Rethinking Democracy
Two articles from the latest issue of The American Conservative do just that.

The first explores something that our president seems not to understand, that liberty cannot be imposed on a people: Democracy & Its Discontents: Voting doesn’t produce peace—much less desirable outcomes—in societies that lack the foundations of a liberal order. I'm reminded of the following passages about Edmund Burke (1729–1797) from Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind:

Liberty, Burke knew, had risen through an elaborate and delicate process, and its perpetuation depended upon retaining those habits of thought and action which guided the savage in his slow and weary ascent to the state of civil and social man. All his life, Burke's chief concern had been for justice and liberty, which must stand or fall together-- liberty under law, a definite liberty, the limits of which were determined by prescription. He had defended the liberties of Englishmen against their king, and the liberties of Americans against king and parliament, and the liberties of Hindus against Europeans. He had defended those liberties not because they were innovations, discovered in the Age of Reason, but because they were ancient prerogatives, guaranteed by immemorial usage. Burke was liberal because he was conservative. And this cast of mind Tom Paine was wholly unable to appreciate. [emphasis mine]

The second examines postmodernist liberty as we know it without the "limits... determined by prescription" mentioned above: Don’t Democratize: Deterrence worked with the Soviets. Why not Iran? Here's a particularly rousing paragraph:

The main difference between Woodrow Wilson and the neocons today is that the universalist ideology that they use to liquidate recalcitrant societies contains a double strychnine dose of one-world economic globalization plus the homogenized trash culture of MTV and its associated vices of drugs and sex. Western opponents of the “evil empire” were right when they calculated that the slab-faced old Commies sitting behind desks in Moscow would be no match for the pony-tailed new Commies who sang with John Lennon, “Imagine there’s no countries, It isn’t hard to do, Nothing to kill or die for, No religion too.” Just as the walls of Jericho were brought down by trumpets, and just as General Noriega was flushed out of the Papal Nunciature in Managua in 1989 by blaring rock music, so what remained of social conservatism behind the Berlin Wall was instantly dissolved by the hideous cacophony of Western postmodernism.