PJ O’Rourke wrote many years ago about attending a pro-democracy march in South Korea. When he asked the protesters what they wanted, they just screamed “Democracy! Democracy!!” and he made the observation that democracy is NOT an end in itself; it’s a means to an end.

Where does this idea that democracy and elections are an end in themselves come from? The Merkins have been ranting for years about how they are going to bestow democracy upon the entire world and thereby save it all for Jesus (and using it as an excuse to pillage and plunder in oil rich countries).

Such bollocks.

Democracy is not an infallible method of bestowing happiness and plasma screen TVs upon an entire populace and you can NOT just inflict it, willy-nilly on a feudal society and expect that everyone will wake up the next day in a utopian dream land where nothing bad ever happens and only the very bad or the very fat die young.

Democracy had its first run in the ancient world with the prosperous empires in Greece and Rome, it worked out alright for a while, then the whole thing went kablooey and western civilisation sullenly reverted to the tried and true tribal system (albeit with fairly large tribes) for a few hundred years. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire and the Far East, who never went in for any kind of democratic rule, were inventing surgery, mathematics, literature and astronomy.

The parliamentary system that Australia, America, Canada etc inherited from the English had its first seeds with Simon De Montfort, 6th earl of Leicester, around 1258. Despite being heralded as one of the fathers of parliament, De Montfort was actually just a successful warlord of his time, who got into a stoush with his brother in law (the appallingly incompetent Henry III) over money and his illegal shagging of Henry’s sister. Henry threw a huge hissy fit, which naturally ended in civil war, and, to get the support he needed, De Montfort turned to what was the beginning of the middle class and offered them a bit of a say in running the country if they would all agree to come and die on the battlefield of his choosing. The then Mayor of London (who naturally did not have to die himself) cheerfully agreed on the burghers behalf, and thus we had the beginnings of the House of Representatives.

De Montfort ended up getting his head (and other bits) cut off at the Battle of Lewes, the first significant military victory of Edward I (yep, the one who did for William Wallace a few decades later) but the changes he set in place were never completely reversed. The English don’t throw as good a riot as the French, bless ‘em, but after about six hundred years, a fair bit of civil unrest, some steady economic prosperity, rapidly expanding middle classes, one royal beheading and a few religious wars, we had the British Empire and colonial expansion.

Thank God for that. The English may have their faults, but by the time they got to the New World, they had some fairly deeply ingrained cultural attitudes about fairness, duty to King and country, the value of education and the importance of the afternoon tea break that made the colonial countries pretty good places to live for most of their inhabitants.

They transplanted to the new world nine centuries of fighting, arguing and writing about how to govern a society in a way that lets most people have a say about most things the government wants to do. It worked, partly because most of the kinks had already been ironed out, partly because people were revelling in unprecedented wealth and improved living conditions across all classes, but mostly because we were all well accustomed to the idea of a democracy.

You can’t just hand out a bunch of ballot papers in a place like Iraq or Russia, where there’s never been anything like freedom or rule of law or a well fed and educated population, and expect them to go “hey cool, let’s have equality and a free press and unions and the right to assemble and free speech and doctors and teachers for everyone and a legal system that’s not for sale”.

Democracy doesn’t work in a society where the majority of the population are poor, oppressed, uneducated and have been for thousands of years. Functional democracy requires that the majority of the electorate is reasonably content with their lot, even when they disagree with the choices made by those in power. That can’t be achieved with a single ballot paper.

I wouldn’t mind having a good old fashioned riot in the streets over the election of Kevin Rudd, but it’s not something I feel strongly enough about to kill people for. I am well fed, reasonably free to make my own choices and my children are probably going to have the same. If there was any way of handing that to the people of Burma and Darfur they wouldn’t need democracy, or if they had it, it might work as well for them as it has for the rest of us.

The poor bastards.

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