The Godly are always there in the wings
Howard Jacobson is cautious about revolutionary elation.
Let’s not get too carried away by the secular nature of the revolutionary zeal engulfing the Middle East right now: the Godly are always there in the wings, waiting for the hour in which they can claim the victory as theirs and restore tyranny, only in their image. Maybe it won’t happen this time – I doubt it, listening to protesters saying they don’t mind what comes next, so long as the process is democratic, as though a democratically elected theocracy is somehow better than any other kind.
Really. I do wish people would get that straight.
Much has been made over the last weeks of the youthful passion of the demonstrators, tweeting for liberty. Here, two of the most terrible illusions of our time are yoked together. To the fallacy that the opinions of the young are worth attending to because they are not the opinions of the old is joined the fallacy that the the internet, because it is ungovernable, is bound to be a positive instrument for good.
Or to put it another way, theocrats also know how to tweet.
Sometimes I do wonder what is being taught in history classes today. So many people seem to think that democracy is some kind of miracle potion, but the checks and balances are at least as important as the right to vote.
Democracy is one means to the end of good government. Sometimes it’s not even a very effective one.
Of course democratically elected dictatorships are superior to all others. It allows us to say ‘well… that’s what they wanted’ and ignore whatever despicable policies are being forced upon a largely helpless populace. Damn it we need an excuse to do nothing and feel superior and those don’t just grow on trees.
If you look at Libya, when I see the pictures of auto corsos packed with confused rebels hiding in some field after they were hit by artillery fire, I have to wonder whether those guys wouldn’t just be happy for some strong figure to stand up, after Ghaddafi is disposed, and say ” So this is what we are going to do now”. And somehow I don’t see that being a secularist.
Hitler was democratically elected wasn’t he?
(Sorry for Godwining the thread)
Trivia time: Hitler billed his election campaign “Hitler über Deutschland”, ostensibly because he used an airplane in his electioneering. By the time anyone noticed the double entendre, it was far, far too late. The guy had nerve.
It’s safe to say “secular” doesn’t mean quite the same thing for the Middle East as it does for us in the west. Here “secular” means “not religious; separate from religion; without reference to religion.” There it seems to mean something more like “not militantly religious,” or “religious, but wears a suit and tie rather than religious garb.” E.g., Saddam Hussein—who had the Koran written in his own blood, and who added the words “Allahu Akbar” to the Iraqi flag—is regarded as a “secular” dictator. If a western head-of-state did those things, I don’t think the word “secular” would be affixed to her name.
No Brian, if memory serves me right the NS vote was down from 34% to 32%. Hitler just sat back and waited for the accommodationist to hand over power which they did.
The ambition of those currently hanging back in the shadows remains “one man, one vote, once” I’m afraid. For a current example, does anybody seriously think that Hamas are ever going to allow another election worthy of the name in the Gaza strip.
I read something a year or two ago, unfortunately can’t remember by whom, that when we talk about “democratic accountability” the key word is “accountability” not “democratic”. The important thing is that a ruling class is accountable to the populace, and whether they came to rule via democratic elections, military power or economic power is of much lesser importance. Of course, you can argue that some of those are more likely to act in a way which can be held accountable.
And, as any fule kno “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.
It is very hard to imagine how one would hold a government to account through means that are not democratic, unless one is genuinely prepared to see the risk of getting shot by the security forces as part and parcel of a well-ordered society, and accepts the notion that force is a good way to resolve disputes about policy.
There are democratic means that are not confined to the election of national parliaments, of course, right down to good old-fashioned ideas like workers’ councils – but they’re still democratic, because if they’re not, sooner or later they’re tyrannical.
The fact that democracy can be, and is, abused doesn’t mean that you can have a fair, open, tolerant rule of law in a rights-based polity without it – it just shows how hard it is to have those things, full stop.
Democracy is almost universally misunderstood as the rule of the majority, but it’s not. Modern democracy, since the Enlightenment, is constitutional rule based on a fundamentally scientific principle. We elect people to try to govern, and if they don’t do it right, there are means of getting rid of that lot and replacing them with another. Without provision for that peaceful transition to new government, the result is merely a technique for chosing tyrants. If you read Plato, you will see that democracy, for Plato, was only a step on the way to tyranny, and he was right. In the absence of constitutional arrangements for transitions of power, “democracy” (that is, the election of rulers by majority) is simply a way of choosing dictators. In Wednesday’s NYT Nicholas Kristof said that democracy is messy,” and that we shouldn’t worry too much about what is to come in Egypt. But this is silly. Sure, democracies are messy, but if there is no way of assuring peaceful transitions of power, so that the experimental principle is adhered to, there is no democracy, just electoral transitions.
I think the point the guy was making was that in many places there is “electocracy” rather than democracy in any meaningful sense, i.e. you get to vote once every 5 years for a choice of exploitative scumbags, then the winners declare “now its our turn to eat” and you get ignored for another 5 years. The key is the ability to hold the ruling class *as a whole* to account.
Of course, anarcho-capitalists would argue that it is entirely possible to hold the rulers to account without democracy, and that doing so economically rather then politically would work better.
I am reminded that, because it has a parliament, Pakistan is supposed to be a democracy. I rather think that is the model that may prevail in the middle east prior to the establishment of islamic autocracy on the Iranian model. I see no reason to be optimistic that these ‘revolutions’ will be different from any others where the revolutionaries are pushed aside or liquidated by those better organized people who emerge from behind the curtain after the dangerous work is done.
As for Hitler, he did not have an electoral majority but von Papen and Hindenburg appointed him Reichskantzler of a Nazi/Nationalist coalition because they thought they could control him on behalf of the landed and industrialist class. They turned out to be very wrong about that. Von Papen became more of a Hitler puppet, being assigned to various posts to carry out nefarious plots and plans (including facilitating Anschluss) to further Hitler’s ambitions.
Interestingly, as the catholic church often seeks to downplay its nazi connections and responsibilities for history, this snippet from Wikipedia (I have no doubt this is true):
@Eric: You are so right. That was the whole point about how Hitler came to power. Two elections in 1932 neither of which gave him a majority. His appointment as Kantzler, not by election but by behind-the-scenes machinations, came in 1933. After that there were no more elections in Germany until after WW2. Something along these lines could easily happen in Egypt, for instance, where the only really organized groups are the army and the muslim brotherhood.