We talk a lot about democracy in this country, especially during this poisonous presidential campaign. But put 12 of us together and ask each to describe “democracy,” and you’ll probably get 12 different definitions. Not all that different though, because there will be at least one common link: If you say the sun comes up in the east and I say it comes up in the west, aside perhaps from ridicule, neither of us pays a painful penalty for our disagreement.
The astronomer Galileo wasn’t so lucky. Just for promoting the theory that the Earth revolved around the sun, he was convicted of heresy and sentenced, until his death, to house arrest. Amazingly, that kind of mental myopia still exists in much of the world, where people have no notion of the meaning of democracy. Even where some think they do, it’s a far sight from ours.
You’ll find egregious examples in today’s Middle East.
Remember all those purple-stained fingers people proudly displayed only a decade ago in Iraq, having just participated in their first real election? That was democracy all right, but look what followed: the once-oppressed Shiites won, the once-dominant Sunnis lost, and it became “winner-take-all” democracy. That legacy lasts to this day.
Then there’s Egypt, where presidents like Hosni Mubarak and Anwar Sadat before him were routinely elected and re-elected to office with more than 90 percent of the vote. Because democratic elections were seen as a sham, citizens had to be convinced after the Arab Spring to buy into the promise of truly free ballots. But the process produced a regime that the generals disliked, so it was fiercely overthrown.
Egyptians have told me it will be generations before they ever again trust in the dream of democracy.
In Russia, President Vladimir Putin over the years has slowly but surely diminished the democratic liberties for which Soviet citizens long yearned and, after the Soviet collapse in 1991, briefly acquired.
How has he gotten away with it? A dissident politician (whose own political party has since been “disqualified”) explained it to me in his Moscow office: “Russians in the ’90s had key problems: the economy fell down, incomes fell down, corruption grew up, many things were terrible, and the name for that was ‘democracy.’ “
So put aside the other constitutional provisions that govern us and the candidates who unnerve us. The meaning of democracy in this unsettling era for America hasn’t changed; we can say what we think, no matter how ignorant, no matter how offensive. The sun still comes up the next day, and the day after that.
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen is an author, public speaker, and former foreign correspondent for ABC News.
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