When will they (the democratists) ever learn?

If there are any Bush supporters who actually spend time cerebrating about the president’s rhetoric and policies instead of merely celebrating them, what agonies of cognitive dissonance must they experience when reading a news story like the below:

The United States pressured Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to exclude Hamas from his Cabinet despite signs the militant group made a strong showing in a parliamentary election on Wednesday.

The United States, which encouraged Palestinians to hold the election and pressed Israel to allow the vote as part of its drive to promote democracy in the Middle East, said it will accept the results as a reflection of the will of the people.

But it also made clear Abbas should keep Hamas in opposition. The group is sworn to Israel’s destruction and is considered a terrorist organization by Washington.

“In terms of who is seated in the Palestinian legislative council, that will be based on these elections,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters. But the choice of a Cabinet and its policies is a matter for the Palestinian officials, he said.

Let’s repeat, just to make sure this sinks in. The U.S. government encouraged the Palestinians to have an election; it pressed Israel to allow the election; and (not mentioned here) it used its power over Israel to assure that Hamas be allowed full participation in the election. Yet this same U.S. government is also pushing the Palestinians not to allow Hamas a role in the government, even if Hamas wins the election.

A pro-American VFR reader who lives in Europe writes, “Wouldn’t this be undemocratic? If the Palestinian voters vote for Hamas, then it deserves to be in power. Isn’t that how democracy works?”

The contradiction which bemuses my reader is merely that of the modern American mind in action. Americans have no political concepts—they can conceive of no political good—other than “democracy,” and therefore they have no rational way of rejecting bad things that come about through democratic means. it wasn’t always like this. We could imagine, say, Theodore Roosevelt, or even Franklin Roosevelt, declaring, “We are heartened by the great trend in the modern world toward self-government. It will be a fine thing if the people of Beheadistan choose their own leaders through democratic elections. But democracy is not enough. If the government they choose is to be just and effective, if it is to have the support and friendship of the United States, it must be a good government, led by good men.”

Today’s Americans, even or especially the “conservatives,” more accurately described as right-liberals, lack the basic political understanding, even the simple common sense, to say something like that. The only language they speak is “Democratese,” which instantly turns them into hypocrites, because, as in their current difficulties with the Palestinians, they are forced into the embarrassment of suppressing the very democracy they’ve been so assiduously and arrogantly promoting. And even this embarrassment (which ought to be huge) fails to wake them up. It is as if their brain were divided into two separate lobes that are not in communication with each other. One brain lobe says, “Democracy—the solution to all problems, the reconciliation of all conflicts, the quieting of all violence, the salving of all pains, the God-ordained path for the whole human race.” The other brain lobe says, “A democratically elected Hamas—are you kidding? We don’t want that.” But today’s “conservatives,” or rather right-liberals (the left-liberals are irrelevant to this discussion, since they don’t care about any real problem in the real world in any case) never bother to bring these two parts of their brain together. Instead, they veer chaotically back and forth between them, lacking any awareness of the stunning contradiction in which they are mired.

Liberalism, as Jim Kalb said to me once, forces people to be irrational.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 25, 2006 07:29 PM | Send