Our Islamic democracy delusion as applied to Pakistan

In a hard-hitting article at National Review Online, Andrew McCarthy, virtually the only intellectual adult at that magazine, talks about how the U.S. government and media have constructed an image of Pakistan that is the exact opposite of the reality. The image is: Dictatorial military regime suppresses the Pakistani people’s desire for Western-style democracy. The reality is (I’ve edited McCarthy’s passage for clarity):

It is the regime that propounds Western values, such as its reform last year of oppressive, Sharia-based Hudood laws which made rape virtually impossible to prosecute. The regime enacted this reform despite furious fundamentalist rioting that was, shall we say, not well covered in the Western press. The regime, unreliable and at times infuriating, is our only friend. It is the only segment of Pakistani society capable of confronting militant Islam—though its vigor for doing so is too often sapped by its own share of jihadist sympathizers.

Yet we’ve spent two months pining about the regime’s suppression of democracy, rather than supporting its attempt to prevent the further empowerment of the millions who hate us.

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James P. writes:

McCarthy says this: “The transformation from Islamic society to true democracy is a long-term project.” So what exactly is a “true democracy”? If the Pakistani people would overwhelmingly elect Osama in any truly free election, as McCarthy contends, why would that not be an example of “true democracy”? Is it only a “true democracy” if they elect someone we like?

LA replies:

True. The problem of course is the very use of the word democracy. Democracy in itself simply means that the people rule, but it is used today to imply the much broader idea of liberal, constitutional, separation-of-powers, limited-government democracy. Or rather people today use it in both senses. Sometimes they just mean popularly elected government, as when the Bushbots cried in jubilation, as soon as Iraq held an election, that Iraq was now a “democracy”; sometimes they mean democracy in the more qualified sense of liberal constitutional democracy. I think McCarthy when he spoke of “true” democracy meant the more qualified sense. But it’s not practicable for people to add all those qualifications every time they write about democracy, so they just end up speaking of “democracy,” which leads to endless confusion.

The adoption of “democracy” as our ideal and our description of our own system has profoundly damaged our ability to discuss and understand political reality and act rationally in the field of politics. For example, in the case of Iraq, if Bush and his Bushbots had said clearly from the beginning that our aim was to establish in Iraq a liberal democracy, meaning a system in which all citizens’ rights are protected, then as soon as the Iraqis put the radically supremacist sharia law in their Constitution, the failure of our project would have been manifest and the game would have been up. But by dishonestly shifting back and forth between “democracy” as elections and “democracy” as liberal democracy, Bush and his bots have managed to avoid that clarity.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 28, 2007 12:28 PM | Send