Just to pile on, I don’t agree, Michael, that we need to respect the outcome of a popular electoral process (especially a weighted one) for no better reason than that it’s a called a democracy.

First of all, if the last few years have taught us anything, it is that there is no agreement about what a democracy is. Was the Palestinian Authority a democracy (before Hamas ruined the charade and made explicit the obvious point that for it, the popular elections were never anything other than an opportunistic power grab)? Turkey’s democracy is rigged to keep the Islamists out of power, but the formula is not working as intended because the non-Islamists can’t get it together, so fundamentalists are now running the country without representing a majority of Turks. With the power they wield, they are removing the shackles that long kept Islam in check. Islamism will now be a force to be reckoned with (as it is in, say, Pakistan) even if the Islamists are out of power. What’s so good about that?

Secondly, democracy is not an end, it is a means to the end of a better, freer, more self-determinative life. The better, freer life is our goal. Why should we applaud the decline of the Turks’ military check? If the choice is between a secular society guaranteed by the military or a slide toward an Islamic society ushered in by democracy, why is the latter better? How is it freer and more self-determinative for a minority, or (were it to happen) even a majority, to impose Islamic culture on people who’d prefer freedom of conscience? How is a democracy preferable to a military that guarantees a life freer than the average Turk would have under unfettered AKP rule?

We are in an age of democracy fetishism, which oddly substitutes facile popular elections for a commitment to real, substantive democracy. I guess that beats confronting (a) the judgmental fact that not every society is ready for true democracy, and (b) that Islamic societies are not hospitable to the freedom of choice, freedom of conscience and equality under the law that I would have thought were elementary to real democracy.