Democracy's stunted growth in fallow fields.

• Author: Howell, Llewellyn D.
• Position: Worldview

YOU CANNOT PLANT wheat on a runway. It will not grow, and yet the U.S. tries to plant democracy on figurative runways all the time--in Iraq, for instance. A prior condition to democracy is a culture that permits the equality, participation, and flow of communications that democracy requires. Deeply embedded religions, created by men--as distinct from both genders--do not allow the equality premise.

Yet, Pres. George W. Bush and his successor, Barack Obama, have kept trying--insistently--and now we have Iraq again ... and Afghanistan, Yemen, Ukraine, Russia, and China. There is a list of putative democracies that do not come anywhere near meeting democracy criteria and will not until we (the actual semi-democracies of the West) understand that the seeds of democracy need soil and water--not just intent--to grow.

Every civil state battles its religion and culture--the West, Christianity and Judaism; the Middle East states, Islam; Russia, the Orthodox Church; China, Confucianism; Israel, Judaism and Islam. It is hard to contradict the rules men made centuries and generations ago in the earliest warrior age, but the fight goes on.

The definition of democracy is very simple, actually, despite the literature. The people rule, and order emanates from them, not from above, earthly or heavenly. Despite wealth, education, intelligence, location, race, religion, occupation, or ideology, the law--the rules that provide order--is civil, not religious. In the matter of democracy, the state and religion oftentimes are combatants, if not enemies.

There hardly is a more voluminous literature than that on democracy. Among the conditions for democracy that have to be present before the first election is that women must be counted as equal and actually given equal rights. This is not something to be voted on later. If the culture limits women, democracy will not sprout and then retrospectively go back and bring the women forward--the U.S. experience notwithstanding.

This especially is so in cultures where the religion specifies a secondary role (or even tertiary) role for women, as in Islam, Roman Catholicism, Mormonism, Evangelical Christianity, or conservative Judaism (among others). Women will not have one position in politics and a different and more inferior one in the church and home.

Democracy is a function of communication, not conversion. Very few people want to move to authoritarian societies, while millions want to move to democracies. Just check...