Democracy and Freedom Are Not The Same Things

In it's "featured article" today, entitled "Democracy Angst," the WSJ Opinion Journal defends the effort to spread democracy in the Arab world, arguing that despite such illiberal outcomes as the victory of Hamas in Palestine, the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, the sectarianism of the elections in Iraq, and the strong showing by the Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt, it offers the best long-term hope for stability. The argument is summed up in the concluding paragraphs:

This is not to say democracy is a cure-all. It is also not to say that the peril these democracies face, from terrorist insurrection or ethnic or religious feuding, isn't grave. Nor, finally, is it to say that the "Hitler scenario" can be excluded in a democratizing Middle East; that possibility is always present, especially among nascent democracies.

But democracy also offers the possibility of greater liberalism and greater moderation, possibilities that have been opened with the courageously pro-American governments of Hamid Karzai, Jalal Talabani and Saad Hariri. And as we stand with them, it seems to us that America's bets are better placed promoting democracies--even if some of them succumb to illiberal temptations--than acceding to dictatorships, which already have.

Or does someone have a better idea?

I don't really have a better idea. However, I think it is important to recognize that the editorial -- as does most of the writing and rhetoric around this topic -- conflates two different concepts. What we really want to spread is not so much democracy as it is "freedom." While we tend to think of democracy and freedom as being synonymous, they are not. Democracy is simply a process by which leaders are chosen. Freedom, on the other hand, is the substance of daily life: freedom of speech, press, religion and association; freedom from unreasonable governmental intrusion into our daily lives; and, the corollary of all of those: tolerance for people whose beliefs, preferences, and (within limits) practices differ from our own. It is this tolerance rather than the mechanisms used to select leaders that tends to make countries peaceful.

As the middle east is proving, over and over again, the fact that people are free to vote is no guarantee that the vote will result in either freedom or tolerance. Quite to the contrary. Elections in the middle east seem today to be more about legitimizing a tyranny of the majority over the minority. A tyranny is no less tyrannical because the tyrants were freely elected. And, it is no less a threat to its neighbors.

The fact that there have been free elections in the middle east is not a bad thing, of course. But it does not warrant the optimism it seems to engender in us. Elections are, in the end, relatively easy to set up. They are entirely mechanical. The essential -- but very much harder part -- is for the society to develop that commitment to tolerance that is the essential underpinning of what we refer to as freedom. Without that, democracy is simply another path to tyranny. And regardless of the mechanism used to invest it with power, a tyranny rooted in hatred of others is a threat to its neighbors.