent basis then this would devestate the world's economy. The types of government that will come out of the Middle East uprisings appear to be taking the form of ones that don't like America. The mostly Muslim countries populations don't really like America and blame it and the West for their lack of civilization. Instead allowing oil to be produced, Obama is actually hampering efforts to drill for oil by not okaying any new drilling permits. I must be missing something when looking at the situation because if I think that Obama wants to purposefully see America downsized or wants economic instability so that he can fundamentally transform America then I am considered to be crazy or stupid or a nut job. But if I don't view the oil situation through this prism then it doesn't make sense. There must be some really good reason that people like me just can't understand as to why Obama would not allow America to utlitize its own natural resources and is actually preventing this. Maybe the average person just doesn't see the big picture or just doesn't get it.

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  3. A lot of people are just as perplexed as you. There are a lot of people that are still convinced that anything dealing with oil would be anti environmental, which is of course a flawed argument.

    I've come to think that the only real answer could be that we are stockpiling for the future. Buying cheap oil from our wasteful enemy might be an good investment in the future. The question is, when the middle east runs out of oil, assuming that they will, would our pansy governments feel bad and give it back like some philanthropy project? This wouldn't be out of the question considering todays norms.

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  4. I have heard that one of the ways that America is going to pay back its foreign debt is by selling American land and resources to those nations.

    I have also heard on an interview on CNBC with an author of a book about the coming collapse of the dollar that a lot of the debt that the world owes to each other will have to simply be written off. This will require nations to come together and form some new type of global agreement.

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  5. Yep, things could go either way and in the short term could quite possibly go the wrong way. But the people have seen the power they have, and I think also have the idea that the dictatorships are keeping them from thriving. It's clear that the Islamic theocratic government in Iran has serious opposition problems. They are just not afraid to shoot those of their people who disagree with them, unlike the Egyptians.

    But, I think long-term, this is good overall. If the theocrats take over and then flop economically (which they will) then the people will know they can overthrow them too.

    And of course: Drill Now, Drill Often. Screw Green Power, it accomplishes nothing and costs jobs. Pretend for a second you're interested in the economic wellbeing of the USA.

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  6. Bud-D on your point that the long term looks good for free governments emerging from these uprising, I don't think that this will be possible as Sowell notes, "There is very little sign of tolerance in the Middle East, even among fellow Muslims with different political or religious views, and all too many signs of gross intolerance toward people who are not Muslims."

    "Freedom and democracy cannot be simply conferred on anyone. Both have preconditions, and even nations that are free and democratic today took centuries to get there."

    This goes back to that Closing of The American Mind book. Freedom does just not pop up out of nowhere. There must be "preconditions". The Middle Eastern people don't have a solid philosophic foundation that is required for freedom. They actually have the exact opposite. Look at the character of the American founders and the average American citizen of that time: the Founding Fathers got their ideals from philosophers that orginiated those ideals long before them and the people had a certain philosophic foundation from which freedom could emerge.

    Also these uprisings are not completely about overthrowing a dictatorship. A lot of the reasons for the uprisings are being driven by "gut-level economics" or the increase in food prices and not those seeking freedom.

    I don't see anything good in the short term or the next couple emerging from these events. But hopefully this is a wrong conclusion.

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