Shadi Hamid on the Tensions Between Liberalism and Democracy
The Good Fight
00:00
Do You Think We Should Support Liberal Regimes in the Middle East?
I sympathize with your instincts from a more high level theoretical question of should we have a principled preference for illiberal democracy over animocratic, supposedly liberalism. Hosni Mubarak was not a liberal. He tortured people and threw them in jail for what they said. That's not a liberal at all. And the forms of liberal democracy aren't really going to be democratic most of the time, which gives me very limited sympathy for them either. I don't expect the US government in its foreign policy to ever kind of substantively commit to a liberal democracy. What I would like them to commit to is just plain old democracy and then be agnostic on the outcomes in a more self-conscious way
Transcript
Play full episode
