'Democracy' Egyptian style

Finally, how represented is the vox populi even in established democracies?

In a democracy, people can freely protest and make their opinions known, no doubt. Sometimes, they can even change their representatives (though the rate of turnover in the US Congress in the last two decades is lower than it was in the last 20 years of the Politburo).

But is this a sufficient incentive (or deterrent)? The members of the various elites in Western democracies are mobile - they ceaselessly and facilely hop from one lucrative sinecure to another. Lost the elections as a Senator? How about a multi-million dollar book contract, a consultant position with a firm you formerly oversaw or regulated, your own talk show on television, a cushy job in the administration?

The truth is that voters are powerless. The rich and mighty take care of their own. Malfeasance carries little risk and rarely any sanction. Western democracies are ossified bastions of self-perpetuating interest groups aided and abetted and legitimized by the ritualized spectacle that we call "elections". And don't you think the denizens of Africa and Asia and eastern Europe and the Middle East are blissfully unaware of this charade.

Moreover, as the United states is re-discovering in Iraq and Israel in Palestine, maintaining democratic institutions and empire-building are incompatible activities. History repeatedly shows that one cannot preserve a democratic core in conjunction with an oppressed periphery of colonial real estate.

The role of imperial power entails the suppression, subversion, or manipulation of all forms of free speech, governance, and elections. It usually involves unsavory practices such as torture, illegal confinement, assassinations, and collusion with organized crime. Empires typically degenerate into an abyss of corruption, megalomaniacal projects, deceit, paranoia, and self-directed aggression.

The annals of both Rome and Britain teach us that, as democracy grows entrenched, empires disintegrate fitfully. Rome chose to keep its empire by sacrificing its republic. Britain chose to democratize by letting go of its unwieldy holdings overseas. Both polities failed to uphold their erstwhile social institutions while they grappled with their smothering possessions.

And true democracy is on the retreat.

From Venezuela to Thailand, democratic regimes are being toppled by authoritarian substitutes: the military, charismatic left-wingers, or mere populists. Even in the USA, the bastion of constitutional rule, civil and human rights are being alarmingly eroded (though not without precedent in wartime).

The prominent ideologues of liberal democracy have committed a grave error by linking themselves inextricably with the doctrine of freemarketry and the emerging new order of globalization. As Thomas Friedman correctly observes in "The Lexus and the Olive Tree", both strains of thought are strongly identified with the United States of America (USA).

Thus, liberal democracy came to be perceived by the multitudes as a ruse intended to safeguard the interests of an emerging, malignantly narcissistic empire (the USA) and of rapacious multinationals. Liberal democracy came to be identified with numbing, low-brow cultural homogeneity, encroachment on privacy and the individual, and suppression of national and other idiosyncratic sentiments.

Liberal democracy came to be confused and confuted with neo-colonial exploitation, social Darwinism, and the crumbling of social compacts and long-standing treaties, both explicit and implicit. It even came to be associated with materialism and a bewildering variety of social ills: rising crime rates, unemployment, poverty, drug addiction, prostitution, organ trafficking, monopolistic behavior, corporate malfeasance, and other antisocial forms of conduct.