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THE CONSERVATIVE REVIEW - March 15, 2011
After the Revolution
by: Pat Buchanan
Townhall.com
"Democracy... arises out of the notion that those who are
equal in any respect are equal in all respects," said
Aristotle.
But if the Philosopher disliked the form of government
that arose out of the fallacy of human equality, the
Founding Fathers detested it.
"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule," said Thomas
Jefferson, "where 51 percent of the people may take away
the rights of the other 49." James Madison agreed,
"Democracy is the most vile form of government." Their
Federalist rivals concurred.
"Democracy," said John Adams, "never lasts long. It soon
wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There is never a
democracy that did not commit suicide."
"You people, sir, is a great beast," Alexander Hamilton
is said to have remarked. If he did not, it was not far
from his view.
Said John Winthrop, the Pilgrim father whose vision of a
"city on a hall" so inspired Ronald Reagan, "A democracy
is... accounted the meanest and worst form of government."
But did not the fathers create modernity's first democracy?
No. They created "a republic, if you can keep it," as Ben
Franklin said, when asked in Philadelphia what kind of
government they had given us. A constitutional republic,
to protect and defend God-given rights that antedated the
establishment of that government.
We used to know that. Growing up, we daily pledged allegi-
ance "to the flag of the United States of America and to
the Republic for which it stands," not some democracy. As
Walter Williams writes, Julia Ward Howe did not write the
"Battle Hymn of the Democracy."
Today, we are taught to worship what our fathers abhorred
to such an extent that politicians and ideologues believe
America was put on Earth to advance a worldwide revolution
to ensure that all nations are democratic.
Only then, said George W. Bush, can America be secure.
The National Endowment for Democracy was established for
this quintessentially neoconservative end and meddles end-
lessly in the internal affairs of nations in a fashion
Americans would never tolerate.
The democratists are now celebrating the revolutions across
the Islamic world in the same spirit, if in less exalted
language, as William Wordsworth celebrated the French
Revolution, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to
be young was very heaven!"
After 1789 ushered in Robespierre and Saint-Just, the
Terror, the dictatorship and the Napoleonic wars,
enthusiasm cooled. But with the Lenin-Trotsky revolution
of 1917, Mao's revolution of 1949, and Castro's revolution
of 1959, the exhilaration returned, only to see the bright
hopes dashed again in blood and terror.
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Last month, the Egyptian revolution enraptured us, with
"pro-democracy" demonstrators effecting, through the
agency of the Egyptian army, the overthrow of President
Hosni Mubarak, a friend and ally for three decades.
In the exhilaration of their democratic triumph, some of
the boys in Tahrir Square celebrated with serial sexual
assaults on American journalist Lara Logan. A week after
the triumph, returned Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi addressed
a crowd estimated at 1 million in Tahrir Square.
In January 2009, Qaradawi had declared that "throughout
history, Allah has imposed upon the (Jews) people who
would punish them for their corruption. The last punish-
ment was carried out by Hitler. ... Allah willing, the
next time will be in the hand of the believers."
"Qaradawi is very much in the mainstream of Egyptian
society," wrote the Christian Science Monitor.
In 2004, this centrist was apparently offered the leader-
ship of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Today, we read that, liberated from Mubarak, Muslims set
fire to a Christian church in Sol, south of Cairo, then
attacked it with hammers.
When enraged Christians set up roadblocks in Cairo demand-
ing the government rebuild the church, they were set upon
by Muslims as soldiers stood by. Thirteen people, most of
them Coptic Christians, were shot to death on Tuesday, and
more than a hundred were wounded in the worst religious
violence in years.
Revolutions liberate people from tyranny, but also free
them up to indulge old hates, settle old scores and give
vent to their passions.
What are the passions that will be unleashed by the
revolution that has the Arab nation of 300 million
aflame?
Surely, one is for greater freedom, good jobs and
prosperity, such as the West and East Asia have been
able to produce for their people.
Yet if even European nations like Greece, Ireland and
Spain, which used to deliver this, no longer seem able
to do so, how will these Arab nations, which have never
produced freedom, prosperity or progress on a large
scale, succeed in the short time they will have?
Answer: They will not. The great Arab revolution will
likely fail.
And when it does, those other passions coursing through
the region will rise to dominance. And what are they but
ethnonationalism, tribalism and Islamic fundamentalism?
What will eventually unite this turbulent region -- when
its peoples fail to achieve what they are yearning for --
is who and what they are all against.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls.
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