Okay, I picked a provocative title. What thoughts should it provoke? Please bracket your dark suspicions that I might be stumping for an emperor in America, and let us reason together. Is democracy really “good”? If so, in what sense? To establish that, let’s switch to something more concrete for the moment.

Are guns good? Well, it depends on the situation. They are good in the hands of honest policemen, law-abiding citizens, and soldiers of our republic. They are very bad indeed in the hands of thieves, mass shooters, and terrorists. So their presence is good in some contexts, and very bad in others. That means they are not good in themselves, but are instrumental goods — that is, they’re good for attaining certain ends, which can be good or bad in themselves. So we wouldn’t call guns unequivocally “good.” We save that for things like life, liberty, and sanctity. Guns, then, can be good or bad, depending on the user and the use.

Is home-ownership good? Does it make us better citizens, more engaged in the economy and more responsible? That’s what the Clinton and Bush administrations thought, which is why they exerted pressure on banks to offer easy mortgages to people with shaky incomes and dicey credit scores. Just the fact of owning a home, some policy wonks had convinced them, would transform the kind of people who trash mobile homes and skip out on their rent into solid, responsible members of the lower middle class. And maybe that worked with some people, as having a baby or joining the Army sometimes drives troubled teens to “mom up” or “man up,” and achieve their untapped potential. But we know very well that home ownership did not have that effect on millions of people who bought homes they couldn’t afford, with money from reckless banks, and defaulted on those mortgages — while taxpayers were forced to bail out the banks. Whole neighborhoods stand decrepit in cities like Los Vegas, the wreckage of what we now call the “housing bubble.”

And much of the Middle East now stands in roughly the same condition, after sixteen years of the U.S. convincing itself that democracy is a good thing in itself, good all the time and for everyone, and ought to serve as the goal of our foreign policy. Republicans and Democrats (with different emphases) accepted this proposition, through four presidential administrations, and the results are plain to see. Whatever we tried, however noble our intentions were and bravely our soldiers fought, the region lies in ruins.

One-man, one-vote democracy is one means to an end. That end is freedom. We cannot choose the Good unless we are free to make choices, so we must fight for freedom first, then discipline ourselves to living by the virtues, while urging our fellow citizens to do the same. We want a government that encourages the virtues, without unduly compelling them. The goal of all this, of course, is to lead happy lives that are pleasing to God. Happiness and beatitude are the only genuine ultimate goals.

In certain cultures at certain times, democracy is the best means to guarantee freedom. But it won’t work well at every stage of every culture on earth. Remember that Adolf Hitler was democratically elected, and the only people who could have kept him out of power were the monarchists in the German Army — who had the power to annul his election and lock him back up in prison where he belonged. They didn’t use it. They respected the will of the people.

As our Founding Fathers knew, and wrote about incessantly, democracy can actually prove a danger to freedom — and hence, all the good things that follow from it, like virtue and happiness. That’s why they created undemocratic institutions such as the Constitution, and the Electoral College, and the non-proportional Senate — to serve as brakes on the wild will of majorities.

49% Vegetarian, 51% Cannibal

Imagine a society— let’s call it “Agrabah”— that is deeply divided culturally and politically. To be specific, Agrabah is 49% vegetarian and 51% cannibal. Should the vegetarians in Agrabah accept the plain results of a fair, democratic vote and let the cannibals come to power? Or would they be obliged to use every method within their power to frustrate the “democratic will” of the plain majority, perhaps by imposing another system of government? They might have to restrict who can vote, censor the press, perhaps even employ a secret police that kept tabs on the hungriest members of the “Murder is Meat” movement. Over time, we would hear of abuses, of secret policemen employing harsh interrogation methods, perhaps even of the army facing down angry mobs and firing into the crowd.

And at that point, some high-minded Americans would call on the U.S. government to intervene, to cut off all aid to the Agrabah government, and offer help to its democratic opposition. Inspired by a few phrases they remembered from high school civics class, political journalists would write high-minded editorials in defense of Agrabah’s “freedom fighters,” comparing them to Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King, Jr., while policy wonks in the U.S. government would seek out “moderates” in the cannibal party, who promised to only take pinkie toes and single kidneys. Those who opposed this policy, who called themselves (let’s say) “realists,” would object that democratic rule in Agrabah was an awful idea, that we should support the existing, undemocratic regime as the lesser of two evils. And these realists would be roundly condemned as cynics.

Well, Agrabah doesn’t exist — it’s the country from Disney’s Aladdin, and a waggish pollster decided to ask the general public if it favored bombing the place. The results were mixed. More Republicans than Democrats favored sending the bombers, while more Democrats than Republicans thought it was a real place and gave a definitive answer.

But the Muslim world is quite real, and many of its regimes got and keep their power by undemocratic means. And the Muslim world is infected with a flesh-eating bacteria called political Islam, which indeed wishes to cannibalize every element in the culture — to impose a totalitarian system of theocratic laws (called shariah) on every inhabitant, and to subjugate, drive out, or kill those who do not accept political Islam: the Christians, Alawites, Yazidis, and secularists — the “vegetarians,” if you will. Some of the region’s regimes (like those in Iran and Saudi Arabia) represent the views of the cannibals, but in others such as Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, the government is protecting the vegetarians. Should we help to topple such governments?

The answer again is: It depends. Is a given government a threat to us, as Bush considered Iraq under Saddam Hussein? Do we have a workable plan for replacing that government, and protecting the vegetarians? If not, we need to think long and hard before we shatter the structures of order that the vegetarians have set up, however unsavory their tactics might be.

So just as not every person in our country should carry a gun, and not everyone’s suited to borrow the money to buy a home, not every nation is ready, willing, and able to be a democracy that protects minority rights. Our gun laws, housing programs, and foreign policy need to reflect such facts. Freedom is good in itself, since it’s an indispensable condition for virtue. Democracy is a hammer, and not every nation’s a nail.