Andrew Sullivan attempts to ding Daniel Larison for an overly dogmatic realist critique of democratization.

Larison first:

Egypt and Jordan can remain at peace with Israel despite the profound unpopularity of this arrangement because the governments are unaccountable and authoritarian. Surely the elections in Gaza should tell us that democratization allows people with deep grievances to vent them by empowering the most extreme and radical elements. This has proved to be ruinous for people in Gaza and far from what Israel wants. Democratization and regional stability are incompatible. If you desire one, you cannot have the other.

Sullivan writes, “I don’t buy the argument that in the long run, autocracies are more stable than democracies, even in the Middle East,” and goes on to cite Iran as proof of the instability of the autocratic model when it comes to succession.

He’s missing the point, though. I’m not sure even steely Larison would go so far as to argue that autocratic succession is any kind of ideal. Autocracies by their very nature change leaders amidst a tension that can at any time spill over into war. Indeed, the greatest achievement of democracy has been that power transfers have been institutionalized to the point of violence being a nearly unthinkable outcome.

What Daniel is correctly railing against, however, is the by far most questionable aspect of Democratic Peace theory: namely that democracies do not go to war against each other. Democratic Peace theorists like the claim, with some sleights of hand, that history bears out this claim. But Daniel’s counter-example is a powerful one. Is there much doubt that the Arab Street, if given access to the reins of power, would demand anything but the annihilation of Israel?

Daniel Larison has a characteristically insightful and thoughtful post up about the rush to double standards that the strong showing of Yisrael Beiteinu is provoking in people. Contra Greenwald, he argues that the real inconsistency is not that America won’t threaten to recall its ambassador to Israel if Avigdor Lieberman gets a cabinet post as it did to Vienna when Joerg Haider won 26% of the vote in Austria. Rather, it’s that people who are strong believers in the goodness of democracy seek to delegitimize and circumvent legitimate expressions of popular support for politics they find abhorrent.

Absolutely correct, though I suspect my conclusion is somewhat different from Daniel’s. I’m simply much more skeptical about the wisdom of “the people” in any given situation. To vulgarize Churchill: we’re for democracy not because it’s awesome, but because everything else sucks more.

Glenn Greenwald excerpts some noxious drivel from The Corner and goes on to complain:

And these are the high-minded, deeply Serious observations one finds in just one 24 hour period in the most respectable right-wing outlet in America. This is to say nothing of what one finds peddled by the lower levels of the right-wing noise machine: Rush Limbaugh, Instapundit, Bill O’Reilly, Drudge, right-wing blogs and the like. But this really is exactly the political faction that has exerted dominant political power in this country for the last 15 years, and has exclusively shaped America’s behavior for the last eight years. And, as a result, we have exactly the country one would expect would be produced when people who have these beliefs are empowered.

I’d like to extend the thesis to Mr. Greenwald that it’s not that we have the country we do today because of the fulminations of certain right-wing publications, but rather that these fulminations are an expression of the true beliefs and dark paranoias which haunt America’s psyche. Fighting the symptoms is no cure.

Matt, horrified at some Hillary campaign cheese, quips:

Every time I see something painfully lame done on Clinton’s behalf, I think she just might ultimately win this thing. At the end of the day, the United States is a pretty tacky middlebrow kind of country.

Not quite. This is more a problem with democracy. Good taste separates refined men from the great unwashed mass of ape which is humanity at large. Democracy elevates the ape, be it in the United States, Europe or Japan.