I began reading your editorial titled “Jihad vs. McWorld” (Aug. 5) with enthusiasm because I was glad to see the Tribune tackling the thorny issues of international conflict in the post Cold-War era.
You fell, however, into the trap of lumping “democracy and the free market” into one entity, when in fact the two are often contradictory. Democracy means free elections and popular control of public institutions. Democracy also demands public accountability for negligence by private corporations, or “McWorld.”
Conversely, the free market works best when there is no government with the authority to interfere, no workers or voters to have to listen to. Any government intervention is harmful to the free market. The rapidly expanding McWorld, free-market culture undermines the forces of democracy as it expands.
Furthermore, your assertion that “the march of democracy has since chosen a muddy path” since “free elections produced turbulent results” really baffled me. If an election is truly free, should it matter what the results are? In a democracy, popular elections are only supposed to reflect the will of the people. Turbulent results in our eyes, maybe. But not in the eyes of the majority of voters in countries such as Turkey or India, where the people decided to throw out the Congress Party, a party that had ruled without serious challenge for more than 40 years!
If anything, the Indian elections showed that India is a maturing democracy that listens to its people and can absorb abrupt changes in leadership. Free elections occurring around the world signal a global move toward popular democracy, not toward conflict, as you suggest.
Finally, “Jihad vs. McWorld” does not have to be conflictual. Your characterization of “modernizers” and “traditionalists” is a weak attempt to re-create an old Cold War, “us vs. them” mentality. You project the actions of the extreme elements of traditional society to be all that is non-Western. But there is no “us vs. them” conflict. There is a dialectical exchange, not a war, between the two forces. There are bad elements in both. The only war right now is one of words.
How to avoid real conflict in the future? This is the question your editorial should be asking. The answer is not to oversimplify conflicts but to reach out to other cultures, to see the drawbacks to a free market and to allow popular elections and growth of real democracies around the world.
