Democracy matters, even somebody else's

I've got my iTunes streaming WBEZ (Chicago Public Radio), listening to the news from Tahrir Square in Cairo.  For those of you who have been under a rock, the big news today is that, after 18 days of mass protests by the Egyptian people, their dictatorial president of the past 30 years (Hosni Mubarak) has resigned from his presidency and handed over power to his vice president and head of the military, Omar Suleiman.


The significance of this event cannot be overstated.  Last month, when the same sort of protests drove out Tunisia's similarly dictatorial leader, it started a chain reaction of protests across the Arab world, and now we see the first major power shift in a serious world political player.  There is much that can be said about all of this, but two things from this blur of a past three weeks come to mind.


First - the failure of the old way of doing things in the realm of foreign policy.  A key reason that Mubarak stayed in power for as long as he did was the open support of his regime given by the US government thanks to Mubarak's willingness to at least recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli government.  It's only one example of our government's willingness to support anti-democratic dictators with poor human rights records as long as they do what we want them to do.  It's the story of Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s (Pinochet, anyone?), of sub-Saharan Africa throughout the Cold War (The Congo and Angola being shining examples of this sort of foreign policy philosophy), and of the Middle East from the creation of the state of Israel on.  It creates a hypocritical dynamic in our supposed dedication to promoting democracy around the world.  More accurate - we support our own democracy, and are willing to tacitly deny other people their democracy if we think their subjugation will somehow uphold our privilege.  Even the much-tauted commiepinkobastardmarxistmuslim President Obama was awfully reluctant to really, truly express support for the Egyptian protestors - consider the mixed messages which have come from the upper echelons of the government over the past three weeks.  I won't even go there with Glenn Beck's paranoid whackjob conspiracy theory soup de jour about how this is the beginning of "a new caliphate" which relies on an alliance between forces which are in absolutely ideological opposition to one another.


Second - the antidote to stale, outdated, hypocritical, oppressive Cold War era foreign policy is...people power.  That's right; actual democracy can, in fact, accomplish things - and among those things, an open door to liberty for people who've been sorely deprived of it for far too long.  If we're really, truly as a nation going to commit ourselves to supporting democracy across the world, then our support for those seeking democracy in the face of authoritarianism must be unwavering.  Yes, democracy is a complicated, messy affair which can be as much the tool of reactionary nonsense as actual good government, but...that's the risk we take when we embrace freedom and self-realization as cardinal virtues.  Much like love, you can't really control democracy - you just have to embrace it for what it is, and rest in the knowledge that, yes, the world really is a better place for it.