> Message: 5
> Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 13:12:26 -0700 (PDT)
> From: mike larkin <mike_larkin2001 at yahoo.com>
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Subject: [lbo-talk] Thomas Friedman: Let them eat software
> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>
> This guy just spits out the most delusional garbage.
> If a leftist talked about people not being ready for
> democracy until we've built them the new society,
> they'd be called Maoists or Stalinists. I can't stand
> it.
>
> http://nytimes.com/2003/05/07/opinion/07FRIE.html
Well, maybe there is something to that comparison.
There is a whole movement now to redefine democracy as something 'more than elections' - a phrase that needs to be heard with the right overtones, which are easy enough to miss since most sane people can see that democracy is more than elections. What people like Zakaria mean by this is that the substantive freedoms that just so happened to come with elections are no longer respected by 'bad' elected governments; to avoid this you need an iron fist to remould society so that it can host elections. Too bad if people decide that there is no such thing as a substantive freedom to pilfer genetic treasures, or to charge exorbitant prices for medicines.
As Slavoj Zizek pointed out, Zakaria loves quoting Taiwan, South Korea and so on - countries which have some spectacularly meaningless elections, even by US no-choice standards. In his scheme, which is flattering to power to say the least, the future of a society is entirely in the hands of its ruling elite, or should be. If that elite fails, the country ends up like Peru or the Philippines, ostensibly 'bad democracies.' Lucky for us all the current crop of elites are Zakaria-reading christian fundamentalists. (As an aside, I don't know how much I agree with Zizek that this sort of attitude is a new phenomenon: this sort of thing has been the stock explanation for overthrowing democracies for the last fifty years.)
Thiago