Let me clarify. Democracy means the rule of the many. The many, if given a chance to practice democracy, can choose political liberalism (a government that is "neutral on the question of the good life, or of what gives value to life," as Ronald Dworkin put it, agreeing with Kant that "No one can compel me (in accordance with his belief about the welfare of others) to be happy after his fashion") or political illiberalism. The majority of people in many parts of the world, decidedly poor and illiberal, tend to choose illiberalism over liberalism, if given a shot at democracy, and to establish illiberal democracy. So, promoting democracy in this context means promoting illiberalism.
[WS:] I am in agreement with your main point above that a collective or popular choice can have different outcomes under different social conditions, and sometimes this outcome can be outright fascism.
What I would argue is the conceptual issues, especially your definition of democracy, which IMHO misses the entire institutional arrangement that not only is essential for the sustainability of the democratic rule, but also makes a big difference between the types of democracy that are possible. On this see Lijphart, _Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty Six Countries_ who identified ten different institutional variables that distinguish between different types of democratic regime that fall on a continuum of what he calls "the Westminster model" (fundamentally, the winner takes all majoritarian system in the Commonwealth countries and the US), and the "consensus model" (fundamentally, the PR parliamentary system found in Western Europe).
An important element of Lijphart's argument is that the consensus (parliamentary) democracy is not necessarily based on the majority rule, but rather on the plurality of interest, and it works better than the majoritarian system in solving social problems.
My other issue would be with the notion of liberalism. Again, while in very general terms liberalism means a guarantee of individual freedom, there are different forms of liberalism that depend on specific institutional arrangements and group interests these arrangements represent and benefit.
The bottom line here is that in a very rudimentary sense, liberalism is a necessary condition of democracy, as democracy that suppresses individual freedoms is a contradiction in terms, or perhaps a meaningless propaganda slogan. Yet, this tautology does not tell us much how political systems actually work. The devil is in institutional details.
Yoshie: Assuming that Rueschemeyer, et al. share my distinction between democracy and liberalism, I completely agree with them: it's the poor who desire democracy, and it's the rich who desire liberalism, in part to check democracy of the poor.
[WS:] I do not think that Rueschemeyer et al. make this distinction for the reasons I mentioned above. They explicitly recognize that while the working class in principle should support extending suffrage, because this benefits its class interests, in reality this support depends on the institutional form (or forms) of the expression and pursuit of working class interests. They also recognize that under certain conditions (such as "hijacking" working class by charismatic leaders) working class can actually end up supporting some form of populist authoritarianism (they quote Argentina under Peron as an example).
To reiterate the main point here, general class interest do not matter, even if they are objective i.e. offering tangible benefits. What matters is the specific institutional form in which those class interests are expressed and pursued.
I think that your argument about Middle East essentially fails to the above into account, and instead emphasize general objective interests. While it is certainly true that poor Arabs would objectively benefit from the policy changes that you mention - this may be evident only to the outside observers. The local perception - or rather perceptions - of the issue are quite different and shaped by institutional forms that developed in this area. One - and, I might add, widely spread form is Islamic fundamentalism and its organizations (such as Muslim Brotherhood, whose foundations pre-date current US policies and even the establishment of the state of Israel).
It is not that this institutional form is some kind of "false consciousness" imposed by the elite. Such "false consciousness" institutions imposed form above never survive for very long, especially in the Islamic world (cf. the Soviet established government of Afghanistan, or the US puppet the Shah of Iran). Islamic fundamentalism is a genuinely homegrown and popular institutional form that DEFINES and expresses collective interests in its own terms and values - which are different from the "objective interests" as seen by outsiders.
Quite frankly, I think that the so-called "solidarity" with the "downtrodden masses" of the Middle East is a bunch of nonsense - ritualistic mantras created and repeated mainly by Western intellectuals. In reality, there is no such thing as masses, downtrodden or otherwise - in the Middle East or elsewhere - only different interest groups pursuing their own interests defined in their own terms and picking their own battles in the name of those interests. If Western intellectuals take sides in these battles, it is almost certainly to use them as proxies in their own battles against other Western intellectuals - quite similar to the "proxy" war that the Bush administration and the Iranian government fight in Lebanon.
Wojtek