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Democracy requires a supportive culture
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How is it that a mere accountant such as myself knew immediately that the so-called Arab Spring would eventually result in a dangerous fiasco, whereas Ivy League-educated elites like President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton deluded themselves into believing otherwise?
Being a serious student of history and philosophy in reading the works of wise men like Toynbee, Spengler, Gibbon, Aristotle and Herodotus, I realized at once that one cannot expect the emergence and maintenance of democracy without the prerequisite culture that supports it.
Where, pray tell, is the Muslim Jefferson? Where is the Muslim Madison or Locke or Montesquieu? Where is the Muslim who believes that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights -- that among these are life, liberty and happiness as asserted in our Declaration of Independence?
Yet rather than confronting this reality, most of the media distract us with the inane, like excoriating Mitt Romney over his legitimate criticism of our institutional groveling or attributing all the violence to a nasty little video trailer.
But what do I know? I never went to Harvard or Yale.
RON BROWN
Ross
First Published September 20, 2012 12:00 am
