Prague Bathos

The ineffably horrid Muravchick and think-alikes, is touting a conference in Prague on spreading democracy, where the likes of Natan Sharansky, Holy Joe Lieberman and W have been prattling about missionary work for democracy (presumably not ONLY at gunpoint).

Just as this goes on, the democratic winners of democratic elections in Gaza are consolidating victory by shooting people in hospitals and in front of their wives and children. The poor victims complain, even as they buy the farm, that it's not fair because, after all, they are not Jews.

The faith of these naifs is doubly misplaced. First, in democracy itself, which for all its canonical status in conventional wisdom, is a highly flawed commodity, and second in the bouregoisified Trotskyism-without-Marx that would spread democracy with cruise missiles and color revolutions to places where no civil society has evolved to support anything close to consensual government.

The fact is, democracy tends to find a place for every snout in the public trough. The souls attached to the snouts are thus diminished, not enough slops are available to all, and power concentrates in the hands of those who distribute the slops (really, those who make the rules about how the slops are distributed).

We are taught in school that democracy is wonderful, and have fought wars supposedly to make the world safe for it. The rule of law is good. Restraint in government is good. Democracy can be horrid. Missionizing for it, as if it were divine grace, is, as every Iraqi knows, worse than a crime. It's folly.