Democratically-minded Strongmen?

Submitted by John in Michigan, USA (United States), Oct 29, 2009 at 20:04

While the future is impossible to know, I share Dr. Pipes' pessimism about the chances for success of these kept politicians.

Elsewhere, Dr. Pipes has made clear his misgivings about the neo-con democracy agenda, and called instead numerous times for a "democratically-minded strongman" in places like Iraq.

I assume that in Dr. Pipes ideal world, there would be a meaningful difference between his idea of a strongman, what he refers to as Washington's kept politician. However, we do not live in that ideal world. Hearing calls for democratically minded strongmen, Washington (particularly Foggy Bottom) will instead deliver kept politicians, since that is what Washington knows how do to.

Dr. Pipes should, at least, explain in detail the difference between the strongmen he prefers, and the kept politicians he criticizes.

Furthermore, he should consider than no matter how well he explains the difference, his explanations will likely be ignored, misunderstood, or exploited by the establishment, in order to justify more kept politicians.

Here to me is the attractiveness of the neo-con democracy agenda: it presents a clear, unambiguous alternate vision, in contrast with the stability-at-all-costs establishment. Therefore, it is more likely to resist being co-opted by the establisment. In addition, if the agenda succeeds (which happens, but less often that we'd like and often in unexpected ways) we get the real thing; if it fails, it could be designed to degrade reasonably well into the democratically-minded strongman approach that Pipes finds more realistic.

Neo-cons, for their part, need to be less focused on elections and more focused on other democratic institutions such as civil society and rule of law. Same goes for the elections fetish of the UN and its constellation of left-leaning NGOs.

The subtle differences (whatever they are) between a strongman and a kept politician make perfect sense in academia, but I contend that in the real world there is likely to be little difference. Whereas, there is no mistaking the democracy agenda for a status-quo, politician-keeping policy, even if the democracy agenda in practice ends up promoting democratically-minded strongmen.

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