268. Wrestling with the Problem of Ishness

Remember "Turkishness"?  It was one of those sets of tribal traits that, if you insisted on it as a nation, kept you out of the European Union.  The Western tribe welcomed only universalists, people who, recognizing the equality and fraternity of all people, rise above peculiarly tribal values, or "ishness."

And now what are we about to get in Britain?  As strong a call for "Britishness," I'll bet, as we have heard in a long time. After the release of findings by the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills investigating conditions in five schools in Birmingham (NYT, 12-7-14) it's hard to imagine any other response.

I may be wrong but you, fellow American, can easily test whether I am or not.  Under the name Americanism you share most of the values in question.  Try bringing them to these findings: that "some teachers and [Muslim-dominated] school board governors... were encouraging homophobia, anti-Semitism and support for Al Qaeda, sometimes inviting speakers who endorsed the establishment of a state run under Sharia law"; that one school "stopped music and drama lessons as well as Christmas and Diwali celebrations, and subsidized trips to Saudi Arabia for Muslim students"; that in another school, "girls and female teachers were discriminated against, and compulsory sex education, including discussions about forced marriage, was banned. Girls and boys seen talking for too long or considered flirtatious were reprimanded, while boys were given worksheets that said a wife had to obey her husband."

The report concluded that there had been a “coordinated, deliberate and sustained action, carried out by a number of associated individuals, to introduce an intolerant and aggressive Islamic ethos into a few schools in Birmingham.”

If that happened here would you still be a universalist?  To the degree that our Declaration of Independence expects you to be?  My guess is that you'll be saying, "That's a violation of American values that can't be tolerated" — if you're not, as a lumpen patriot, already saying to Muslims what you said to Communists: "Get your heart in America or get your ass out."

 Before getting the more genteel British response I'd like to hear a replay of some of the lectures to the Turks about their insistence on Turkishness, and their punishment of insults to it.  How it was a relic of autarchy, and interfered with the nation's "maturing as a democracy," the sort of thing fully developed nations had abandoned long ago.  Only the insecure would be so touchy about insults.

And now, by George, what do we have, right in our faces?  The most brazen insult to Britishness ever heard in these isles.  Imagine, ending Christmas celebrations.  Telling boys that their wives had to obey them!  Having pupils listen to talk about Sharia as if it weren't a lot of medieval nonsense!  No idea whatsoever of British calm and reserve, no history of laughs at religious "enthusiasm," no abhorrence of zealotry.  And no, absolutely no, sense of progress, away from anti-semitism, away from homophobia.   Really, put that with support for Al Qaeda and a fellow's ready to stick something on his bumper.  Tolerance does have its limits.

The problem has its amusing aspects, but it gets tough once you see that universal values don't stand up by themselves.  They need support, and the only one around is tribal.  Democracy needs a tribe whose members are willing to deal and compromise and stick with the system.  Go universalist and you let anybody, regardless of race, creed, or color, be a member.  You value inclusiveness.

Then wham, you discover that some people hold to a creed that won't let them stick to the system.  They'll just appear to do that until they are strong enough to substitute their own.  So if you include them you could lose deals and compromises and all the other things valued in a democracy, including inclusiveness.  That's a real possibility and you, mugged by it, suddenly find yourself making the statement that will make you the butt of every comedian in your democracy: "To preserve inclusiveness we're going to have to exclude certain people."

That is, you're going to have distinguish them, and learn their profiles, and use these profiles to protect yourself and your tribe, the tribe of universal values and general inclusion.  And, it appears, of a thousand ironies.  Map "Jewishness" onto the population of Israeli liberals and you'd see it, practically one irony per household.  Or Frenchness onto French liberals.  Almost as many.  An enlightened society just can't value ishness without producing ironies.

Whether England is going to compete with these two isn't clear yet.  I'm sure that over there they know the difference between values necessary to keep the democratic system going — only three, really, regular elections, acceptance of their outcomes, and minority rights — and values necessary to maintain tribal comfort.  Ending Christmas celebrations disturbs tribal comfort but is no threat to elections.  A principled democrat will live without Santa Claus until he can persuade the majority to bring him back.  If he can't persuade he accepts.  Sharia is another matter.  Will it end elections?  Can boards of education let visitors preach it to youngsters?  Those are matters to be clarified in discussion with those best qualified to speak for British Muslims.

A lot will depend on the answers, because if they show insistence on values that threaten British democracy then exclusion will be justified, and inclusionists — multiculturalists, pluralists, universalists — will have to live with the multiplying ironies.

242. The Descent of "The Economist"

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The Economist just (Leader, 3-8-14) called Ukraine's president Viktor Yanukovich "a home-grown autocrat."  That's another thing against him as a very bad man.  But it's a thing not accurately named.  Yanukovich was voted into office.  He is "a home-elected democrat."

So is Mohammed Morsi and so are Thaksin Shinawatra and his sister Yingluck, to name elected officials demonstrated against in the streets by people we have been asked to sympathize with.  Asked, that is, by people who put goodness above democracy.  In America those people must not be very sensitive to words, since they, or their newspapers, are also quick, not noticing the irony, to reproach other people (nations, leaders) for their hostility to democracy.

By now there are now, as I count them, 83 ironies in Americans' use of the word "democracy" since their government backed the Egyptian generals (yes, we controlled them; we could have cut off parts to their tanks and planes) in their overthrow of the elected president.  There was a time when The Economist was sensitive to these ironies, at least enough to keep the blatant slant, the Murdoch slant, out of their nouns.  Maybe after you've made the "vileness" of a regime (Syria's. among others) sufficient cause for action against it the slant gets easier.

Democracy makes  "badness" hard to locate.  What do you call the people who elected the bad Yanukovich (in an election the international community found to be well within "democratic standards")?  What do you call the candidate who lost to him, prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, or the president elected to serve from 2005 to 2010, Viktor Yuschenko?   They were West-leaning so they must have been good, right?  Well the good politicians had their chance and the people had their choice.  And they elected the bad politician.  What are they, bad people? 

And you know what?  In all that time there wasn't an autocrat in sight.  

223. "You get the government you deserve."

There's one thing wrong with that wonderful reminder to voters in a democratic country, "you get the government you deserve": it can't be said to those who voted against the majority that produced the government.  Like now, to a Massachusetts liberal suffering under the fiscal thumbs of House Tea Partiers.  "You think I deserve this?"

Tough enough under ordinary circumstances but here the dessert-serving group weren't even a majority, and what they did is not even democratic.  Their majority in the House is a result of Republican gerrymandering (the popular vote in the 2012 election of House members went to the Democrats by 1.2%) and their typical action, stopping funding by refusing to raise the debt ceiling, is a result of a procedural quirk, a leftover from a pro forma budget gesture of 1917.

The polls show that as a nation we're very unhappy with them, with approval of Congress down to 12%, disapproval up to 85%, and more than 70% of those strongly opposed to the job congressional lawmakers are doing (Washington Post/ABC).  So they're rascals, right?  From what you hear in street interviews they're that and more:  "religious nuts," "one-issue extremists," and the old one, "dirty politicians."

Depressing, isn't it, to have such people gaming the system, playing the quirks.  Differences in a democracy are supposed to be worked out, fought out, fair and square on the floor of the legislature.  Lose there and a representative is supposed to go along gracefully until his next chance to fight.  In the designated arena.  That's democracy.  Not slinking around with a wrench looking for a place to jam the machinery — machinery you have yourself already set, or allowed to be set, in motion, for God's sake.  

I can't stand it.  I'm a democrat (and Democrat) about to die of depression.

No, I won't die, nor will the masses of depressed people all around me.  We know that we, unlike the Egyptians, have a fixed, absolutely irremovable, election coming up.  And we have, in our aural memory, another good old American expression to cheer ourselves up with: "Throw the rascals out!"  Straight from the citizens who threw out Boss Tweed and the Teapot Dome gang and the Whisky Ring.  The majority the polls tell us of will assert itself.

How comforting, the thought of those rascals being thrown out, head over heels behind Boss Tweed.  The majority triumphant. 

How comforting, and now, apparently, how vain.  The majority has already shown how it's going to act, and that, in 2014, will be to keep the rascals in.  Ninety percent of them.  That's the percentage of incumbents they returned to office in 2012, when the laments over the terrible 112th Congress were as loud as the laments over ours, the 113th.

"Yes, but voters then didn't know what we know about these machinery-jammers, these district-slicers."

Ah, my friend, you have forgotten.  The jamming and slicing, and making a party of it, were already on display.  John Boehner had his (or the Tea Party's) thumb on the fiscal artery as surely, with his intentions as surely known, in April 2011, as he has now.  There was a partial shutdown of the government, remember?  With a bigger one narrowly averted in August.  What more was there to learn about these rascals?

The general electorate certainly appeared to have learned what it needed.  Hell, going into the 2012 elections you'd have thought that to be an incumbent legislator was to be one step from the tar pot and the feather pile.  Congress's favorable rating was only a little higher (15%) in the Gallup poll than it is now.  Teapot Domers, here they come.  And how many Congressmen got thrown out?  One in ten.  A rapscallion here, a scallywag there.

So, comfort-seekers, get used to it.  Americans, no matter what they tell the nice polling lady, no longer throw rascals out.

220. Congress: Debt Ceilings and Term Limits

What does the debt ceiling, due to screw up national decision-making again on October 17, have in common with the two-term limit on the service of our presidents?  Both are cases of the ignorant tying the hands of the knowing.

People living in the past are always going to know less about the needs of the nation in the future than the people living in that future.  The men of 1789 knew very little about what the U. S. would need in the way of a President in 1940.  The people of 1917 didn't know a damn thing about the expenditures needed in 2013.  Hell, nobody in the world could, even a year ahead of time, tell what the nation was going to need in 2013.

Yes, there is a difference between those people.  The men of 1789, however willing they were to bind men of the future in other ways, refused to bind them in this way.  They left it to the choice of the men on the spot at the time.  Washington declined a third term, and established a custom; Roosevelt went for a third term, and broke the custom.  Then the people of the time could make their choice.  Binding by law didn't come until 1951.

The men of 1917, on the other hand, were not only willing to bind men of the future to what they thought best for them, they were willing to give men of any party the ability to bind all the men who came after them, at any distance — decades, years, months — to what they thought best for them.  I know, the men of 1917 did this by accident, and it took the men and women of 1995 (the new Republican Congress), to do it by intent, but still it was done.  Both oppose the democratic notion that people, by majority vote, should be free to determine what's best for them.

Where do knowledge and ignorance come in?  In the claim that justifies such apparently undemocratic action: we're smarter people.  There's nothing new there.  All people in parties think they're smarter than people in other parties.  But these people, or whoever put the binding into law, were saying that they were smarter than everybody, including those who might come along later.  "We know the nation's needs at that time better than they will know them."  No, it's worse than that.  It's the howler, "We know the nation's needs better than we ourselves will know them."  In the case of the debt ceiling they will be referring to the on-the-spot measures they will have knowledgably passed, or let pass, but which still, maybe a week later, have to be funded.  They assert, practically simultaneously, A and not-A.

I think we can bear the arrogance here — "Since we are smarter than all the dumb bunnies who follow us, we'll fix it so that they'll have to recognize our wisdom" — but I'm not sure we can bear the stupidity.  How smart do you have to be to recognize that people facing a problem are going to know more about it than people guessing at it from the past? 

No, you can't argue that that's what our Founding Fathers believed.  "Didn't those fathers see the need to protect dumb bunnies from themselves?  And aren't we all dumb bunnies?" Of course we are, and they devised a Constitution to protect us from ourselves, binding us.  But none of those bindings, like the one to keep us from uniting church and state, are like these, binding one set of Congressmen (or voters) to another, earlier set, on the grounds that the later set will be less wise in the choice of a candidate or budget.  And you can't argue that the Athenians, our models, did that, by setting limits.  They did, but only for offices chosen by lot.  For the rest they trusted elections.

"Yes, but there's nothing in our Constitution to protect dumb-bunny voters from the demagogue who learns how to make his position permanent, or from spendthrift Congressmen who break the bank." 

That's just wrong.  Elections are specified in the Constitution and they protect us.  But that appeal to the Constitution, like so many others, is beside the point.  It's not that debt- and term-limit setters are saying that voters are dumb bunnies; it's that they're saying that some bunnies are less dumb than others, and that's them.  With no basis whatsoever.

Where did they get the idea that future voters could not identify a three-term-hungry demagogue (or a bank-breaking Congressman) but that they could?  The idea that future voters couldn't throw him out with an election but that he had to be thrown out by a law?  If they were so smart why didn't they see that along with the bad demagogue they were going to throw out all the bright, good, non-demagogic nation-savers that might be there in the same bathwater.   I think they got their idea of future incompetence from the conviction that they themselves were the nation-savers.  They couldn't wait for history to bestow that title.

Oh how a democracy needs that, ability to wait.  Leaders who wait for history, citizens who wait for an election.  It's the ability Egyptians so needed if they were to have a democracy, ability to bear the Muslims in power long enough to meet the requirement that they throw them out in an election.  No, they saw nation-destroyers, and needed nation-savers.  And got what Thomas Jefferson could have predicted, a tyrant, one who, like all tyrants and demagogues, sells himself as a nation-saver.

Well, nation-saving is as nation-saving does, and maybe Egypt needed such saving.  Maybe we can come up with a justification of General el-Sisi, and maybe we can justify our democracy in supporting him.  It's hard but it probably can be done.  Worse things can happen to a country than loss of democracy, I suppose.  But of all the kinds of saving we try to justify I think the saving of our nation from its dumb bunnies by another set of dumb bunnies must surely be the hardest.

211. Love democracy, love the killing in Cairo.

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Listen up, third-worlders.  Here's what it like to be a lover of democracy at this moment, with Egypt's army having just killed a couple of hundred Muslims demonstrating for the return of democracy.

No, I'm not going to add to the six dozen ironies already piled up by the developments in Egypt.  I'm just going to explain what's democratic and what isn't.

That killing now, by a dictator installed by an Army coup.  It's not, as it may appear, the opposite of democracy.  It's not like all the strongman takeovers the U.S. has opposed, not like one aristocratic clique overthrowing another in South America, not like a warlord suddenly declaring a heavenly mandate in Asia, not like a Bolshevik few striking in Europe.  Those are all deniers of democracy.  This is an expression of it.  A circuitous expression, yes, but nevertheless an expression.

Here, in big chalk, is the circuit.  Begin with the fact that the U. S. is a democracy.  The things that it does or does not do express the will of its people.  ("Democracy" means "rule by the people," right"?)  Not all the people, but a majority, which means the most votes in Congress.  Votes in the past show that any action that makes Israel less secure will be voted down — if it manages even to be brought up.  Action against the dictator installed by the army coup will in the eyes of Congress make Israel less secure than it would be under a militant Muslim president installed by an election.  It's bound to be voted down or kept from coming up.

To be believed that paragraph requires, probably, six pages of little chalk — whether or not Congressmen do express the will of the people here, whether their vote can be predicted, whether that vote can make a difference in Egypt, why they think an army regime in Egypt will make Israel more secure — but there's just not space here to supply it.  You'll just have to trust me.

Anyway, if you believe as I do that American action against the Egyptian ruling general could stop him (for one thing we could cut off the money that pays his army) then yesterday's killing in Cairo is an expression of democracy, American democracy.  It is the will of the American people that the Egyptian people be denied their will.

Forget trying to relieve the pain of this by showing your abhorrence of killing, Americans.  ("I didn't mean that.  They shouldn't go that far.")  Any time you want other people to do your will they can (as Clausewitz has shown) force you to become a killer just by refusing to do it, up to the end.  If you vote for Israel's security here (or for a Congressman who will vote for it) you show that you want to kill the Egyptians who refuse to accept the removal of their president.  You're a killer.

And forget all the sophistical demonstrations that the elected president wasn't really elected or wasn't really a president or that the coup wasn't really a coup.  The man got a majority of the votes in an election that qualified neutral observers called reasonably free.  There's no reason to believe that another election would turn out differently.  The will of a majority of the Egyptian people has been expressed.  And that's all democracy means, or needs to mean.

So forget, third-worlders, all those golden benefits promised you under the word "democracy."  And don't think it has anything to do with the goodness of a people.  It doesn't assure virtue.  All democracy assures is that the majority of people in your country, the people who most of the time will have the greatest power, or potential power, will have in place the machinery by which they can express their will.  That's good, maybe golden, especially when time comes for a transfer of power, but if it's good it's good only internally.

Externally, in dealing with other nations, you can no more count on it being good than you can count on the human will being good.  And allowing it to be collectively expressed isn't going to improve the odds.  Whatever the collective will is, though, whether it's good or bad, remember: it's just the will of one people, in one country.  If that will denies the will of another people in another country, if it denies them even unto death, that could be very bad.  We can call it terrible names — "hypocritical," "evil," "criminal."  But we can't call it "undemocratic."

170. To the American Who Thinks Times Are Bad.

 

You there, you who are doing what I have done for 70 years, read the newspapers and worry, don't let these politicians make you think times are bad.  They don't know bad.  They can't imagine bad.

You want to know bad?  Bad is looking for the funnies in your newspaper on the floor, seeing the big, black headlines, and being told by your dad that this very bad man Adolf Hitler had invaded Austria, that England and France had done nothing, and that there was no telling what would stop him now.

Up to that time you had thought bad was the unemployment numbers your town's Republican paper kept putting on the front page all through 1937, climbing month by month from 14 to 19%.   The Depression was coming back!  Where would it stop?  How many more of your friends' dads would go broke, as mine did in 1938?

Bad is not having any more layers of fat left.  Mothers of my time wanted to fatten their children so that, if they got sick, they'd have "something in reserve to draw on."  Find nothing soft when you felt your arm and you figured that with the next whooping cough you were going to lose some bone.  That would be very bad.  (My grandmother applied "layers of fat" to luxuries of the twenties she hadn't approved of, and which were being stripped away after The Crash.)

You want to know worry?  Worry is being a child in the forties like Meg Greenfield, a Jew, and John Updike, a Christian, watching the lines of defense collapse toward you, and not knowing how much your country had ready to protect you, or whether God cared.  (You might even try putting yourself in the place of an adult in 1942; you know we were going to be winners in the war, he didn't.)

Worry is what you do as an adult when Stewart Alsop writes that the Soviet Union has just MIRVed its long-range missiles, making some hydrogen-bomb hits a certainty.  It's what grows when you learn that your country contains people sympathetic to the MIRV-firing side, and willing to help them improve their firing — or, if not that, work to make your country more like that country, to the point of revolution.

Worry is what you do when you hear a worker for Gene McCarthy tell his crew of fellow students when Nixon looks like the winner:  "Well, what we've got to hope for now is a quick revolution."

Look at what we have now with those things in mind and what do you see?  Enemies with no H-bombs, no delivery vehicles that can reach our shores, no tanks that can break through our lines, no more divisions than the Vatican had.  And, even better, no enemies with significant sympathy, much less a constituency, in the United States.  Has there ever been a group more generally scorned than the Taliban?

Look at our candidates.  Each meets the Stewart Alsop test: Will he be acceptable to the other party?  He meant without driving them to talk of revolution.

Look at unemployment, 7.8%.  Bad, but far from 19%, and we know which direction it's going in.  Furthermore, we're not all teetering over a canyon with no safety net under us.  And, I might add for those willing to make a leap in space as well as time, we're not living in a country where that 7.8 figure, being of advantage to the incumbent power, is generally distrusted.  Indeed, we're living in a country in which those who express such distrust are hooted off the stage.

As for loss of fat, you who assess the nation's health, try looking at it my grandmother's way. The nation added layer after layer, beginning in the fifties, until we were bulging with it.  That's OK, I suppose, until you begin to think the bulge is normal, and necessary, and your right, and the loss of it a disaster. 

Here's where the imagination comes in.  Try a thought experiment.  Imagine what it would be like as layer after layer of the fat added since the forties came off.  Would it be as terrible as you think, and are told?  Maybe you'd get a lesson in material disasters, and how they're different from moral and spiritual disasters.  Maybe you'd find yourself, and the nation, reading Emerson and Thoreau more seriously.  Maybe, as Republicans lament America's loss of its position as the number one superpower, you'd look more closely at the Swiss and the Swedes, and ask more seriously how they could be happy.

Want to picture what a moral and spiritual disaster would be?  Picture us, fat with weapons, dropping an atom bomb on North Vietnam, as Curtis LeMay wanted to do.  "America would lose her soul," said Walter Lippmann, and I think he was right.

Finally, look more closely at all the politicians who have been haranguing you from stage and screen for these many months, calling each other names, raking up the other guy's muck, displaying their own clean families, making you sick one moment with their sentimentality and outraged the next with their divisiveness.  Look at them, maybe with the help of your college history teacher, against the full background of the past, with John Adams (or his birther flacks) calling Thomas Jefferson the "son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto" and Adams calling Jefferson "hideous," "bald," "toothless" and "hermaphroditical." Look at our politicians with our model democracy in the background, ancient Athens, with clean families on the stage winning one case after another and politicians groomed by the best flacks (named "rhetoricians" then) winning the best offices. 

121. Power Sucks

The trouble with power is that as soon as people know you have it they're running to you to settle their quarrels. You arrive in a nice valley full of farmers, kill the big man in the castle, and right away you've got a bunch of farmers in your courtyard boo-hooing about other farmers.

Say you want to be a big man in the Old Testament. You beat up on this tribe and that tribe and take all the crescents off the necks of their camels. You've done more with the sword than any Hebrew hero in years. And where do they put your story? In the book of Judges. You're a damned quarrel-settler.

Go beyond your valley or your county and it gets worse. Build the biggest navy in the world, bombard your way into a few continents for their minerals, and what do you get? Not just minerals. Not just an empire. You get countries running to you to for quarrel-settlement. You decide on boundaries, you make rules, you prescribe systems. When the world's geography needs ordering you give it latitude and longitude.

I know, the assignment is inevitable. People go to the big power because no matter what judgment they get from the little power it can be overturned, smack, by the big power. So even if he's just a dumb jock (like Samson) the big man has to put on the robes, do the assizes, be the judge.

"But isn't being the big world power worth it? Getting all those minerals? Getting to make your place zero longitude?"

Only if you can stand all the names people call you. "Imperialist." "Aggressor." Besides, the payoff in minerals changes. In the old days you could just march in and take somebody's oil. Now there's a world organization with a court and a publicity system. You'd have the whole universe yelling at you. That's what it is to be the big power now. All quarrel-settling and damn few minerals.

"I think if I had the power I'd just sit there and not use it. Except for my own safety. At least I'd have nobody yelling at me."

A lot you know. People know you have the power. They know you can smack anybody you want to. And they don't care how dumb a jock you are. They'll want you to come in and settle quarrels a genius couldn't figure out.

"You mean it takes a genius to see that innocent people are dying, that a dictator is making war on his own people, that death by gas is horrible?"

No, it's easy to see those horrors. So easy that you can't help seeing them on both sides. That's where it gets tough.  Which side is committing the most horrors?  The worst?  How much worse to count against how many close-to-worst?  Suppose you have thirty pretty bad horrors and two downright awful.  Sometimes you've got to be a genius. You're not a genius, you don't go in to end the horrors, and everybody calls you bad names.  "Inhumane."  "Immoral." You're in as much pain not using your power as you were when you used it and got called "an imperialist."

"Sounds like the only way to avoid pain is to give up power. But then you'd never have the satisfaction of seeing a success, a nation with its own quarrel-settling system, democracy, set up and functioning. That will never happen unless you go in."

Don't talk to me about satisfaction. I may not be smart but I've lived. I know you can set up a democratic system that finally, after centuries, gives a people the power their majority calls for and then, if they're like the Iraqi Shi'ites, they'll throw their shoes at you. If satisfaction depends on gratitude, forget it.

"So you'll never use your power to help any Middle Eastern nation set up a democratic government?"

Not unless I get a lot smarter. Smart enough, anyway, to tell which side in a quarrel has a chance of doing democracy long term. Smart enough to see a semi- revolution, rather than a revolution, coming up. The trouble with revolutions, as Robert Frost pointed out, is that they bring the same kind of people back on top. The trouble with going in and helping revolutionaries is that you don't know how far they're going to revolve.

"And if you don't get that smart you'll what? Give up power? Go back to farming?"

No, I'll go for the power of example. The greater success our people have in managing their own quarrels the more the quarreling people of the world will be moved to the same kind of management in their countries. The power to invade isn't the only kind of power the United States can use. Think of the number of countries we didn't invade that became democracies.

115. Is Democracy an Ideology?

Is democracy an "ideology"? Does it have "agents"? Would they be "foreign agents"?

"No, you can't talk that way. An agent of a foreign ideology is somebody like those members of the Communist Party in the U.S. in the thirties. Somebody who works to undermine democracy."

Ah, but Marshal Tantawi and Prime Minister Putin are apparently talking that way. When Tantawi's people in Egypt's caretaker government accuse American NGOs of "interfering in domestic politics and stirring unrest" I hear his voice. When Putin's people lay responsibility for "turmoil in the streets" on American democracy-building groups I hear his. Both have gotten louder in the last month, with Putin's people accusing the American ambassador of "promoting revolution" (Huffington Post, 1-18-12) and Tantawi's people putting a travel ban on U.S. pro-democracy activists (Reuters, 1-26-120). What I'm wondering is how exactly their words are different from the words we used when we talked about communists as "agents of a foreign ideology."

"Well, the agents are certainly different and so are the ideologies — whatever the words. These give us enough to identify them."

Maybe so, but by the dictionary I think we're pretty firmly stuck. If an ideology is "the body of doctrine associated with a political movement" and an agent is "a person who acts on behalf of another person or group" and "foreign" tells you that person is from another country then those American-paid democracy-building people in Cairo and Moscow, right up to the ambassadors, are correctly called "agents of a foreign ideology." Putin and Tantawi are right.

"And so the only difference between communist agents in Washington then and democracy agents in Moscow now would be in their ideologies. But, you know, we shouldn't mind being stuck with that as long as we distinguish properly between their ideologies. Putin and Tantawi are each appealing to an ideology peculiar to their nation ("You're in Russia now, Ambassador McFaul") or culture ("Egypt is an Islamic country, sir") with its particular values; our ambassadors and NGOs are appealing to an ideology for the whole human race ("All men are created equal," they are "endowed with inalienable rights"). If democracy is an ideology our agents represent a superior one."

I know, I know. Universal values trump particular values. The American and French revolutions are the best. No nation or culture is justified in opposing them. Wonderful. Our ambassadors and NGOs work for humanity. And you know what? When I look at them all I can think of is "Old Dan Tucker." You know that song? "Get out of the way of old Dan Tucker, running late to get his supper.

"Don't you approve of those values? And of their priority?"

Yes, but they scare me to death. President Bush, appealing to them, loving them in the person of that Western, liberal president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, pushed to get Georgia into NATO. You know what that meant? It meant that if Russian troops invaded Georgia we, by the NATO commitment, would have had to send troops to their aid. All the way to Georgia, a country far from us, and which we could supply only through the Black Sea. Furthermore, it was adjacent to Russia, which still had a load of nuclear weapons. And we'd have had to take them on, or been "humiliated" — as they say of the worst thing that can happen to a Great Power.

The trouble with universal values is that you act on them in particular situations, facing a particular number of troops motivated by a particular culture or ideology. You can, as a friend in the Army once said, lose your particular ass.

"Isn't that the risk, more or less, of acting on any ideal?"

Yes, but risks vary with the ideal, and this one is loaded, especially for Americans. Talk about defending liberty and human rights and we'll line up behind you. How we lined up behind President Kennedy when he said, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty” It excites me still. But where did that line lead? Into the agony of Viet Nam.

Think of President Bush going into Iraq. Get out of the way of Old Dan Tucker. He was like the other presidents except that he called up the defend-democracy spirit late, after he was already in the particular place. "No weapons of mass destruction? No Al Qaeda? No real threat? OK, we're here to build democracy." The American public will always excuse action toward that ideal. They wouldn't do that for an "ideology."

"That gives me an idea. Call 'democracy' an ideology and they'll quit excusing action in its name. And they won't be so eager to fight for it in every corner of the world. Good verbal move."

Sure, and it's exactly the move Putin is making. Democracy is an ideology like any other, and it happens that this particular country, the United States, is pushing it. On us.

"Is democracy an ideology like any other?"

Only, I suppose, if the American revolution is a revolution like any other.

114. Reconciliation in Egypt

The news from Egypt is so heartening I can't resist commenting on it. You remember what we were looking at there, this impasse over the new government? The military council and the Muslim Brotherhood dug in? Do you remember your feelings? Me, I was asking, "What hope is there when junta generals and religious zealots go up against each other? When has either one ever softened?"

Then Monday, the word from Cairo: an accord reached on "the creation of a presidential-parliamentary government, a legal system no more Islamic than the previous one and broad guarantees of freedom of religion and expression." It would include some degree, still to be worked out, of civilian control over the military.

There was little doubt in my mind about the zealous fundamentalism of the Brotherhood. I believed what Mary Crane said about it (for the Council on Foreign Relations), that it "seeks to Islamicize societies from the ground up and compel governments in Muslim countries to adhere to sharia, or Islamic law."

Nor did I have much doubt about the generals' determination. I believed that their position let them run and profit from a lot of key industries, knew that they did not pay taxes, and figured they had a lot of income they'd lose if they lost power. They had every reason to dig in.

So there they were, strongmen and zealots, staring each other down, and by the track record of every other horse in either stable there was no way they were going to send me home happy. Yet that's what they did! They sat down and said, "Hell, we're both in this together. Let's work something out." You'd think they were veterans of the democratic process. That's what we say over here, in this old democracy, isn't it? Isn't it?

102. How Should We Speak the Word "Democracy"?

"You don't really believe in democracy, you English-speakers, you believe in it only when the right guys are going to win." Try to answer that and you're hit with the names of the democratically elected wrong guys our guys moved out of office, Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, Salvadore Allende in Chile. Or, worse, a quote from Dwight Eisenhower backing Ngo Dinh Diem's cancellation of elections in Viet Nam: "80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh." Hold on, Vietnamese, you're not going to get any support from us for democracy.

So, if we state, "America is a democracy" proudly we're going to get a lot of noise. Can we quiet it down by making the statement doggedly? "We know, we know, but everybody has to compromise their ideals sometimes. In those times that you mention national self-interest trumped the democratic ideal, sure. But we had a good reason for that: serving our interest served the interest of democracy. The nation keeping democracy alive around the world has to keep itself alive, doesn't it? The Soviets used the same argument about communism and their country."

Say that, and then point out that we still have an election every four years, don't we? Peaceful transfer of power, that's our big claim. Democracy gives "power to the people most likely to be troublesome if deprived of it, the majority" (Post 39). We've got the essentials.

Clearly doggedness in that line can buy us some peace and quiet. But will it ever last? Aren't there always going to be some bad guys we want to keep out of power? And aren't there always going to be people of our own, maybe a majority, crying, "Bad! Bad! Keep them out! Keep them out!" Right now we've got Islamists threatening to win elections all over the Middle East. In Egypt there are some generals ready to keep them out. If we say, "Go ahead, generals, deprive them of power," how dogged can we be about those essentials? That's just what the generals will be violating. "Oh no," they'll hear us saying, "those people aren't going to be troublesome. They're just the majority." Yes, and we're the voice of democracy.

We don't know whether we'll talk like that yet but we know that if we do the word "democracy" is going to stick in our throats. And dogged repetition isn't going to help.

So, how will we speak the word? Should we maybe not use it? Find some other word for what we represent? No, we are still doing many things that only the word "democracy" identifies. And some of these are the ones that get us into the deepest trouble. Why do our leaders listen to those voices crying simply, "Bad! Bad!" — over communists in Viet Nam, or tyrants in Mesopotamia, or Islamists in Egypt? They know that the situations in those places are, or were, very complicated, and simple good-bad calls are very dangerous. They must know that. Educated people know that. Ah, but these educated people must, to stay in power, have the votes of the majority, which has never, in any country yet, had time (or inclination) to educate itself. So there you are. Democracy. There's no other word for it.

All right, we just have to find a becoming way of saying the word "democracy." It's tough. Luckily, though, we have some pretty good guides. Winston Churchill, after admitting that democracy was a terrible form of government, once added that it was "just better than all the others." There's our cue. Say it resignedly, or wryly. "Ah me, America is a democracy." In a store full of trash you've got to make the best of a bad bargain.

93. "Technocratic leader"

Greece and Italy now have premiers they are calling "technocratic leaders" (NYT, 11-11-11). The term distinguishes them from "democratic leaders." It's a distinction to die for these days in Europe, where the people of these two countries accept, in principle, the need for austerity measures to get themselves (and Europe) through the debt crisis, and punish the democratic leader who puts the principle into practice.

No distinction promises to play out better. In the capital one leader speaks for the principle, gets agreement, then leaves. Another comes on and does the practical part. In the streets there is pain, especially among all those losing jobs they got under the political patronage system. "Those dirty politicians!" says one sufferer. "No, no," says another, "this one's not a politician, he's just a technician, making sure the machinery works. You can't blame him." A "technocratic leader" is a leader who can't be blamed.

No premiers will ever be loved more by the premiers they replace. Technocratic premiers preside over an "interim government," which is also a "government of national unity." Those wonderful terms tell the nation that they're not a threat, they'll be gone, the politicians can come back, and, bless the technocrat, there'll be harmony when they do.

Nowadays we're likely to see a computer expert. He takes the program the nation needs, plugs it in, pushes the right buttons, and the machine cranks out the desiderata while everybody else is enjoying their coffee.

What we're looking at is essentially an ends-means machine, and everybody who dislikes dirty work (the old name for what the machine does) should have one. It leaves you free to go for good ends without getting stained by any of the bad means attached to them. This machine just makes the connections on its own.

I would think democratic leaders would want to provide every voter with one of these ends-means machines. Then every time voters demanded that he go for a good end the leader could say, "Call up the program. Follow it through. Decide whether you have the courage to go all the way with it. Then tell me you want it." What a teaching device! The voter's inattention or incapacity, the great plague of democratic leadership, would no longer plague him. He'd never be blamed for failing to produce the impossible.

Would we want this machine to be like the punitive one in Franz Kafka's famous story "In the Penal Colony"? That machine inscribed its lesson on the body. The technician fed it a diagram and needles traced out the crime until the subject, in pain, understood it. Surely our technology could produce its equal.

Our answer will no doubt depend on our view of our fellow human beings. Are they capable of paying sufficient attention? Of doing what's required of them? If we think they are then we'll be willing to punish them for not doing so. Inattention and cowardice become crimes. At the end of the line here is vindictive pleasure: "Neglect your homework, will you? Ruin the country with your ignorant demands? Shame your friends with your timid dodges? Well here's something that will teach you!"

On the other hand, if we think they're not capable we'll scorn the machine, as the humane Europeans in Kafka's story scorn theirs. We'll stick to patient instruction in the world's cause-effect sequences. What's at the end of the line here depends on how serious those sequences can be. If one of them ends in the disappearance of democracy (or, God help us, in the disappearance of the world) then the end for this view is in an appalling complaisance, people sitting around at the last trump wishing they'd been harder on inattention and cowardice.

80. "Repressive regime"

What does a "repressive regime" repress? Human rights. What does a "progressive regime" promote? Human progress. And what do you call a regime that denies human rights and promotes human progress?

We have no word for such a regime but we do have a wonderful example, the regime of Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore. If by progress you mean movement from the old and benighted to the new and enlightened that state has made it. Its public schools are now up alongside the best in the world, its pension system is a model, its wealth per capita is higher than Britain's, and its corruption is less than that of any state in Asia.

But oh what violations of human rights. Lee imprisoned critics without trial, suspended habeas corpus, arrested union leaders, deregistered unions, and had vandals caned. He also, according to Nicholas Kristof, "banned bubblegum, punished people who did not flush toilets and…forcibly gave haircuts to young men with long hair" (NYT 11-5-00).

Americans have to choose between the put-down word and the build-up word. There is no in-between. So it's case by case. Here's the Shah of Iran, pushing all kinds of social and economic reforms, expropriating large estates for the benefit of small farmers, extending suffrage to women, improving the schools, extending literacy, and raising the national income to record heights. In the New York Times (since 1981, two years after his people threw him out) his regime gets called "repressive" eleven times. Then there's the regime of Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, which tried to do the same and more in Turkey, and succeeded. Not one time is his regime called "repressive." Ataturk had nothing like the Shah's secret police but that word still fit him. He outlawed the fez and tried to cut off beards.

So, no surprise. We use the word "repressive" selectively and we obviously take success into consideration. It's a little like "treason"; if it succeeds who dares name it?

Otto von Bismarck thought success took care of the whole problem. "Our democratic friends," he said, "will pipe in vain when they see princes concerned with their well-being." That was after he set up social insurance for German workers. But America can't stop piping. And its democratic history calls the tune. But alas, the words come from the dictionary. There "repressive" means "inhibiting or restraining the freedom of a person or group of people." And that means that every dictator America supported in the Cold War and every oil autocrat it supports now comes within the word's range of reference. The dictionary shows the world, to which we and Bismarck pipe, how disharmonious our song is.

My guess is that that will never stop us from singing about human rights. After the idealists ask us what we as a nation stand for we won't be able to bear the silence. We've been pretty well taught that there are more important things than harmony.

61. The Student March that Brought Down Syngman Rhee.

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One of Hitler's gifts to the 20th century (and Lord knows how many later centuries) is greater confidence in the use of the word "evil." We may once, facing the mixed-up moral world, have been at a loss to find a reference for that word, but no more. Hitler nailed it, and at the same time nailed "good" as its opposite.

I think of that clarity now when I remember my response to the first two riots (or law-breaking demonstrations) I knew anything about. In the first, that at Newport in 1960 (see preceding Post), the students were to me clearly Yahoos, with no cause but their own pleasure. In the second, that at Korea University in the same year, the students were clearly true-blue soldiers in the fight for justice and democracy, the most noble political cause university people can have.

Though both of my responses were equally sure, my love for the fighters for justice and democracy went much deeper than my dislike of the Yahoos. I came home looking for a student leader to hug.  So too would you, university friend, if you had heard what I heard.

Try listening to this. A Korean professor of American Studies is explaining, over coffee, the political situation in 1960. "Syngman Rhee's way of governing is to declare martial law, round up the assembly members opposed to him, and make them vote his way. That's what he did in 1952, to defeat a motion for parliamentary government. He did the same kind of thing in March, 1960, to get himself re-elected. And nobody was doing anything about it.

"Except the students. You know what they did, the students of my university, my students? With the streets and housetops full of soldiers they organized a march, here to the Blue House, three miles, to try to pull the townspeople into some kind of fight. Fight all right. The soldiers let them have it. From the rooftops. When they reached the square. Two hundred [142, later] of them were killed, 2000 [1500, later] wounded. Our students they were, and students from the other universities, who joined the march on the way.

"Well, we had a faculty meeting to decide whether we should march.  But too many professors were afraid for their jobs, and maybe their lives, for us to make a decision. Still, when we came out each individual faced a choice. Turn one way and you were on a streetcar heading for your house. Turn the other way and you were heading for the government buildings. Some students had gathered around that path, waiting to see and, hopefully, help.

"Most profs went home but enough of us turned toward town to excite the students, who gathered around offering aid. 'Do you need a jacket? Water? A hat?' More students came running up, with some running right back toward the dormitories, carrying the news.

"There on the grass we made our banners, two of them. (A student had suddenly appeared with, surprise, cloth, paint, and poles.) On the first banner we wrote this: [My informant —  whose name, alas, I cannot now dredge up — put words, in Korean, on a card I still have.] It says, 'Make up for the bloodshed of our students.' On the second banner we wrote, 'Syngman Rhee, step down.'

"By now there were a lot of students, falling in behind us and cheering as we moved through the campus toward the streets. It was a rare thing in Korea. University teachers here are highly respected but aloof. They don't do this kind of thing. Ordinary students were amazed, as you could hear in the shouts from our margins to those in the buildings. 'The professors are marching! The professors are marching!'

"But it really was a student march. They poured in from all parts the campus, gathering behind their leaders. These leaders had been through it before — yes, all those dead, all those wounded, many by hostile (hired?) people on the sidewalks — and they knew what they were doing. They knew what we were worth to them. You could see that as we got to the campus exit onto the city streets. There we could see figures on rooftops. There the sidewalks were filling up. Just before we got to them, at some leader's sign (I suppose), the students formed ranks around us, front and sides, to protect us.

"There was little cheering from the students. It was too tense. And from the streets and windows, at first there was near silence. Surprise, I think. But you could hear individual voices. 'The professors are marching. The professors!'"

If I there had been any pretense to objectivity before it would have broken down here.  I get worked up as I think about it now and my source then, for all his Asian reserve, broke at this point into open confession. He had gotten a Ph.D. in American Studies at some Midwestern university. Drawing on material at the USIS, and on talks by Fulbrighters like me,  he had for eight years or more been teaching students the values of critical inquiry, open discussion, and democratic government. And he'd seen those values trampled on, and trampled on. And he'd done nothing about it. Now here were his students, not only putting their lives on the line for those values but putting them on the line for him.  It was the high point of his teaching life, maybe his life. He confessed it and said, "I looked at those students between me and the crowd and I said, 'I don't care if I die. I will finish this march with them.'"

The rest of his story was wonder. The streets began to cheer. "The students! The professors! Go! Go! Yea! Yea!" People came out of the doors with sandwiches. An elderly man broke through to give my colleague a Coke. There were more and more of them, the closer they got to the government house. The figures on the rooftops melted away. In the square there was unity, expressing itself in a roar. From streets and houses.

They stood for a while, presenting their message, then went their ways. My friend went to a noodle shop with some colleagues. "We went home not sure whether we'd have jobs the next day. Or a home." Next day, 26 April, a student came bursting in. "We won. We won. Rhee is resigning. We won."

If you react to that story as I did you can imagine the kind of shape I was in when, back in the States before the year was out, I joined the March on the Pentagon.  Next Post.