A question in the form of a parable by the late Robert Nozick.

Consider the following sequence of cases, which we shall call the Tale of the Slave, and imagine it is about you.

Hat tip to William Laffer.

Evgeny Morozov challenges conventional wisdom on the efficacy of the Internet as a tool for democratizing dictatorships.

Morozov questions the significance of what he calls “iPod Liberalism,” and argues that the “Spinternet” and the use of the Net for “authoritarian deliberation” actually significantly aid authoritarian regimes.

11:51 video

A small Latin American country actually stands up to imminent dictatorship. Its Supreme Court defends the country’s Constitution and its Army enforces the law, removing from office the president who was in the process of overthrowing the Constitution and making himself into a dictator.

Splendid! Democracy and the rule of law triumphs for once in Latin America. But, how does the US Government in the Age of Obama respond?

Barack Obama joins Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Daniel Ortega in condemning the removal of the criminal from office. Evidently, democracy for Mr. Obama is a one-way street. Democracy is inviolable with respect to the election of Marxists (like himself), but once in office any winner of a democratic election on the left is perfectly free to declare that the game is over, he will now govern by decree, and no further real elections are required. In future, the democratically-elected Marxist administration will count all the votes, Chicago-style, aided by organized supporters (like ACORN) who will intimidate opponents and register hosts of imaginary voters and the deceased while driving busloads of winos and welfare scum from precinct to precinct to cast ballots early and often. That’s real democracy in action.

Reuters:

U.S. President Barack Obama said on Monday the coup that ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was illegal and would set a “terrible precedent” of transition by military force unless it was reversed.

“We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the president of Honduras, the democratically elected president there,” Obama told reporters after an Oval Office meeting with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.

Zelaya, in office since 2006, was overthrown in a dawn coup on Sunday after he angered the judiciary, Congress and the army by seeking constitutional changes that would allow presidents to seek re-election beyond a four-year term.

The Honduran Congress named an interim president, Roberto Micheletti, and the country’s Supreme Court said it had ordered the army to remove Zelaya. …

Obama said he would work with the Organization of American States and other international institutions to restore Zelaya to power and “see if we can resolve this in a peaceful way.”

Personally, I think the Honduran army made one serious mistake. They exiled the dictator, instead of hailing him before a military tribunal and executing him. Now he will be playing political games from abroad, seeking foreign intervention to restore him to power.

And who knows? Some Marxist regime, Cuba, Venezuela, or the United States, might intervene and return him forcibly to power.

Michael Gerson, in the Washington Post, tells conservatives why Americans should be willing to fight for other peoples’ freedom.

In the backlash against President Bush’s democracy agenda, conservatives are increasingly taking the lead. It is inherently difficult for liberals to argue against the expansion of social and political liberalism in oppressive parts of the world — though, in a fever of Bush hatred, they try their best. It is easier for traditional conservatives to be skeptical of this grand project, given their history of opposing all grand projects of radical change.

Traditional conservatism has taught the priority of culture — that societies are organic rather than mechanical and that attempts to change them through politics are like grafting machinery onto a flower. In this view, pushing for hasty reform is likely to upset some hidden balance and undermine the best of intentions. Wisdom is found in deference to tradition, not in bending the world to fit some religious or philosophic abstraction, even one as noble as the Declaration of Independence.

A conservatism that warns against utopianism and calls for cultural sensitivity is useful. When it begins to question the importance or existence of moral ideals in politics and foreign policy, it is far less attractive.

At the most basic level, the democracy agenda is not abstract at all. It is a determination to defend dissidents rotting in airless prisons, and people awaiting execution for adultery or homosexuality, and religious prisoners kept in shipping containers in the desert, and men and women abused and tortured in reeducation camps. It demands activism against sexual slavery, against honor killings, against genital mutilation and against the execution of children, out of the admittedly philosophic conviction that human beings are created in God’s image and should not be oppressed or mutilated.

And the democracy agenda goes a step further. It argues that the most basic human rights will remain insecure as long as they are a gift or concession of the state — that natural rights must ultimately be protected by self-government. And this ideology asserts that most people in all places, even the poor and oppressed, are capable of controlling their own affairs and determining their own rulers. If this abstract argument seems familiar, it should, because it is the argument of the American founding.

Read the whole thing.

The Washington Post notes that the president’s failure to gain control of the federal bureaucracy has paralysed the implementation of his intended policies, and left him in the frustrated role of outsider critic of the government he theoretically heads.

By the time he arrived in Prague in June for a democracy conference, President Bush was frustrated. He had committed his presidency to working toward the goal of “ending tyranny in our world,” yet the march of freedom seemed stalled. Just as aggravating was the sense that his own government was not committed to his vision.

As he sat down with opposition leaders from authoritarian societies around the world, he gave voice to his exasperation. “You’re not the only dissident,” Bush told Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a leader in the resistance to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. “I too am a dissident in Washington…”

In his speech that day, Bush vowed to order U.S. ambassadors in unfree nations to meet with dissidents and boasted that he had created a fund to help embattled human rights defenders. But the State Department did not send out the cable directing ambassadors to sit down with dissidents until two months later. And to this day, not a nickel has been transferred to the fund he touted.

Two and a half years after Bush pledged in his second inaugural address to spread democracy around the world, the grand project has bogged down in a bureaucratic and geopolitical morass, in the view of many activists, officials and even White House aides. Many in his administration never bought into the idea, and some undermined it…

“It’s our policy,” the official said.

“What do you mean?” the bureaucrat asked.

“Read the president’s speech,” the official said.

“Policy is not what the president says in speeches,” the bureaucrat replied. “Policy is what emerges from interagency meetings.” …

Still, after an invigorating start in 2005, progress has been harder to find. Among those worried about the project is (Natan) Sharansky, whose book (The Case For Democracy) so inspired Bush. “I give him an A for bringing the idea and maybe a C for implementation,” said Sharansky, now chairman of the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at the Shalem Center in Israel. “There is a gap between what he says and what the State Department does,” and he is not consistent enough.

The challenge Bush faced, Sharansky added, was to bring Washington together behind his goal.

“It didn’t happen,” he said. “And that’s the real tragedy.”

Arnold Kling, at TCSDaily, explains why truth plays so small a role in the public dialogue and the democratic process.

I am going to suggest that democratic politics is a very poor information-processing mechanism. The great mass of people form their political beliefs with little regard for facts or logic. However, the elites also have a strategy for avoiding truth. Elites form their political beliefs dogmatically, using their cleverness to organize facts to fit preconceived prejudices. The masses’ strategy for avoiding truth is to make a low investment in understanding; the elites’ strategy is to make a large investment in selectively choosing which facts and arguments to emphasize or ignore.