More democrats empowered by U.S. promotion of democracy!

The charming fellows of Hamas now speak our lingo about democracy and claim their own political legitimacy on its basis. But does this mean that they are adapting to our values, or that we are adapting to theirs? Reuters reports:

Hamas swept recent municipal polls in West Bank cities and made a strong showing in three earlier rounds of local voting.

“We have come here to tell the American administration and U.S. President George W. Bush and all those who listed Hamas as a terror organisation that Hamas has become the choice of the entire people,” said Hamas spokesman Mushir al-Masri.

Al-Masri is implying that there is a contradiction between seeing Hamas as a terror organization and seeing it as the choice of an entire people. Of course, there is no contradiction. Democracy qua democracy simply means that the people elect their government. It doesn’t say anything about what kind of government they elect. It could be a federal republic with separation of powers, checks and balances, and strict limits on the power of the government over individuals and communities; or it could be a Shi’ite government enforcing Islamic law and denying rights to women and non-Muslims; or it could even be a terrorist regime. As long as the government is elected by a majority of all the people, it’s a democracy. Somehow President Bush and all those great brains who have advising him and promoting him for the last five years did not understand this elementary fact of politics, which every normal 12-year-old in this country used to understand.

Prior to the last 40 years or so, we Americans did not commonly describe our system of government as simply a “democracy,” but used more nuanced phrases conveying the mixed nature of our federal, constitutional, republican, democratic, and liberal system. That such a mixed as distinct from a simple system of government is an indispensable basis of liberty was part of the basic understanding of every American who was not a leftist. That we now think of our system as simply a “democracy,” and have reduced all our notions of political good to “democracy,” has rendered us incapable of talking sensibly about different forms of government, and particularly about the different forms of government that may be suitable for different kinds of societies, e.g., for an individualist, Western, Anglo-Protestant society versus a tribal, Muslim, Shi’ite society.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 26, 2005 11:30 AM | Send