Thomas Jefferson once asserted that for the flame of democracy to remain ablaze, that we would “need a revolution every twenty years.”  Why might that be?  Perhaps he understood that democracy requires a freshness of leadership that is born forever out of a baptism of fire.  Perhaps he foresaw that democracy necessitates a constant struggle for identity and consciousness, and a rejuvenation on the verge of post-adolescence in order to prevent a slide into an embrittling senescence.  

Communists and other enemies of democracy have often used this quote of Jefferson’s to attempt to justify their seditious aspirations.  But did Jefferson really mean we would have to be prodigal with our domestic heritage merely in order to ‘reinvent the wheel’?   

Since the establishment of the first modern electoral democracy in America, democracy has indeed spawned waves of revolution ‘every twenty years’ or so.  But these waves have surged forth mainly  from America upon oceans of global extent to wash principally and effectively and freely upon new shores:

The history of democracy is not a slow steady advance, in the view of political scientist Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard University, but a succession of waves that have advanced, receded, then rolled in and crested again.

Writing in the Journal of Democracy, Huntington identifies three historical or "long waves" of democracy. The first began in the early 19th century with the extension of the right to vote to a large proportion of the male population in the United States, and continued until the 1920s. During this period, some 29 democracies came into being. The ebb, or reversal, of the first wave began in 1922 with the accession of Mussolini to power in Italy and lasted until 1942, when the number of the world's democracies had been reduced to 12.

A second wave began with the triumph of the Allies in World War II, cresting in 1962 when the number of democracies had risen to 36. The ebbing of the second wave between 1962 and the mid-1970s brought it back down to 30.

When the third wave of global democratization began in 1974, there were 39 democracies, but the percentage of democracies in the world was about the same (27 percent). Yet by January 2000, Freedom House counted 120 democracies, the highest number and the greatest percentage (63) in the history of the world.

What, of course, we are witnessing is the Globalization of Democracy.  A hegemony sweeping the world with Jeffersonian ‘revolution every twenty years’, not where it has already been established, but where it is yet to be established.

Indeed, in its 1999 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, the U.S. State Department went so far as to identify democracy and human rights as a third "universal language" (along with money and the Internet). That report envisions the emerging transnational network of human rights actors (both public and private) becoming an "international civil society . . . that will support democracy worldwide and promote the standards embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights."

An international civil society that will support democracy worldwide!  Yes, democracy seems to be ‘taking hold’ almost everywhere except … (I’ll yet you look at the chart below and decide)…

Goose eggs for the Muslim world.  Until now, for the democratization of Iraq will change that.

We are not fighting a ‘War against  Terrorism’ . Rather, terrorism, and its twin, tyrrany, are the forces resisting the historical burgeoning of globally irrepressible democracy.  And losing.

Sources...

 * Democracy's Third Wave

** A Report Card on Democracy