Jerry Bowyer: Democracy, The God That Failed
[Mr. Bowyer is the author of "The Free Market Capitalists Survival Guide," published by HarperCollins, and a columnist for Forbes.com.]
Recently I was a guest on Neil Cavuto’s show on the Fox Business Channel. Before I spoke, Neil’s guest was Congressman Gary Ackerman from New York. The Democratic congressman waxed eloquent about our need to support the goals of the Egyptian protesters and to urge Mubarak’s ouster as quickly as possible. Cavuto asked the giddy congressman how he knew that these protesters were genuinely representative of democratic values, at which point Ackerman blurted out that it was just obvious, that all one had to do was to look at the crowds and look at the enthusiasm on the Internet.
Well, it wasn’t obvious to me, nor apparently to Cavuto. It clearly wasn’t obvious to the Israelis who simultaneously share our values and a long border with Egypt and whose media did not suppress images of anti-Semitic hate speech among demonstrators. I feel quite sure that it wasn’t obvious to Western reporters beaten by the mobs, or the one who is reported to have been sexually assaulted and beaten by a crowd of 200 militants chanting “Jew, Jew, Jew.”...
A monarchy, or even a dictatorship, still depends on the consent of the governed. The people can, and often have, refused to submit to an autocrat who strays too far from the zone of the people’s consent. Coups, civil wars, mass exoduses, disintegrations, and anarchies are just some of the tools that the people have used to withdraw consent from regimes to which they no longer can offer loyalty. Democracy doesn’t create a situation in which consent can be withdrawn–it simply institutionalizes the transition, creating a situation in which consent can be withdrawn without the bloodshed associated with regime change in non-democratic orders. In other words, the ballot is cheaper than the bullet.
This is why revolutions so seldom make things any better; they change governments but don’t change people. A revolution exchanges one group of rulers for another, without exchanging one group of rules for another. History is strewn with the corpses of stillborn liberal democracies starting with France in 1789, which attempted to imitate the United States experiment in self-government without supplying the spiritual, cultural and legal foundation that ensured its success....
Read entire article at Forbes.com
Recently I was a guest on Neil Cavuto’s show on the Fox Business Channel. Before I spoke, Neil’s guest was Congressman Gary Ackerman from New York. The Democratic congressman waxed eloquent about our need to support the goals of the Egyptian protesters and to urge Mubarak’s ouster as quickly as possible. Cavuto asked the giddy congressman how he knew that these protesters were genuinely representative of democratic values, at which point Ackerman blurted out that it was just obvious, that all one had to do was to look at the crowds and look at the enthusiasm on the Internet.
Well, it wasn’t obvious to me, nor apparently to Cavuto. It clearly wasn’t obvious to the Israelis who simultaneously share our values and a long border with Egypt and whose media did not suppress images of anti-Semitic hate speech among demonstrators. I feel quite sure that it wasn’t obvious to Western reporters beaten by the mobs, or the one who is reported to have been sexually assaulted and beaten by a crowd of 200 militants chanting “Jew, Jew, Jew.”...
A monarchy, or even a dictatorship, still depends on the consent of the governed. The people can, and often have, refused to submit to an autocrat who strays too far from the zone of the people’s consent. Coups, civil wars, mass exoduses, disintegrations, and anarchies are just some of the tools that the people have used to withdraw consent from regimes to which they no longer can offer loyalty. Democracy doesn’t create a situation in which consent can be withdrawn–it simply institutionalizes the transition, creating a situation in which consent can be withdrawn without the bloodshed associated with regime change in non-democratic orders. In other words, the ballot is cheaper than the bullet.
This is why revolutions so seldom make things any better; they change governments but don’t change people. A revolution exchanges one group of rulers for another, without exchanging one group of rules for another. History is strewn with the corpses of stillborn liberal democracies starting with France in 1789, which attempted to imitate the United States experiment in self-government without supplying the spiritual, cultural and legal foundation that ensured its success....