Democracy, the Morning After

By Joe Klein

The people are demanding honest government," President George W. Bush said last week. "The people want services. They want to be able to raise their children in an environment in which they can get a decent education and they can find health care." The President was talking about Palestinians, not Americans, and he was on a roll. "If there is corruption, I'm not surprised that people say, Let's get rid of corruption," he added. "If government hadn't been responsive, I'm not the least bit surprised that people said, I want government to be responsive."

Hmm. This is a curious self-empretzelment: How did it come about that when Bush talks about Palestinians he sounds like Ted Kennedy talking about Americans? It came about the old-fashioned way, through utter policy failure. Bush's flashy love affair with democracy is a fallback position: it ascended when the original rationale for the war in Iraq--the threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction--receded. Bush was dismissive of "nation building" in his 2000 presidential campaign. By the 2004 race, however, a staple of his stump speech was, "Freedom isn't America's gift to the world.

It's the Almighty God's gift to each man and woman in this world." A lovely sentiment, a beautiful line, a potentially disastrous policy. It is common wisdom among serious democracy advocates that there are preconditions for successful representative government. There must be a solid middle class; there must be the rule of law and freedom of speech. But a more elusive human quality is necessary as well: a drastic change of public sensibility from passivity toward active engagement. In a place like Iraq--or the former Soviet Union--passivity was a survival mechanism. The best way to live with a tyrant like Saddam was to draw as little notice to yourself as possible. A Russian friend once told me that he was taught as a child never to smile in public. You never knew when a smile might be interpreted the wrong way.

Democracy requires the exact opposite. It demands that people take charge of their lives and make informed decisions. That takes time, the careful accumulation of the habits of citizenship. Bush's "gift" formulation sends exactly the wrong message; it leads people to believe that all they need is a purple finger and life will get better. The President seems a victim of that same delusion: he seems to believe that we can get away with promoting democracy through glorious rhetoric without doing the slow, expensive, heavy lifting of nation building. It is easy to talk about the need for decent education and health care if you're not charged with providing it.

The President, of all people, should know how difficult it is to take care of basic things like, say, prescription drugs for the elderly or shelter from the storm--especially if your government places a low priority on the efficient provision of public services and a high priority on the care and feeding of cronies (as Fatah did in Palestine). Bush's global-democracy, uhhh, crusade, is yet another triumph of spin over substance, a broad-brush carelessness that feeds off emotional election-day highs, flag waving and freedom rallies across the region but which has led, in every case, to severe hangovers.

From Afghanistan to Egypt, not one country that has had an election in the past year has emerged more stable as a result of the experience. In Iraq, three elections--the last one little more than a "census," in the words of Iraqi journalist Nibras Kazimi--have increased the probability of partition or civil war and installed a corrupt, Iran-leaning government of religious conservatives, which will undoubtedly remain in power when the new "permanent" government is formed. In Afghanistan, elections have brought narco-warlords to positions of significant power. Even the Potemkin elections in Saudi Arabia and Egypt resulted in the aggrandizement of religious extremists. There was the election--more a selection, really--of foulmouthed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, who has turned out to be far more radical than the ruling mullahs anticipated. And now Hamas in Palestine.

There is a caveat, though: Democracy may lead to a chaos of false hopes, but what's the alternative? In the past, regional stability, of a sort, was ensured by U.S. support for extravagantly corrupt and brutal regimes. The high-speed, information-age propaganda and savagery of Osama bin Laden has changed all that, as has the careful provision of social services by groups like Hizballah and Hamas. If the status quo is no longer tenable, as was the case in the Palestinian territories, it's far better for Hamas to come to power via the ballot box than the gun. The election holds out the possibility of moderation--and also the possibility that the leaders of Hamas will come to learn what Bush seems not to understand: that freedom isn't a gift. It is an achievement.