I’ve generally stayed on the sidelines during the whole democracy debate and, truth be told, I’ve not followed every jot and tittle (my life has been chaotic these last few weeks) and so I’m scared of mischaracterizing anybody’s position.

So I’d like to chime in on my broken record for a minute. I’m a longstanding griper about our fetishization of democracy to the detriment of liberalism (the rule of law, human rights, free markets, free speech etc). No serious person, it seems to me, can deny that it would be better to live in a liberal but undemocratic society than a democratic but illiberal society. In other words, democracy — while an important mechanism — is fundamentally amoral. A society of evil men can democratically choose to do evil.

I think many democracy-boosters understand this, and agree, but they use democracy as an umbrella term for liberalism. The problem is that this leads to a corruption of rhetoric and, eventually, thinking. I think it’s pretty clear that liberalism and democracy go together in the long run. But I think it is obviously false that democracy automatically yields liberalism. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t. More often — as in the United States, Great Britain etc — one could just as easily argue that liberalism leads to democracy. I understand we need to take a principled pro-democracy stand. But we shouldn’t blind ourselves to the fact that undemocratic instiutions are often on the side of the angels. The Turkish military, for example, is a defender of Turkish liberalism – flawed though it may be — against the threats it faces from, among other things, democratic Islamic populism.

Pursuing elections before you’ve cultivated liberal values is a recipe for Hitlerism or Hamas-ism. Indeed, it’s a fascinating contrafactual to ponder how different things might have been if the Bush Administration had not emphasized — rhetorically — literal elections over everything they think elections represent (see here for a recent lament along these lines in the Corner).

Rich’s points are well-taken. There’s a reason we’re stuck dealing with the Middle East — because much of the rest of the world has come to its senses. The Arab or Muslim “street” doesn’t much care about democracy. Until it does, harping on elections is a fools errand. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t support pro-democracy groups and activists — where our support would help — but our choices right now are basically, to use a social scientific phrase, really sucky. That’s why I think we can’t be tied down to one approach. If there’s a strong-man who wants to be Attaturk, we should give him some leeway. If eletions will advance the ball toward liberalization, we should be for elections. Our principles are larger than mere elections and a more realistic foreign policy would advance our ideals more if it took this into account. Ronald Reagan, for example, understood that pushing democracy in the Soviet Union was a far less effective rhetorical weapon than the subject of human rights.