Global Intifada

(This post is dedicated to all those Muslims who love bashing Islamic governments and naively call for the democratization of the Muslim world)

Following the collapse of the
Soviet Union, the Western world has had a global field day in pursuing its post-colonialist agenda for global domination. It would be foolish to limit our understanding of this domination to solely political or military affairs. Rather, neocolonialism has economic, social, intellectual, religious, and ideological dimensions.

The ideological strain of neo-colonialism functions by applying a steady stream of overt and covert propaganda that the only way a particular people will continue to function is by colluding or imitating with the colonizing entity and if they do not join in this imperialist venture, then they will follow the path of previous states in destruction, annihilation, or at least marginalization in world affairs.

Thus, it is of no surprise that Western states have attempted to increase the pressure for 3^rd world countries to ideologically align with the colonizer states in order to consolidate the power they have gained from the creation of the vacuum of power that resulted in the collapse of the
Soviet Union. It is imperative that Muslims understand that the entire discourse on democratization and Islamicization is not an innocent intellectual exercise, but one that is intrinsically related to a contained political-economic matrix of control and subjugation.

Even contemporary Western non-Muslim thinkers such as Dahl, Barber, Beard, and Levinson have uncovered how economic interests have governed the development of democracy; some have even gone so far as to question whether America is or was a democracy given that its political institutions are skewed in favor of those with economic power.

For example, Sanford Levinson in his seminal book “Our Undemocratic Constitution” critiques many different aspects of the US constitution in light of democratic theory and concludes that not only is the US constitution undemocratic, but he calls for a massive reformulation of it through a constitutional convention. One point of his criticism is with regards to the concept of the bicameral legislature. Conventional wisdom claims that the purpose of this institution is that the purpose of the bicameral legislature is to preserve the balance of power within the state through a system of checks and balances so that no one particular branch of government attains to much power. Levinson exposes this lie by pointing out that the true purpose of the bicameral legislature was not to protect the nation from tyranny, but to protect the interests of the wealthy from the mythical democratic “mob.”

“At the time of the founding, for example, one of the strongest arguments made for the Senate was the importance of offering guaranteed representation to
America’s financial elites as a way of protecting private property. As Akhil Reed Ammar notes, at the
Philadelphia convention, “Gouverneur Morris openly advocated a Senate limited to men of ‘great personal property’ and animated by the ‘aristocratic spirit,’” Morris lost. There are no property qualifications for membership in the Senate, though the contemporary Senate is often described as a “millionaires’ club” wildly unrepresentative of the actual distribution of income in the
United States.” (p 32 of “Our Undemocratic Constitution”, Levinson) In 2003, financial disclosure forms revealed that 40 out of 100 senators were millionaires. (CNN) Moreover, the average salary of congressmen is $165,200 a year, clearly placing them in the highest income bracket, not to mention retirement and health benefits they get. (Source)

Not only are congressmen some of the most affluent members of American society, they are far more likely to be influenced by members of their economic class, questioning the entire presumption of a fair and equal democratic process. This suspicion has been verified by Larry M. Bartels in “Economic Inequality and Political Representation” who concludes that senators are far more likely to respond to the needs of constituents who were at the top of the income distribution as opposed to those at the bottom of the income distribution who received little or no influence on political processes, at least in the Senate. Bartels’ study is based on “senators’ roll call voting behavior as well as specific votes on the minimum wage, civil rights, government spending, and abortion.” (p 1 of “Economic Inequality and Political Representation”, Bartels)

A perfect example of how the wealthy class subvert democracy is the amount of campaign donations that occur during an election year. Websites such as White House for Sale engage in research to determine which officials receive the most campaign contributions and who gave it to them. A cursory look at the website can lead to two reasonable conclusions: (a) the candidates with the most air time in the media coincidentally are the ones who receive the most campaign contributions and (b) the overwhelming majority of the campaign contributions for the leading players are not from private donors, but from corporations.

If the executive and legislative branches of the world’s “greatest democracy” are not truly democratic, then perhaps it would be prudent for Muslims to stop the entire discourse of democratizing the Muslim world and instead focus on a critical study of democracy itself.

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