Increasingly exasperated by popular disillusionment over the Iraq conflict and the failure of Bush's immigration amnesty bill in the US, the pro-war, pro-immigration liberal right has decided to blame (wait for it ...) western democracy!
According to Times columnist Gerard Baker, in a recent opinion column, "How paranoid little Napoleons took over the United States," democracy is now passe:
"Democracy, Winston Churchill famously observed, is the worst form of government ever devised -except for all the others, well he was right about the first part."
Having rejected democracy as a workable system of government for America, Baker then has the audacity to use democracy as a rationale for failed neoconservative regime change in Iraq:
"A central tenet of neoconservativism has always been that promoting democracy around the world is not only morally right, but also in the long-term interest of peace and stability."
With the Democrats and old-right Republicans dismissed as irresponsible, anti-democratic populists for wanting to pull out of the unwinnable war in Iraq, Baker decides to attack mainstream America for opposing immigration amnesty:
"President Bush had tried, honourably and rightly, to get a Reform Bill through Congress that would have regularised the status of 12 million illegal immigrants, mostly Latinos, as well as enforcing bordersecurity more effectively."
"The Bill was defeated by a roar of nativist and, at times disguised racist hysteria from the American heartland. Little Napoleons on TV and talk radio strutted and howled, denoucing the President and his supporters for surrendering to a cultural takeover by Mexicans."
A piece of paraphrased advice for Baker - you can insult some of the people, some of the time, but you can't insult all of the people all of the time.
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What a mass of contradictions. Baker starts with a hostile assessment of democracy. He then writes in more upbeat tones of democracy as being universally valid and morally right. However, faced with a grassroots democratic movement in the US, he turns against democracy again, describing the movement as ugly, absurd and led by little Napoleons. He thinks electoral pressure (i.e. democracy) is to blame.
Perhaps Baker assumed that people really were the kind of atomised, abstracted individuals who would eagerly embrace democracy to pursue radical forms of autonomy.
He has had two shocks to his ideological system. Both the Iraqis and the Americans, it turns out, are not such abstracted, disconnected, ahistorical people.
The Iraqis are strongly connected along the lines of religious affiliation, and the Americans see themselves as having a distinct nationhood, rather than just being a group of individuals who constantly "reinvent" themselves for economic purposes.
Perhaps it is these two revelations which have brought on Baker's conflicted, contradictory attitude toward democracy.
Ah these sorts of people are very common in Britain and have been for some time. But ours have the good courtesy to at least pretend they believe in democracy.
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