Why Autocracy is Bad: Anecdotes from the Arab World Posted by Shadi Hamid

A lot of us act as if democracy being a good thing is so self-evident that it needs no further elaboration. Most Americans, I’m sure, agree that democracy is a good thing. But it’s not always easy to articulate why, in part because most of us have never experienced its opposite. 

I can’t even begin to convey the daily travails of living under autocracy. If I was living in, say, Jordan and things got really bad, I could always just leave. I have an escape clause. Hundreds of millions of Arabs don’t. I will never be able to truly comprehend the powerlessness they feel, the helplessness that is the inevitable product of living under a society where others all too often determine your fate, and without your consent.

My father grew up under the brutality of Nasser regime in Egypt. He was apolitical, probably because he had to be. That was the price of success – not to question, not to conceive of what a different society might look like. If there is one thing such rulers feared more than anything else, it was citizens who were capable of imagination. It took my father years to become comfortable exercising his right to vote. It took just as long - 8 years of political awakening under Bush - to realize what his vote meant.

In any case, how does this powerlessness manifest itself? That is what I turn to now. I'll just relay a simple, and relatively trivial, anecdote. When I lived in Jordan in 2008, I frequented a Starbucks on Wakalat street, in a posh area of Sweifieh. I would park my laptop, get some drip coffee, and write. Needless to say, I would occasionally need to use the bathroom. Even though this street was meant to be a magnet for Jordan's young, secular elite (with Mango and Zara stores), there were two badly-maintained public bathrooms. Perhaps more problematically, neither had any soap. If this was the U.S., we might contact the relevant local authority and inform them there wasn't any soap. But, in Jordan, it was unclear what was to be done. Was there a relevant "local authority" and, if there was, how did one contact it or get it to listen to you, particularly as it would have been an unelected, and therefore unaccountable, body?

Because I couldn't answer these questions, I took matters into my own hands and bought a bar of soap and put it on the sink. I was proud of myself for fighting back in my own little way. Until I came back the next day and saw that my bar of soap was no longer there.

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Of course, hypothetically, there is such a thing as a republic, in which the rule of law means that there is no autocrat at all; but no real regime has been able to maintain the rule of law long and rigorously enough to allow empirical observation of how such a system might work.

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