Below is Richard Cohen’s argument from the Washington Post that the Arab countries must undergo what European countries did 100 years ago, with the implication that the Egyptian revolution is just one stop on the trainline to… Auschwitz? I think this historical argument makes him a conservative. It is ridden with historicism, a rigid belief in historical patterns as determinative of events today. When the truth is, a, History does not repeat itself. And b, the Germans didn’t have facebook. I.e., human beings learn from one another. There is a vast circle of recognition the world round. And that belief, by the way, makes me a liberal. (Similar sorts of arguments were used by anti-Semites 150 years ago against the idea of backward encapsulated European Jews ever progressing, per Derek Penslar).
The Middle East must first pass through somewhat the same process as did Central and Eastern Europe. Before World War I, it had no democracies. The region was ruled by monarchies.
After the war, nearly every state (the Soviet Union was the most prominent exception) was a democracy and one, the most culturally and politically advanced of them all, had an exemplary constitution and a resplendent bouquet of political parties. Nevertheless, this country reeled from Weimar Republic to Nazi dictatorship in virtually no time at all.
