Perfection cannot be the price of support for democracy, and the fact that not every election goes as we might hope does not invalidate support for the effort to promote liberty.  Freedom has a remarkable track record, including in regions that were once thought to be inimical to it.  ~Peter Wehner, OpinionJournal.com

Who wants perfection?  How about anything better than empowering Islamists in every single case of a free and open election in the Near East in the last three years?  The point isn’t that things haven’t gone as well as one might have hoped–they have flatly contradicted the hopes and predictions of the democratists in every case and have not brought us any closer to regional peace, but have, on the contrary, been empowering people whom the very same democratists are perfectly happy, in other contexts, to describe as madmen.  I don’t much care for Ahmadinejad, and the democratists hate the guy, so why do they want to have more elections and more democracy in lands where the majority seems inclined to elect people just like him? 

Notice how he doesn’t make any mention of which “regions” he’s talking about.  Freedom has a remarkable track record, provided that we don’t have any way of checking that record or scrutinising the claims of misty-eyed democratists.  Of course “elections” and “democracy” have nothing as such to do with promoting liberty.  If the results of the last few years from all over the world are any indication, elections and democracy are the fast track to the end of what liberties there were in many of these countries.  They also appear to be the fast track to politicising and aggravating sectarian and ethnic divisions and pushing otherwise potentially manageable countries over the brink.  I don’t need perfection–something better than catastrophic failure and blowback might be nice, though. 

What is it that drives people to say things like this?  I have made a few suggestions here.