I fully admit to falling for the Bush-Cheney “Freedom Agenda” stuff in the 2000’s. I did not fall for it entirely, as I assumed they were lying about most of it. I figured their talk of spreading democracy was just cover for getting rid of troublesome dictators they did not like anymore. Given the rising tide of Islamic terrorism and the failure of other options, I was willing to give it a shot. After all, fighting the lunatics over there was better than fighting them over here. It seemed like the best option at the time.

The build out of the surveillance state was always a problem for me, but that was mostly for economic reasons. I just saw DHS quickly turning into another EPA. We would end up with a costly, blundering bureaucracy that accomplished nothing good. I also assumed the Left would hamstring all efforts to make the surveillance state effective, as they did with the CIA during the Cold War. It turns out I was mistaken on both accounts. The neocons really meat what they said and the Left never bothered to oppose the surveillance state.

In fairness to most everyone back then, the Left was out of their mind with rage after the 2000 election and then went nuts over the response to 9/11. A good rule for over a century is the assume that the Left is up to no good and going against their program is the way to truth. Seeing one Progressive after another ululating in the streets over the Bush foreign policy made it much easier to support. That and there was no alternative. It was the Bush plan or incoherent craziness that seemed to be rooting for the Muslims to win.

That was then. We have now seen a number of Muslim counties get the vote. In every case they voted for Islamic parties. It turns out that the majority of Arabs are deeply religious and they want to live in a country ruled by their coreligionists. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood garnered the plurality of the votes. The second place party was even more Islamic. In other words, the typical Egyptian saw the Brotherhood as the moderate option. The same thing happened in Iraq when we held their elections.

Iran, of course, has been down this path for 30 years. Despite the economic and political problems in Iran, the majority of the people actually support the ruling mullahs. They want to live in a country run by the tenets of their faith. Turkey is steadily moving toward becoming an Islamic state, rejecting western style liberal democracy. Again, the majority is in favor of Islamic rule. It really does not matter what the neocons hoped would happen, they should have know that Muslim countries would vote for Muslim government.

That’s what makes this post bothersome. A lot of of us have learned a lot about the Arab world and Islam in the last decade. Our intellectuals, however, have remained stubbornly ignorant. They desperately cling to the unsupported assertion that there is a constituency in these countries for liberal democracy. They see the young people on TV with their mobile phones and think that’s reality. That’s not reality. Those people are maybe 20% of the population. The rest see them as emblematic of the problems with liberal democracy.

It’s like the word “democracy” now means a whole package of economic, political and cultural institutions, rather than a political system. If the people vote for their traditional way of life, somehow that is anti-democratic. On the other hand, if our neo-liberal rulers rig an election to thwart the will of the people, that’s democracy in action. It’s hard to know if this is the result of anti-Western hostility among out elites or simply ignorance. It is probably a product of both. Anti-Western hatred has cultivated a generations of stupid intellectuals.

Either way, we are the first people on earth to have a ruling elite that loathes the very culture over which they rule, the culture that makes it possible for them to exist. This was Pat Buchanan’s insight thirty years ago. The American idea of a moderate representative republic that looks out for the interests of the people is revolting to the people who rule over us. So much so, they have revolted against everything associated with it. The result is a weird secular religion that they think they can spread around the world.