Globally Rational

“Democracy” is a popular buzzword here in the US.  Everybody assumes that if a country is “democratic”, they are also automatically “free”.  While I don’t oppose the idea of freedom and liberty, I don’t think that they should be naturally associated with the word “democracy”.

In America, democracy and freedom both showed up at the same time.  As far back as I can remember, I’ve been taught that we must agree with the Declaration of Independence’s suggestion that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” just spur automatically from the fact that “to preserve these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed.”  But in fact, that’s not what Jefferson was saying… he didn’t say that democracy creates freedom, but rather that free societies should be democratic.

So why is it that the US pushes the world to create “democratic” societies instead of creating “free” societies?  That’s what we’ve been advocating in Pakistan, Iraq, Eritrea, and many other countries where the elected government is (or soon will be) unimaginably corrupt and self-serving.  Meanwhile, here in the US, everybody assumes that an elected government must have the interests of the people in mind… after all, they want to get re-elected, right?

Maybe not… case in point: Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.  After rigging the first election to make it seem like he didn’t lose clearly, he intimidated the rest of the country to the point where his opponent was forced to withdraw from the run-off election.  Now, Mugabe is declaring victory despite the fact that he obviously distorted the results of the voting to a point where he seemed like a landslide winner when everybody knows that he is highly unpopular.

So why do we try to enforce democracy instead of freedom in countries like Iraq?  Well, I think the reason is obvious… Americans don’t really understand that there is a difference.  Democracy can be enforced by guns, while freedom can only be enforced by schools.  As long as you can convince the American population that you’re doing one or the other, they’ll be happy… so why not just put in a nominal government based on a superficial popular vote?  After all, it’s much easier to buy guns than it is to build schools.

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