Yet voters came out in the hundreds of thousands...

You have to read this one, by David Brooks:

Conditions were horrible when Salvadorans went to the polls on March 28, 1982. The country was in the midst of a civil war that would take 75,000 lives. An insurgent army controlled about a third of the nation's territory. Just before election day, the insurgents stepped up their terror campaign. They attacked the National Palace, staged highway assaults that cut the nation in two and blew up schools that were to be polling places.

Yet voters came out in the hundreds of thousands. In some towns, they had to duck beneath sniper fire to get to the polls. In San Salvador, a bomb went off near a line of people waiting outside a polling station. The people scattered, then the line reformed. "This nation may be falling apart," one voter told The Christian Science Monitor, "but by voting we may help to hold it together."...

No one can be sure what will happen in Iraq and Afghanistan, but us warmongers and Republicans have one huge advantage...we are the good guys, and our system works! And the Realist/Postmodernist appeasing Democrats have a huge disadvantage—they are on the wrong side of history. They are reactionaries defending tyranny and inaction, and their system doesn't work. They, like their terrorist allies, may win a skirmish or two, but they will be flattened in the long run.

To quote Brooks again:

On the other hand, over the past 30-odd years, democracy has spread at the rate of one and a half nations per year. It has spread among violence-racked nations and to 18 that are desperately poor. And it has spread not only because it inspires, but also because it works.

You can't outrun the History Train....

(thanks to OJ)

Posted by John Weidner at September 28, 2004 7:46 PM