I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked
Iran may not seem the best vantage point to observe the convulsions in Ukraine and Thailand. But traveling through the country last week, I often thought of its constitutional revolution in 1906 -- one whose political legacy exceeds that of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and offers more instructive lessons than any European revolution in why democratic upsurges often produce mayhem, followed in short order by tyranny.
The effort, led by Iranian intellectuals and activists, to check a centralized, arbitrary and inept monarchy was one of the very first political movements of its kind anywhere in Asia. It succeeded in creating a constitutional framework -- a principle of republicanism and a vocabulary of civil society and democratic rights that remain relevant in Iran to this day.
But no working government emerged, and factional fighting doomed the revolution as much as the geopolitical rivalries of Britain, Russia and the Ottoman Empire. After much chaos, the proverbial "strongman" -- inevitably, a soldier on horseback -- emerged to reimpose order, and the sovereignty of the people was sacrificed to an even more centralized and powerful state.
Exactly.
The history books are littered with high-minded sounding words, but the fact is that it rarely works out the way those espousing them claim.
The challenge comes, however, from this:
Intense mass politicization caused in recent years by the venality and incompetence of ruling elites is turning millions of people around the world into rebels and secessionists.
So why do we have "ruling elites" in a land of alleged Constitutional Republics?
Hmmm... that may be the problem, and the first sacrifice these folks tend to make to their own power and venality is found in the Rule of Law.
Thus the focus of dozens of Tickers over the last years calling for restoration of same without delay.
In the end a just government is a referee -- and little more. The problem with allowing "more" isn't that those who start such a movement are of impure thought (although some are) -- it's that as you aggregate power you wind up inevitably driving more and more actions that are simply designed to maintain and expand that power rather than arbitrate disputes and protect individual rights.
Unfortunately the cheap, easy and fast tonic that someone inevitably grabs for when the state reaches the point of gross over-reach and intrusion is agitation for violence. This is especially true when people start talking about democratic "upsurges."
The problem is that democracy is simply a high-minded word for two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. If you have an ounce of perception you realize that this is a recipe for violence in virtually every case; the sheep has only two choices but both are nearly-certain to end with him in the belly of the wolves.
Why would anyone (other than a wolf, of course) argue for that?
I find it disturbing that so many people continue to focus on that word -- democracy -- and parade it around as if it was something good, especially those who know better such as our President (past and present!) and Congress. It is nothing of the sort; democracy in truth is nothing more than the rule of the mob, and nobody in their right mind is interested in that sort of outcome.
The nuance is that what you're really looking for is a Constitutional Republic, a form of government where government is granted certain powers, and only those powers, by the people, guided by the principle that the people at-large are the source of and retain inalienable rights.
So long as a Constitutional Republic is retained there is no rule of the mob; you have the right to be left alone so long as you don't violate the rights of anyone else in what you do. This, indeed, is what anyone who happens to be in a minority should want, and in a pluralistic society the sum of those minorities form a majority and thus can guarantee same. It is this form of government that tells the sheep that they may arm themselves and, if necessary, defend themselves from the wolves, and equally important that should the wolves attempt to eat the sheep anyway the wolves will be the ones upon which sanction is brought irrespective of their majority status.
Incidentally if you're curious about how America came to be a Constitutional Republic that's the path and the reason for it. The colonies were not homogeneous; there were fairly-serious divisions among the people in terms of religious and personal desire. What the Founders realized, much to their credit, was that irrespective of those differences between all of those sub-groups together they were a strong majority, and if they stuck to the principle of a Constitutional Republic they gained joint protection against becoming wolf food where as a democracy inevitably most of them would lose the same and wind up as serfs -- or worse.
We should keep in mind that while many believe our nation was founded under unique circumstances the truth is that we're even more-aligned today toward a Constitutional Republic than we were 238 years ago. There is in fact a greater spread of various minority interests today than there were in 1776 in America and as a result it is even easier to isolate, pick off and eat one of them through an aggregation of the others.
But in a pluralistic society such as America supporting that sort of action whether individually or by attempting to incite the population at-large is ridiculously unwise, simply on the numbers. In a pluralistic society no matter who you are you're not a majority and the aggregation of minorities can always turn against you.
History says that if you go down the road of democracy rather than that of a Constitutional Republic ultimately aggregation of power will do exactly that.
There are those who will claim that "white" is the majority race in America but you need to look more-closely. Remove "Hispanic" from "white" (they are counted together) and it's 64%, not 72. If you then start looking at ancestries you find that the greatest representation among Americans is Germanic at about 15% of the total population, and that's a far cry from half or more.
The challenge before us all is to have this discussion openly and push back hard against those who use the word democracy, as that is how we find both joint reason and purpose in returning our government to the primary role envisioned and laid forth by the Founders, removing from it the ability to reach beyond.
It's in all of our self-interest to do so as otherwise there is no means by which any of us can determine in advance if things go pear-shaped whether we will be in the majority, and thus a wolf, or whether we shall discover, much to our chagrin, that we're a sheep.
Leaving aside the moral and ethical arguments the practical simply cannot be debated. There is one, and only one, sane path forward -- both for us and for those in other nations such as Thailand and the Ukraine.