The Future of Democracy in the Middle East: Islamist and Illiberal

This is an interesting take on the separation of the concepts of democracy and liberal freedoms. It's based on observations of how developing nations appear to adopt democracy and it notes the emergence of so called "illiberal democracies". It observes that western democratic nations emerged as a consequence of liberal freedoms, and suggests this is just an accident of history and that one is not necessary for the other.

I disagree.

The reason that the political mode of dynamic tyranny (see Aristotle) we call democracy and liberalism are more or less welded/conflated is that one tempers the other to create a stable system in the same way that a hydrogen atom is stable pattern of proton and electron (other political philosophers put it better, but that's my nerdy metaphor).

The article seems to posit that democracy can continue to exist in the radical absence of liberal values, but then offers a number of statements that contradict that.

> ruling parties, seeing their opponents more as enemies than competitors, sought to restrict media freedoms and pack state bureaucracies with loyalists. They used their control of the democratic process to rig the system to their advantage.

These are not stable democracies. They may be seemingly legitimate nation states that claim the epithet "democracy" but they are ephemeral, without any future.

> Signer argues that “at its simplest level, democracy is a political system that grants power based on what large groups of people want.” And what these large groups want may not be good for constitutional liberalism

That's a very pedestrian, flat-footed and reductionist definition of "democracy". We have always known this. The Germans voted Hitler in. But within a few years that country had been destroyed along with half the world. That's a feature of Raw Democracy, why Aristotle favoured Polity in its place, and why we have more sophisticated interpretation today which insists on a liberal context.

I'd say the coinage of the term "illiberal democracy" is mischievous, and we cannot humour it without corroding our own, _better_ notion of democracy.

I do like the style of writing in The Atlantic, but this analysis feels a bit off.