It is more than a bit telling that a day after this psuedoconservative paean to democracy by Victor David Hanson appeared in National Review, we learn that a slate of candidates backed by Islamic clerics win the first series of municipal elections in Saudi Arabia.
Hanson amazingly notes, “A Hitler, Mussolini, shah, or Pinochet can hijack for a time weak democracies, but they offered no real improvement and only led the people to disaster.” No real improvement? Disaster? It’s more than a bit disingenuous to compare Pincohet or the Shah to Hitler and Mussolini. The former–and their peers such as Franco or, for that matter, Bismark and Chiang Kai Shek–did a great deal to modernize their countries, create conditions of order required for the building of wealth, and defeat much bigger threats, that is, to lead their people away from disaster, namely the very real 20th Century threat of totalitarian communism. In other words, its preferable to have an authoritarian regime on the way to liberalism and then eventually some kind of popular rule, then to have true totalitarianism. Hanson’s wilful blindness to this distinction is shocking, especially from a so-called conservative; after all, it was conservatives that made this case so compellingly during the Cold War, viz. Jeane Kirpatrick’s famous essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards.”
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