Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

Another View of the Palestinian Election

If it irritates you to have to sit through an ad in order to read an article on salon.com, here’s another view of the Hamas victory from the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne Jr.

Two Elections and a Lesson
But the world is a complicated place. Of course free elections in Iraq are hugely better than dictatorship. But when free elections become more a census to count members of warring ethnic and religious factions than a way of settling underlying disputes, they do not necessarily pave the way for enduring democracy. They do not provide voters with ways of test-driving the various alternatives.

I think Dionne is making the common mistake of thinking “dictatorship” automatically means “evil meanie in charge”. A dictatorship need not be a bad things for the people who live under one. (Ergo, the term “benevolent dictator”.) Particularly if those people, like the Palestinians and Iraqis, are so strongly tied to their different ethnic identities that they are unable to consider what would be best for their entire country outside of what would best for their particular group.

It’s like I said before: individualism vs collectivism. We here in the United States have a strong cultural history of individualism that, for the most part, enables us to be more objective about choosing our leaders.