AT LEAST PRETEND THERE’S A STRUGGLE…:

The Fox vs. the Hedgehog (Jonah Goldberg, November 1, 2024, The Dispatch)

A quick refresher: The basic gist of Fukuyama’s argument is that liberal democracy is the best and final answer to both the “social question” and the “political question” as 19th century thinkers put it (lengthy explainer here). The long dialectal, often bloody, contest over various forms of government—monarchy, authoritarianism, fascism, communism, liberal democracy, etc.—has been settled, and liberal democracy won. Fukuyama used the term “history” in a very specialized, Hegel-drenched, way. He didn’t argue that the clock would stop and events would no longer happen. From the Hegelian perspective, the “end of history,” Fukuyama explained, “did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled.” For Marx—the quintessential hedgehog—history would end with the withering away of the state and everyone living in perfect communism. For Hegel, it would be the liberal state. […]

Anyway, one of the great, prescient insights in The End of History is that liberal democracy cultivates a kind of “boredom” that causes people to want to overthrow it. “Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause,” Fukuyama wrote. “They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.”

And there you have all the explanation you need for the post-liberal, neoreactionary, “Do you know what time it is?” right. Ditto all of the post-liberal, anti-Enlightenment, critical theorists and neo-Marxists of the left. And let’s not forget the deracinated and alienated goobers who signed up to join ISIS or the trustafarian jabroneys and grad students who simp for Hamas. It’s not monocausal, of course. But, you get my point. As I’ve said before, boredom kills.

But where does the boredom come from? “Tocqueville explained that when the differences between social classes or groups are great and supported by long-standing tradition, people become resigned or accepting of them,” Fukuyama wrote. “But when society is mobile and groups pull closer to one another, people become more acutely aware and resentful of the remaining differences.”

The narcissism of small differences is one of the great drivers of human conflict. From college faculty fights to intramural libertarian fights, to the Russia-Ukraine war, groups that are very similar often have the nastiest conflicts. There’s something about people sharing most of the same cultural, religious, and political assumptions that makes the remaining disagreements seem wildly more important than they should be. Huge differences between cultures don’t bother people the same way as small ones because the big differences aren’t threatening. European Catholics weren’t all that outraged by Confucianism, Hinduism, or Shintoism, but man, Protestants got under their skin. Why? Because Protestantism was a threat to the way Catholics defined themselves, and vice versa. You fight enemies, you hate traitors. You try to convert pagans, you punish or exterminate apostates and heretics (vast swaths of antisemitism in various eras can be chalked up to this dynamic). You see this everywhere in politics. The hard left hates “neoliberal” moderates far more than they hate conservatives, even though they agree on so much more. If the Trumpified corners of the Christian right hates anybody more than they hate David French—pro-life, devout, Christian, David French—I don’t know who that person is.

Given that a President Kamala would likely be constrained by a GOP Congress, she should offer two fake existential crises that they could work on together: establishing control over the border and the budget. Summon all Americans with a vision of sacrifice to get the government’s economic house in order and make believe we’ll be enduring major sacrifices. Recall that when Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich managed it both sides were able to take credit and government t seemed to be working.

WE HAVEN’T FACED AN EXTERNAL THREAT SINCE BEFRIENDING BRITAIN:

Are We Too Worried About International Threats?: We should chill out and let the threats to America self-destruct—even China (John Mueller, Oct 31, 2024, Discourse)

Because of its size and economic growth, China is now in second place globally in total GDP (though 78th in per capita GDP), a position it has occupied for most of the past two millennia. Partly impelled by that development, it wants to be seen as a “great power.” As part of this, China is seeking to gain “influence” and “to assert dominance in East Asia and project influence globally” by lending money through its Belt and Road Initiative to a vast array of other countries and by engaging from time to time in “wolf warrior diplomacy” using economic and military muscle to badger and to bully.

However, these efforts have been remarkably futile and counterproductive. Rather than generating admiration or obedience from countries that once wished it well, resentment at its “wolf warrior” antics has soared not only in the West but also in important neighbors like Japan, South Korea, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Australia and, most significantly, Taiwan, pushing some of them further into the embrace of the United States.

The Belt and Road Initiative is awash in unpaid debt, and loan outlays were cut from $75 billion in 2016 to $4 billion in 2019. As former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has recently observed, “The BRI is often depicted as helping China win hearts and minds, but in reality it is not winning anything” as recipients grow “frustrated with the corruption, poor safety and labor standards, and fiscal unsustainability associated with its projects.”

China’s Taiwan Weakness
The report sees China’s potential future invasion of Taiwan as its first salvo in its drive to “dominate” East Asia. To supply his military with some guidance, Xi has given it the goal of being able to successfully invade Taiwan by 2027, a mission that the report and many others in the West consider ominous. However, Timothy Heath of RAND points out that in setting that timeline, Xi was seeking primarily “to keep the military focused on its goal of becoming more professional and resist tendencies of slipping into corruption and lethargy,” and that there appears to be no evidence of an intent, in anything like the immediate or not-so-immediate future, to actually invade. Xi himself is reported to be exasperated at the West’s claim and insists that plans to invade in 2027 (or, for that matter, in 2035) simply do not exist.

Moreover, the problems accompanying such an effort are likely to be sobering to military planners. The report does note that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be economically devastating, but it fails to note the difficulty, emphasized by many in the U.S. military, of a massive amphibious landing: Stormy seas and weather rule out landings for the vast majority of the year, and potential landing beaches are small in number and well-fortified. In addition, resistance in the form of guerrilla and urban warfare in the mountainous interior by some of the 20 million intensely hostile Taiwanese residents could prove to be extensive.

Moreover, in the contingency considered by some analysts to be “most likely,” a military conquest of Taiwan would require China to outdo Pearl Harbor by raining thousands of missiles not only on Taiwan but on American military bases and ships in Japan and Guam. The judgment of the CIA, according to its director William Burns last year, is that “President Xi and his military leaders have doubts today about whether they could accomplish that invasion,” and that “if they look at Putin’s experience in Ukraine, that’s probably reinforced some of those doubts.”

Impelled by such considerations, longtime diplomat and China-watcher Ambassador Winston Lord has concluded that the chances of an invasion of Taiwan in the next decade or two are “somewhere between one and two percent.”

The Potential for Chinese Decline or Stagnation
A more plausible occurrence is that rather than rising to anything that could be conceived as “dominance,” China could decline into substantial economic stagnation.

DEMOCRACY IS A FUNCTION OF THE LONGBOW:

Who was the real St Crispin, and what did he have to do with the Battle of Agincourt? (Ian Morton, October 25, 2024, Country Life)

Critical to the outcome of the Battle of Agincourt were the English archers, some 7,000 forming the bulk of Henry’s army, pouring a torrent of arrows into the ranks of the French, who were jammed together and bogged down on a muddy field between two woods. Archers were the artillery of the age, the word coming from Middle French, meaning the provision of weapons, including projectiles. Chaucer mentioned the term in The Canterbury Tales of 1405. The bow and the arrow were artillery before cannon, powder and shot. Royal Artillery gunners with the surname Archer, Bowman, Bowyer or Fletcher may inherit closer links with history than they might suppose.

THE WATER WE SWIM IN:

Slog and Sacrifice: You don’t have to be religious to appreciate what millennia of religion have given us. (Jonah Goldberg, October 4, 2024, The Dispatch)

Human rights, universal equality, the sovereignty of the individual, higher education, and scientific inquiry—even the idea of secularism itself—are products or byproducts of Jewish and Christian thought.

For instance, Western science flows straight out of the Abrahamic revolution. “Postulating a single creator for the entire universe,” writes Walter Russell Mead, “leads to the belief that the universe is predictable and rule driven.” Therefore, the universe outside of our heads is discoverable and knowable through investigation. The scientific method has many catalysts —from alchemy to dye-making to the necessities of war—but even these things had religious aspects, and the systemization of science itself was the product of religious scholastic orders and institutions (like Harvard used to be). Modern astronomy is largely a Christian invention. (Yes, the Chinese had astronomers, too. But when they discovered that the Christians were better, they imported Jesuits to jobs the Chinese couldn’t do.)

Or take the ideal of “universal brotherhood”—i.e. Equality. It’s a Christian idea flowing straight out of Paul’s exhortation to believers in Christ: “You are all sons of God.” And Paul, a heretical Jew, owed much of his thinking to his religious upbringing. You could argue that the idea of the right to follow your conscience started with Socrates—though given how things ended for him, that’s debatable. But the idea of conscience—conscientious objection to war, civil disobedience, etc.—became a thing thanks to folks like Aquinas and Martin Luther.

I suppose it’s possible that there could have been an alternative timeline where we got driverless cars and microwave ovens, democracy and the Bill of Rights, without Abraham and his theological progeny. But the indisputable fact is that we didn’t. And remember, God gave us plenty of time to figure this stuff out without Him.

FAITH IN REASON IS TREASON:

My Conservative Credo (John Dos Passos, Winter 1964, Modern Age)

Somewhere in the middle twenties a Frenchman named Julien Benda wrote a book called La Trahison des Clercs that made a great impression on me. As I look back on it, it was a somewhat superficial work, but its title summed up for me my disillusion with most of the men of letters I had considered great figures in my youth. This was during the period of the war of 1914–18. I was studying at Harvard up to the spring of 1916 and followed with growing astonishment the process by which the professors, most of them rational New Englanders brought up in the broadminded pragmatism of William James or in the lyric idealism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, allowed their mental processes to be so transformed by their conviction of the rightness of the Allied cause and the wickedness of the German enemy, that many of them remained narrow bigots for the rest of their lives. In joining in the wardance the American intellectuals were merely following in the footsteps of their European colleagues. Their almost joyful throwing off of the trammels of reason and ethics is now generally admitted to have been a real transgression against the cause of civilization. I can still remember the sense of relief I felt in taking refuge from the obsessions of the propagandists of hate, in the realities of war as it really was. The feeling was almost universal among the men of my generation who saw service in the field.

Benda analyzed this state of mind with pain and amazement. For two thousand years he saw the people we now tend to describe as intellectuals, whom he described as les clercs, as having been on the side of reason and truth. As he put it, although helpless to keep the rest of mankind from making history hideous with hatreds and massacres, they did manage to keep men from making a religion of evil. “L’humanité faissit le mal mais honorait le bien.” Surveying the racial hatreds, the national hatreds, the class hatreds that rose from the wreck of civilization in that most crucial of the worldwide wars, he concluded, “On peut dire que l’Europe moderne fait le mal et honore le mal.”


Western civilization is only just now beginning to recover from the carnival of unreason that went along with the military massacres of the First World War. The hideously implemented creeds of the Marxists and the Nazis and the Fascists of various hues were rooted in this denial of humane and Christian values. The task before us is somehow to restore these values to primacy in men’s minds and hearts.

It has been my experience through a pretty long life that the plain men and women who do the work of the world and cope with the realities of life respond almost automatically to these values. It is largely when you reach a certain intellectual sophistication that you find minds that have lost the ability to distinguish between right and wrong.

Treason of the Intellectuals (MARK LILLA, DECEMBER 07, 2021, Tablet)

Our century will properly be called the century of the intellectual organization of political hatred. With this one sentence, we recognize Julien Benda as our contemporary. The hatreds he had in mind—racial, national, class-based—are once again our own. When Treason was written, street violence stoked by a hyper-partisan press was common between rival radical factions united only by their contempt for liberalism and parliamentary democracy. In France the most potent political force on the scene was the antisemitic Action Française, the monarchist social movement whose daily newspaper was widely read in elite circles and served as a microphone for the silver-tongued racism of its founder Charles Maurras and nationalist writers like Maurice Barrès. The diminutive Maurras was anything but a street fighter. Instead he invented what might be called the counter-intellectual screed, which can be defined as a ruthless attack on the intellectual class for faults to which one is oneself miraculously immune. In 1905 Maurras published a pamphlet titled The Future of the Intelligentsia (L’Avenir de l’intelligence), which portrayed France’s intellectuals as a déclassé caste that had lost its influence in the age of capitalism and mass democracy, and was now exacting revenge by turning against the fatherland and becoming the puppet of Jewish and German interests. By declaring writers and journalists to be political and racial traitors, Maurras was not too subtly putting targets on their backs.

Two decades later, Julien Benda, a man of the left, published his brilliant riposte to Maurras that turned the accusation of betrayal around. The core of the book, as in Maurras’ own pamphlet, is a highly idealized portrayal of European intellectual life from the Middle Ages until the French Revolution. Benda imagined an honorable class of politically detached thinkers who for centuries had kept their eyes fixed solely on the eternal ideals of truth, justice, and beauty. He called them les clercs, an old French word for scribe that has a whiff of the ecclesiastical about it. Some of les clercs were saints (Thomas Aquinas), some were poets (Goethe), some were philosophers (Descartes), some were artists (Da Vinci), some were scientists (Galileo). What they shared was the sense of a transcendent calling and a commitment to guard it against the encroachment of power and necessity. They were not naïve; they recognized that power and necessity have claims on us, and at times we must bow to them. But they never confused necessity with truth and justice. Even Machiavelli, Benda reminds us, who taught his Prince the strategic use of evil to secure his rule, never called evil good, just necessary.

On Benda’s telling, this class of intellectuals was transformed in the 19th century under the influence of Romanticism and historicism, which lured them into thinking that their task was to shape the world, not simply understand it. In the wake of the French Revolution the strict rule of reason came to seem a paltry thing next to energy and feeling and the march of history and the evolution of the species. If existence is only a blur of pure becoming, the temptation is to enter its flow and participate in the process, bending it if one can. The value of an idea in such a process then becomes its effectiveness, not its timeless truth. And power, whether that of the creative genius, the leader, the race, the nation, a class, or a movement, becomes an idol. In abandoning their critical distance from the mundane world, modern intellectuals of left and right became moralists of realism, Benda charged, the spiritual militia of the temporal, herding the masses toward the next historical end. The scribe’s defeat begins right from the point where he claims to be practical. As soon as he asserts that he takes into account the interests of the nation or the established classes, he is already—inevitably—beaten. The arrow launched against Maurras here reaches its target, and the call to serve truth, justice, and beauty can once again be heard.

THE REVULSION EATS ITS OWN:

Edmund Burke’s Critique of the French Revolution (Paul Krause, July 19, 2024, Discourses on Minerva)

[W]hat we will concern ourselves with is Burke’s analysis of “revolution society” and “constitutional society” and what is entailed in both.

Burke’s constitutional society is a well-ordered society from organic evolution with ancient and longstanding roots; a quintessentially conservative disposition. A constitutional society is the particularized manifestation of universal truths: such as the right to associate, right to organize government, right to dismiss corrupt rulers, etc. A constitutional society is a society of laws and “regulated liberty” for without laws and proper regulations no society can be orderly, effective in its composition and conduct, and have the legal means and juridical precedents to maintain itself while also allowing the means of dismissal, improvement, and ingenuity.

One of Burke’s key arguments in favor of organic institutionalism is how institutionalism has a transcendent character to it. That is, it is larger than the self. Organic institutionalism is our inheritance. It is what our ancestors worked and bequeathed to us. We honor our ancestors in accepting this inheritance. And we honor our ancestors in improving what they have bequeathed to us. We do this so as to bequeath to our progeny, children, a future too. In this manner the chain of history is tied together: past, present, and future are all linked together in the contract between dead, living, and to be born:

This policy appears to me to be the result of profound reflection, or rather the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection and above reflection. A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temperament and limited views. People who never look back to their ancestors will not look forward to posterity. Besides, the people of England know well that the idea of inheritance provides a sure principle of conservation and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement. . . . Whatever advantages are obtained by a state proceeding on these maxims are locked fast as in a sort of family settlement, held tight for ever. By a constitutional policy that follows the pattern of nature, we receive, hold, and transmit (i) our government and our privileges in the same way as we enjoy and transmit (ii) our property and (iii) our lives.

As Burke so poignantly reflects, a society that looks upon its ancestors with scorn, or doesn’t look upon its ancestors at all, doesn’t concern itself with the future either. It becomes selfish and self-centered and works only for oneself rather than others. Atomization results when one becomes self-absorbed and lifts oneself up as the center of the world and of history.

A constitutional society, however imperfect, is something ultimately good and that evolves in progress. It is good because it has established and worked to improve, the legal traditions, rights, liberties, and traditions which any society’s first principle of organization and development need. For Burke, the rejection of the organic and constitutional society is not only a rejection of nature, it is a rejection of humanity’s creaturely nature – it makes humans into God as humans believe they can create, from nothing (creatio ex nihilo) the perfect society.

Burke argues that France had its opportunity to transform itself. As a result of missing this opportunity, however, the “revolution society” is the opposite of an organic and constitutional society. The impetus of revolution is to destroy.

THE DIRTY SECRET IS THAT THINGS ARE GREAT:

Itchen for fishing: Good fishing, books and beer remind us that not everything is awful (Patrick Galbraith, 7/11/24, The Critic)

What you’ve got to understand, he explained, as he sat at his desk — a desk which comes from the original Lutyens-designed Country Life office — is that most of the media in this country tells you why you’re wrong or why somebody else is. What Country Life does, he explained, is it makes people feel good about themselves. It sounds simple but Country Life is one of the only magazines in Britain that sees its profits jump year on year. As the world becomes more miserable, people seek it out more and more.

I like the dogs and the chalk streams and the literature and the food

I think, though, there’s something else going on too. We live in a period when everybody wants to talk Britain down. “Tell me”, a well-known novelist’s husband said to me recently at a book festival we were both speaking at, “about how awful it is to be a young person in Britain.” The thing is, I replied, I quite like it. I like the dogs and the chalk streams and the literature and the food. I like English cheese, pubs, and London in winter.

We walked back along the bank, each of us with our fish, then we sat in the pub in Twyford and had a beer. “What I think it is”, I said to Mark, is that Country Life provides an antidote to this bleak and self-fulfilling narrative that everything here is awful.

we yearn to be the heroes of our own narratives, which is made difficult be how affluent and peaceful modern life is. So we cosplay a drama that does not exist.

CONSERVATISM SEEKS TO CONSERVE LIBERALISM:

Humanely Conservative: a review of The Wisdom of Our Ancestors: Conservative Humanism and the Western Tradition By Graham James McAleer and Alexander S. Rosenthal-Pubul. (Reviewed by Lee Trepanier, 7/07/24, University Bookman)

Conservatism represents a middle ground between a cosmopolitan liberalism and a tribal nationalism. Within this middle ground, particularist loyalties to the family and nation exist but within a Christian framework where all human beings are ultimately valued and accepted.

The second part of “conservative humanism” is an educational movement that is classical and Christian, but not modern. Classical humanism is from the Greek and Roman world of intellectual, moral, and aesthetic formation, while Christian humanism recognizes that every person has an intrinsic and transcendent dignity since humans are created in the image of God. The classical and Christian combination of humanism stands in stark contrast to its modern counterpart which starts from the Enlightenment and reduces human nature to materialism, whether biological or technological. For McAleer and Rosenthal-Pubul, the “humanism” in conservative humanism is the cultivation of the individual in the Greek, Roman, and Christian sense where the person “affirms an obedience to a moral order transcending our will.” By recognizing a moral order outside of the individual, the conservative humanist accepts the limitations of the human condition and attempts to live a flourishing life within them.

This understanding of conservative humanism is the thread that connects the chapters in McAleer’s and Rosenthal-Pubul’s book, which, the authors admit, are a commentary on the themes found in Roger Scruton’s The Meaning of Conservatism. These themes include humanism, conservatism, the establishment, natural law, free enterprise, and freedom. In the first two chapters about conservatism, McAleer and Rosenthal-Pubul emphasize its associational aspects—the family, the church, and private schools—as well as the value of humanism which is “the master idea of our civilization.” According to the authors, conservatives are to defend humanism, the transcendent dignity of the individual person, against the ideologies of totalitarianism, tribal nationalism, and transhumanism.

LET’S MAKE A DEAL:

PODCAST:

Pluralist Points: Democracy as a Civic Bargain: Josiah Ober talks with Ben Klutsey about how democracy arose in history and how we can help it endure today (BEN KLUTSEY, JUN 28, 2024, Discourse)

OBER: Our basic idea in the book, or the idea we start with, anyway, is that democracy should be defined as “no boss”—or at least no boss other than one another. The impulse toward democracy is the resistance to having some external power (a king, an oligarchy) tell you what to do. We then suggest that the real only alternative to being told what to do by some ultimate boss is to figure out how to organize the political sphere, organize what we are going to do together ourselves.

That really is the beginning of democracy: is a bunch of people somewhere saying, “We’ve had enough of being bossed around, and we won’t have it anymore.” This can be an evolutionary process in which people become increasingly fed up and do things that slowly move the boss into a more and more minor position. That’s sort of the theory or at least one way of explaining what happens in the United Kingdom. Or you can have a revolution that just kicks the tyrant out, and then you’ve got to figure out what to do in the aftermath. That’s what happens, for example, at Athens or at Rome.

You can have—as the case in the United States, you become fed up with an external boss that you feel is not doing what the boss was supposed to do in terms of providing you with basic liberties. Then you say, “We’re done. We’re not going to be ruled by the king any longer. We’re going to run things ourselves.”

I think it’s always this conception that we don’t want somebody telling us what to do who isn’t us.


KLUTSEY: Right. Now, when you look around and you observe the situation with democracies across the board, what problem are you seeing? What issues are you seeing?

Obviously, there’s quite a bit written about in terms of—the democratic backsliding is what oftentimes people refer to. What are some of the core problems that led you to say, “Hey, we need to write something to get people to understand what this democratic project is all about”?

OBER: Yes. Our core idea in the book is that democracy really is a bargain. It’s got to be a bargain that is made within a pluralistic society. We assume that the people who decide “we don’t want a boss” are not just a homogenous mass of people who agree on everything else. Yes, they agree we don’t want a boss, but they don’t necessarily agree on what the marginal tax rate should be once we have to raise some funds to deal with, for example, foreign policy, national security and so on.

We say that it is imperative to recognize that not having a boss means that you have to learn to negotiate with your fellow citizens over matters on which you disagree. We can try to limit the degree of disagreement. We can try to make arguments to each other and say, “It would be better to have the marginal tax rate as this. Don’t you see how right I am?” But at a certain point, you’re going to say, “No, actually, I don’t agree.” Then we’re going to have to have some method to say, “All right, we’re going to come to the best deal we can.”

The whole purpose of basically making these deals is to be able to go on together without a boss, running our own affairs as best we can. We want to say that as soon as the idea of negotiating with, bargaining with, coming to the best agreement you can find with your fellow citizens is rejected—when that’s rejected and we say, “I don’t want to make a negotiation with them. I want to force them to do things my way. I reject the idea that those people really are even my fellow citizens, if they don’t believe what I believe.”

That kind of strong polarization, value polarization, is what we really see as a big threat to democracy, because it makes people convinced that democracy is about getting pure justice or getting exactly what you think is the right way, as opposed to recognize that democracy is always an imperfect bargain, imperfect from the point of view of anybody’s—any individual or any individual group’s—idea of what would be absolutely best.

No one’s going to get what they think is best, because we’re in a pluralistic society in which people’s interests are not identical. So that’s our key thing, is to try to say that democracy really is about compromise. It has to be. Because it’s about compromise, it will always be—the solutions will always be imperfect from everybody’s point of view. That’s just intrinsic to the system. As soon as you start demanding perfection, you’re basically rejecting the very idea of democracy.

LIBERALIZING IS COMPLEX:

Speculation Is Rife About the Future of Kuwait’s Parliament (Omar Alabdali & Luai Allarkia, June 27, 2024, New/Lines)

Kuwait has long been an object of perplexed interest for Arab political observers. The country’s political system, essentially a constitutional monarchy with a combative parliament, is rare in a region filled with autocrats, police states masquerading as secular republics, and other types of dictatorships.

Its intricate parliamentary politicking is unusual, as is the sight of assembly members aggressively questioning members of the royal family in a Gulf sheikhdom where reverence for emirs and princes is an obligatory part of the political etiquette. The complexities of the emirate’s political shenanigans and the rise and fall of governments and elected assemblies can often seem Byzantine and incomprehensible to political observers in the region.

But Kuwait’s experiment with a form of democracy, however flawed, is worth chronicling. The evolution of its political system, spurred along by the traumatic invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, is unique in the region. But it is also worth examining as a cautionary tale that highlights the limits of political maneuvering in a region where a retreat to one-man rule in the name of stability is easy, and where proponents of democracy must fight time and again to preserve their right to challenge those in power.