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27 February 2011

Fitness for Democracy

Questioning whether Arabs, or anyone else, are politically mature enough to handle democracy, as Nicolas D. Kristof does in his Opinion article in the February 27, 2011, New York Times, is presumptuous. He makes the same mistake as Francis Fukuyama in his book, The End of History—just because Western nations seem to have settled on liberal democracy as their favored form of government does not make it the ultimate achievement in fairly ordering human affairs.

Although the consent of the governed is necessary for rulers to govern legitimately, a majority of subjects may willingly acquiesce to other forms of government than a democratic republic. That they do does not make them less mature; it may derive from their general valuation of other considerations as more important than individual free will, such as communal cohesion or religious piety.

Mr. Kristof, like many in the media, too quickly generalizes from the beliefs of a few committed activists in a place like Tahrir Square to characterize most Egyptian citizens, for example, as liberal democrats. We shall see what form of government ultimately results from the overthrow of the Mubarak regime. Even if it is accepted by the majority of Egyptians, it does not have to be a liberal democracy to be a more legitimate political order than what preceded it.

24 February 2011

Collectively Bargaining Teachers

In the dispute with Wisconsin’s Governor in early 2011, Randy Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers claims the right to collectively bargain with its employers on behalf of its members. As a critical supporter of the Democratic Party, the AFT has corralled the Party’s members of the legislature into fleeing the state in order to deny a quorum in one of its houses. The AFT’s members are professionals whose union also demands post-graduate education for them at the expense of the public. Can they really have it both ways?

Labor’s right to collectively bargain has been an accepted feature of labor-management relations because it supposedly compensates for the disadvantage at which non-professional and individually non-essential employees find themselves vis-à-vis their bosses. However, in most cases teachers are more highly qualified and more highly educated than their supposed bosses—the taxpayers.

Teachers, through their union leaders, seek to portray themselves as “workers” by also advocating the rights of less qualified public employees, like fire fighters, garbage collectors, etc. Using this tactic would lead NIH researchers or judges to join their cleaning assistants or bailiffs and stenographers in wage and benefits negotiations. It is disappointing that the teachers to whom we entrust the education of our children have fallen under the influence of union leaders who have persuaded them to use their leverage over parents to demand treatment as powerless victims of public sector exploitation.

23 February 2011

Social Media and Revolution

Events in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 lead one to believe that social media like Facebook, Twitter and other Internet channels are making revolution against despotic political regimes easier to foment. Not only do they make the communication of discontent and the organization of civic action widely and inexpensively achievable; they can also generate instant excitement among a greatly impressionable segment of the public. This is particularly effective in societies in which the youthful generation (those under 30 years of age) outnumbers the older more jaundiced group of citizens.

It still takes discipline for a revolt to succeed against an oppressive government. Moreover, despite portrayals like that on Frontline on February 22, 2011, such a revolution must take place more widely than in one square of a country’s capital city. What that Frontline report did correctly point out, though, was that important lessons were learned by the leaders of the Egyptian revolution from the experience of the leaders of the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia. Modern information technology tools clearly facilitated that software exchange.

Will social media play an important role in the establishment of new governments in Egypt and Tunisia? And will they be integral to the governance of those societies under their reformed political systems? It’s hard to believe that as informal and impromptu a structure as social media can effectively bring order among a collection of ten million Tunisians, not to mention eighty million Egyptians. That structure, however, will forever limit the arbitrary disregard of the interests of the “powerless” by governments in the future.

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