Jophiel wrote:
Obama single-handedly sparked a wave of pro-democracy movements throughout the Middle East and North Africa?
Jokes aside, one of the things that does bother me about the coverage of all the unrest going on in the ME is how the media constantly labels the various protests and revolts as "democracy in action". Um... It's not. Popular uprisings have been happening for pretty much the entirety of human civic history, and very very very very rarely do they ever have anything to do with democracy, much less result in a democratic form of government. Yet the democracy label is tossed around anyway.
The easiest thing to do in politics is to get people to join you in opposition to something they all don't like. The hardest thing to do in politics is to get people to join you in support of something they all do like. That's why negative politics tends to work. You can usually get many times more people to agree that they don't like something about your opponent than you can get to agree that they do like about you. Everyone does this to some degree in politics, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't still ask the question "what replaces the thing we all agree we don't like?".
In the real world, we don't ever make just the decision *not* to do something. We really choose to do something else. We should look to see if those opposing something are presenting an alternative that is "better". Because when we don't, there will be an alternative, but we wont know what it is until it arrives, and most often it wont be something we would have chosen if we'd been presented with it in the first place.
Having said all that, I would love for these protests to lead to actual democratic systems being put in place. And unlike some Conservative pundits, I don't have a problem if those systems include groups like Hamas, Hezbolla, the Muslim Brotherhood, etc for the same reasons I mentioned above. It's easy to gain power by always and only focusing people's anger at other targets. It's easy for someone standing on the sidelines to get people to join them railing against "the man". But when they have to step up and take some of the responsibility, it wont be so easy. The only way people can break free of the grip of those groups is to see what they'd do if they had power. Painful? Almost certainly. But until the people living in those areas see what their true options are, they'll never reject the more radical ideas that sound great from a guy standing on a street corner, but don't work out so well when they come from the guy who's failing to provide food, shelter, and clean drinking water to the people.
Um. But that's exactly why such popular revolts so often lead to even more oppressive regimes than the ones they overthrew. The new leaders wont want to be judged like the old, so they clamp down more on anyone who might oppose them as they opposed the last guy. And since they know how that works, they're often far better at preventing any opposition.
We'll see what happens though. I just wouldn't automatically assume that real democracy will result from any of this.
