PILING ON KAPLAN. As Spencer notes below, Larry Kaplan apparently fears that Americans will not want to invade other countries in order to install democracy after recoiling in horror from what's happening in Iraq. Kaplan writes as if there isn't a robust democratization literature that, although it hasn't definitively settled every question, has at least achieved consensus on some big-bucket factors that make a country a good candidate for democracy. Though there are some important scholars (notably Max Weber) who laid the groundwork in different areas, the democracy literature generally started back with Seymour Lipset's seminal 1959 journal article, Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy, which laid out a number of conditions under which democracies develop and thrive. (Lipset is no stranger to neoconservative circles, as for instance it was Nathan Glazer who urged him to develop this article and a number of others into his famous book Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. A writer for Commentary magazine observed in 1961 that the book "once again demonstrated his preeminent position in the fields of both sociology and political science." Given these credentials, Kaplan should have been exposed to Lipset at some point.) Lipset's criteria -- among them economic wealth, an open class system, an egalitarian value system, a capitalist economy, a high literacy rate, legitimate and efficient institutions, and high participation in voluntary organizations (no, militias don't count!) -- were not meant to be rigid, but by any measure, Iraq was never a good candidate. Throw in the oil, the ethno-sectarian cleavages, Saddam's decimation of society, the intolerance of radical Islamist politics, a historical rejection of colonialism, and you have the current mess on your hands. Any "democracy promotion" doctrine shouldn't simply chuck what we've learned over the last 50 years about democracy in favor of a policy of mere wishful thinking. Otherwise we will just be wasting American lives, dollars, and prestige in a fruitless enterprise.
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Blake Hounshell
