The struggle over the shape of the constituting assembly they're going to get in Iraq reminds us how firmly entrenched democratic fetishism is. Two hundred twenty-five years ago, the Founding Fathers argued over the protocols of the new America, and embarked on eight years of Articles of Confederation, which sought to contain with special concern the Federalists' appetite for giving greater power to the central assembly. Then we got the Constitution. Then we got a civil war. And, in between, a dozen constitutional amendments.
The Iraqis, especially the Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, are debating over what should happen before June 30, as if it were Patrick Henry arguing with James Madison. The Americans had had almost two hundred years of experimentation with creeping self-government, the Iraqis, none. Democracy is, for them as for so many others, a "right" and also a talisman.
An American Sinologist sent to Vietnam in 1970 to verify the legitimacy of the elections, wrote in a learned journal that for most Indochinese, the idea of entering a polling booth and emerging from it having fashioned the life in which they would proceed to live was sheer thaumaturgy; for some of them, the professor wrote, a laughing matter, on the order of rubbing your left elbow with your right hand while tapping your left foot, expecting that a beneficent god would reward you with a fuller harvest.
Democracy has certainly had challenging days. It is not easy to sacramentalize the democratic vote given how close it can come. If 49 percent vote for Mussolini and 51 percent vote for John Stuart Mill, it is an act of faith to say that democracy was transubstantiated by that victory. If the undesirable candidate can come that close, why can't he occasionally win? As Per??id, and Hugo Ch?z. The Communists almost won Italy in 1948 and threatened France for years. Add the votes the Nazis got to the votes the Communists got in the Reichstag elections of July 1932 and you had a majority of Germans voting for dictatorship.
So the Iraqis should be counseled to treat democracy not as magic, but as a rudimentary approach to self-rule. We can point to the most recent democratic experience in the United States. We all stared at Howard Dean with wonder, amusement, awe, and, finally, apprehension. On February 19 Mr. Gerald McEntee, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said that, in his opinion, Howard Dean was simply ? "nuts."
But how could Dean be "nuts" if Vice President Gore recommended him as the Democratic candidate? And Senator Harkin, in the critical Iowa race?