Measuring Democracy

“The government is telling us that the street is not the place for things to be solved, but I say the street was and is the place. The voice of the street must be heard.”

These were Alexander Dudcek words during the liberation of Czechoslovakia in 1979. and thirty years later, they still hold strong, and the voices of the street continue to be heard and continue to ignite change.

But what ignites this change? How and why has the Arab world suddenly revolted against the authoritarian regimes of the past? This is the question Rebecca Solnit attempts to answer in her piece called The Butterfly and the Boiling Point.

One piece of evidence the author suggests as sparking revolution in Tunisia was the WikiLeaks cable that outlined the US unwillingness to back Ben Ali, the previous dictator of the country. It was truly insightful to connect these two issues, as I felt like a lot of the WikiLeaks stuff was lost in the debate of whether Wikileaks is a positive or negative force in society.

Soltin does not attribute the recent revolutions to Facebook or Twitter. She recognizes that they were around before, and although they might have helped organize protests and garner resentment against the regimes, these new forms of media have been around for years now.

The author doesn’t really say the revolution was caused by x,y,z. Rather, she shows how any one person can be the starting point for a massive uprising. The article concludes that this type of movement is one that could upend the watered down democracy of the United States.

I tend to find a revolution in the US hard to believe. Her piece is far too ideological in the sense that it does not identify particular factors that led to the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. The average person in the US is not in the same boat as the average Egyptian or Tunisian. Americans are far to complacent, and the problems that face them on a day to day basis are entirely different than the poverty and social challenges that citizens of Tunisia had to deal with.