Joshua Treviño

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

– W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming

We elected Hamas.

Just over four years since democratization-as-peacemaker became United States policy; more than a decade after the blood-soaked “peace process” began; and seventy-three years after the capacity of the democratic masses to choose evil should have been burned into the Western psyche, we staged a Western process in a non-Western society, and we elected Hamas.

Note the pronoun, please: we did. This is not to absolve the howling masses of the Palestinian electorate, hellbent on the annihilation of the hated Jew, for its deeds. Alone in the Middle East, they were conquered in wars of their own design, and not expelled wholesale; alone in the Middle East, they achieved some measure of prosperity and even liberty under the conquerer’s heel; alone in the Middle East, they were granted self-rule by their conquerer; alone in the Middle East, they are allowed to perpetrate all manner of terror and murder against their conquerer, and still treated as a polity of more or less equal status. For all this, their bitterness and resentment festered and swelled. For all the self-pity over the Naqba and Zionism and Western manipulation, their fate is ultimately self-made.

But the responsibility for this is ultimately ours — “us” being the democratic West and its norms as a whole. Know these things as given: The aping of democratic processes in a society immensely unsuited to it would assuredly not have happened without our intervention. The handing-over of Palestinian leadership from the Israeli administration to a terrorist cabal would not have happened without our intervention. The mindless push for democracy as a panacea for social and theological ills would not have happened without our intervention.

What, after all, is democracy but, to quote Mencken, “the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard”? Good and hard is how the Palestinians get it now: the dwindling band of Christians among them, traditionally a disproportionate font of entrepreneurialism, will dwindle further under the Islamist boot; secularism will sputter along toward its death; the women will descend further into the status of Islamist chattel; the innocent youth will be further perverted to the cause of jihad; and the erstwhile conquerer will feel ever less pity and less restraint in the just retribution for this “state’s” inevitably murderous deeds.

The aim of political philosophy used to be the introduction of wisdom into governance. The Greeks of antiquity were especially concerned with this: Plato’s ideal Republic, indeed, was overseen by the wise and superseding Guardians — an institution directly transposed into today’s Iranian theocracy. Their Roman successors were themselves concerned to set up a rule by the “best men.” The conflation of the theocratic underpinnings of later Western governance with wisdom preserved this basic value; and when history moved into the democratic era in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was with the assurance (born of the manifest failures of monarchs and aristocracy) that the people at large were the best repository of wisdom — and thus the best suited to rule.

There is therefore a lineal descent from the Jeffersonian faith in the power of mobs, to William F. Buckley’s (apocryphal) declaration that he would rather “be governed by the first 200 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty.” But along the way, the reason for the faith in the masses was lost and replaced with something altogether more pernicious. Instead of popular wisdom being the surest wisdom, the means became the end — democratic governance was justified not because it was wise, but because it was democratic. The will-of-the-people became a thing to be respected for its own sake, despite its having thrown forth the slow-motion disaster of Californian direct democracy, Adolf Hitler, nostalgists for his work, and now Hamas. Again with Mencken, we slid from a noble concept to the mere “worship of jackals by jackasses.”

It is time to let go of democracy. It is time to see it as nothing more than a method, and not accord it moral value in itself. Churchill rightly noted that it “is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.” We should embrace and promote it on pragmatic grounds alone, and let that pragmatism guide us to its proper time and place. Surely its proper place is not in a culture where the death-cult flourishes; not in a culture where a god commands slaughter; not in a culture where the acquisition of honor means more than life, prosperity, and love.

Surely its place is not in Palestine, where reason itself is crushed under the burden of shame and the desire for vengeance, and all moral sanity appears to dissipate. This is hardly a uniquely Palestinian affliction: I’ve been mere miles away in Jordan, where anti-Semitic tomes unseen in the West since the demise of the Third Reich are offered openly for sale. And I’ve been in “Palestine” itself, or what its proponents wish were Palestine — in Jerusalem, where I went to the Western Wall under heavy security. The day before my visit, the Muslims worshipping at al-Aqsa above decided that their faith demanded a stoning of the Jews below, and assaults on Israeli security posts in the adjacent tunnels. In this atmosphere, I was accosted at the Jaffa Gate by an irate Palestinian, who demanded to know what could be done to get Americans like me to hire men like him to show the holy sites. I replied truthfully, that he and his could stop the mindless violence, the terror, the whole intifada. He spat on my shoes.

Surely, surely not in Palestine.

Until we grasp this — we Westerners from Israel to Europe to America — we will continue to be killed and confounded by the choices of the peoples upon whom we have inflicted our catastrophe of liberty. Because insanity is no monopoly of Muslims or Palestinians, rest assured that this is our future — and theirs.

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