Democracy With a Lid On It
The rich and the various assorted enablers-of-the-rich were all there in Davos, Switzerland this week, while the previously-disenfranchised milled around various Palestinian polling places. Both events were (and are) experiments in, or the results of, ventures in democracy that were unheard of a half century ago.
The casting out of dictators in Asia, along with China’s moderation into a wannabe consumer-based economy has brought immense capital wealth to the Far East. The lid is certainly off (or nearly off) that trembling, boiling pot that is the masses of Asia. Nearby, in the Middle East, the steam is rising—a pressure-cooker, whose clamped-down lid seeks out an early release of pressure in the Stans, Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq, in an effort to avoid explosion.
Far East and Middle East are works-in-progress and, while the short-term results may be subject to whims of capital or forces of rhetoric and bias , there is no denying their progress toward democracy in the long run. This is …