Conservatives are the same all over

Matthew Yglesias, yesterday:

Paul Krugman says that when Iraq goes badly, the bully-boys of the right "won't blame those who led us into the quagmire; they'll claim that it was all the fault of the liberal media, which stabbed our troops in the back."...

The first response to almost any difficulty is to decide that we need to chuck one of the system's building blocks overboard. Democracy makes it harder to cheat on international agreements, free speech is a threat to morale, legal restraints on the intelligence apparatus are holding us back. Such things as legislative oversight of the executive and the existence of a professional bureaucracy are intolerable. When disaster relief efforts go poorly, the solution is domestic deployment of the military. Even political competition itself over questions of national security policy is a form of aid and comfort to the enemy.

Lost in all of this is the possibility that democracy is a successful form of government that's tended to spread over time precisely because it's a successful form of government.

Robert Farley:

In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was conveniently forgottent that many conservatives (including the Team B types) believed that the Soviet capacity to mobilize its society would prove too much for the United States to handle. Democracy was great in the abstract, this line of thought went, but was insufficient to meet the threat of a totalitarian foe....

And now, again, we see the conservatives begin to suggest that we fail in Iraq because of fundamental flaws in our way of life. Our propaganda isn't good enough, and our media has too much freedom, our national security apparatus allow too much difference of opinion, and our generals are allowed to criticize after retirement. Finally, our democratic system has made us too soft and too weak to do the things that need to be done.

Democracy: Great in the abstract and a useful bludgeon, but don't let it slow you down.

Mahmoud Ahmadenijad:

Liberalism and Western style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the Liberal democratic systems.

I have no doubt that two and a half thousand years ago, around the Athenian agora, a substantial minority of the citizens believed that, in order to win the war against Sparta, or Persia, or whoever the enemy of the day was, the Democracy that Athens nominally supported needed to be destroyed.

I have no doubt of this because, oddly enough, the conservatives in Athens eventually did overthrow the Democracy during the war. In 411 BC, shortly before the war ended, the conservative elements in Athens, who'd never really been wild about Democracy to begin with, overthrew the government and instituted their own council of 400 oligarchs. They eliminated the rights that the majority of Athenian citizens had enjoyed for more than a century, all with the claim they were returning Athens to its "ancestral constitution."

They were able to do this not in spite of a war that was nominally to preserve democracy, but because of that war. Athens had grown tired of the war, and they believed that the 400 could bring about a peace. As it turned out, the Spartans didn't much care who was running Athens, only that Athens was a threat. Meanwhile, the (lower-class, democratically-minded) Athenian Navy returned from overseas, and quickly routed the oligarchs and returned the Democracy to power.

The lesson? First of all - when Conservatives talk about Democracy being inconvenient, they're not speculating idly. Given the chance, yes, they'd happily sell us down the river to keep power. Secondly, long wars are fundamentally corrosive to Democracies - something the American founding fathers understood well.

Nevertheless, we know that conservatives like Bill Kristol really, really missed the Cold War when it was gone. Conservatives like George W. Bush have publicly mused that a dictatorship would be great, so long as they're the dictators. There's a tendency to see those two strains of conservativsm separately. They're not. Conservatives don't like voting, don't like voters, and don't like government. Is it any surprise the threat to democracy comes from them, not from outside?