World Democracy: Tocqueville

Events in China, Iran and Myanmar remind us that the will to democracy is alive around the world. It does not need the support of American weapons. It needs the support of the people living under those authoritarian regimes. That support is growing, as the people come to see that authoritarian governments are not ultimately concerned about the general welfare of the people. The allegiance of an authoritarian government is to individuals, dogma or tradition. To protect these things, authoritarian governments set aside the needs and aspirations of their people.

This state of affairs cannot last. Alexis de Tocqueville observed that:

• “Variety is disappearing from the human race; the same ways of acting, thinking, and feeling are to be met with all over the world. This is not only because nations work more upon each other, and are more faithful in their mutual imitation; but as the men of each country relinquish more and more the peculiar opinions and feelings of a caste, a profession, or a family, they simultaneously arrive at something nearer to the constitution of man, which is everywhere the same. Thus they become more alike, even without having imitated each other. Like travelers scattered about some large wood, which is intersected by paths converging to one point, if all of them keep their eyes fixed upon that point and advance towards it, they insensibly draw nearer together--though they seek not, though they see not, though they know not each other; and they will be surprised at length to find themselves all collected on the same spot. All the nations which take, not any particular man, but man himself, as the object of their researches and their imitations, are tending in the end to a similar state of society, like these travelers converging to the central plot of the forest.” [Democracy in America, Volume II, Part III, Ch.17]

• “The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal; but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or to wretchedness.” [Democracy in America, Volume II, Part IV, Ch. 8]

May the party officials in China apprehend that “democratic centralism” is not democratic.

May the clerics in Iran apprehend that it does not help their religion or their government to insist that their religion and government be combined. [May our Republican leaders in the U.S. apprehend this, too!]

May the generals in Myanmar apprehend that their authoritarian control of the nation is harming the welfare of their people, and the Law of Karma applies. Free Aung San Suu Kyi and all of the people of Myanmar!