How democracy can literally save lives

Daniel Henninger

The Wall Street Journal

Among intellectuals, said Daniel Henninger, “there is no idea more routinely mocked than George Bush’s proposition that what the world needs today is more democracies.” Maybe this month’s two major natural catastrophes will help change their minds. In Myanmar, some 100,000 innocent people are feared dead from a devastating cyclone; Beijing estimates that more than 30,000 Chinese were killed by last week’s earthquake. Both authoritarian regimes have rejected the world’s offers of humanitarian aid because it might make them look weak. Now, natural disasters can strike anywhere. “When they kill people in a democracy,” however, an outraged populace usually demands that someone be held responsible. Following the “fiasco” of Hurricane Katrina, FEMA head Michael Brown was forced out and President Bush was criticized so vehemently that his popularity never recovered. But in dictatorships such as Myanmar and China, where the ruling tyrants answer to no one, human suffering is met with stony silence. “In nondemocracies, the politicians don’t give a damn because they don’t have to.”

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