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Part of the problem was that the left was too successful in casting things like HBD and culture being deep as unthinkably racist. They were extremely taboo on the mainstream right.
To put things in perspective, ousting the Soviets from Eastern Europe was largely successful. It was still highly taboo to talk about the problems in places like Zimbabwe and South Africa.
As a result it was impossible for anyone on the right to assemble an argument about how removing Saddam wouldn't result in a democratic revolution.
You'd sound too racist to be on TV.
Liberals from a more cosmopolitan background often have the attitude of "everybody knows X, it's just not polite to say it". But Republicans from small white towns frequently don't know it. They're going to go along with poor decisions if you don't let anyone tell them.
Edit:
I seem to be having some communications difficulties with this post. Back in 2009 or so HBD blogs were the only places having discussions about things like cousin marriage in Arab cultures leading to clannishness which caused problems when trying to impose individualist democracy on them.
I'm not even endorsing any particular theory. I'm just saying that the limits on public conversation made it difficult to fight a bad idea.
I assume your basic HBD-related argument here is that democratic transition was largely successful in Eastern Europe in 1989 because White Christians live there, as opposed to Zimbabwe and South Africa (or something).
Either way, I don’t mean this as an insult of some sort, I’d rather go ahead and nitpick.
The obvious commonality among the Eastern European nations that more or less successfully transitioned to democracy in 1989 is that they all have some past legacy of applied democratic norms, rule of law, parliamentary systems, Western orientation and (some differing level of) Germanic cultural influence. Belarus, for example, is a clear exception. (And the question of whether the area of the former GDR was ‘properly’ democratized or not is seemingly an ever thornier one on the minds of West German normies.) In contrast, the Russian, Central Asian and Caucasian republics of the former USSR clearly lack this and continued the norms of authoritarianism and repression accordingly. Whatever marginal democratic tendencies might have even been present at the beginning clearly went nowhere. This was already clear as day back in 2003, and was available as an argument against rosy neocon predictions regarding Iraq’s future.
I won’t argue about the basket case Rhodesia has turned into; with respect to South Africa though I’d point out that it’s easy to get dispirited about developments there instead of comparing what ended up happening to the absolute bloodbath and misery the country could easily have slipped into after Apartheid collapsed.
On one hand I'll repeat my broken-record line of "don't damn peoples down seven generations", and even though I think genetic group differences are a thing, I'm much more skeptical of sweeping statements about specific groups being incapable organizing in of specific political systems. On the other hand, this is a liberal just-so story that glosses over anything inconvenient, and invents several convenient "facts" to salvage it's own argument.
Ah yes, the long rich democratic tradition of the 20 years between the World Wars, that were imposed by Woodrow Wilson's deranged fantasies, and managed to revert to authoritarianism even within that short timespan. The attachment to democracy was so short that we were seriously debating if it's not better to take the Asian Tiger route, and only implement democracy after authoritarian reforms.
Which only shows how democracy is a luxury system. It can work if the stars align just right, but has the tendency of taking it's necessary conditions (like everybody having roughly the same values) for granted. The moment these conditions are not met the democracy enjoyers themselves will start begging for it's end, arresting opposition candidates, and seriously considering the banning of political parties, for the high crime of people voting the wrong way.
What is this meant to be a reference to please? Czechoslovakia? Because there was no reversion to authoritarianism in that case.
The Asian Tiger route was a strictly Southeast Asian (Confucian) phenomenon in the specific context of the Cold War and facilitated by generous and targeted American capital investment and the proto version of offshoring. None of that applied to Eastern Europe after 1989.
It was all a long-term consequence of German 'reunification' (the annexation of the former GDR into an unchanged federal state structure) being a complete shitshow which incidentally the Americans played no part in.
Referring to Weimar Germany I assume.
There are two glaring problems with that. Imperial Germany had a legacy of democratic norms already - there was a legislative assembly, elections, political parties, political discussions in a free press etc. Also, Germany isn't in Eastern Europe.
Whoa, whoa, hold your horses. Imperial Germany was absolutely an Obrigkeitsstaat (elite-state?) ruled by a small number of people with very token democratic institutions that were meant to channel republicanism into wearing itself out and discrediting itself via fruitless procedures conducted within a powerless framework. That "democracy" never amounted to anything, wasn't taken very seriously by non-activists, and got absolutely bulldozed over by the actual rulers whenever they didn't jump according to orders. The Prussians in general and Bismarck specifically had a habit of allowing seemingly republican instutions to take the wind out of activists' sails, only to pull the rug out from under them and have riot police beat the shit out of them a few years later. The counterrevolution was still very much going on in Imperial Germany.
So the "legacy of democratic" norms was really the legacy that democracy was a farce. Does that square with your perception of inter-war Germany?
As opposed to Russia, where the meekest similar attempts even at creating token institutions were likely to land you in a Siberian penal colony. Degrees of differences do matter.
And there's a very large degree of difference between what seems to have been the historical reality in 19th and early 20th century Germany and what I assume most people would imagine when they hear "a legacy of democratic norms".
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