Brooks and Friedman must have taken (or skipped) the same poli sci courses in college

OP-ED: Democracy's Long Haul: Looking back on the liberty to come [subscription required], by David Brooks, New York Times, 13 July 2006, p. A23.

Maybe I'm not so narrowly read after all!

It was odd to read Friedman in the "World is Flat" act so surprised when Michael Sandel (one of my favs at Harvard and a great guy to boot) basically told him that his "flat world" concept was simply Marx updated or Marxism on steroids. You just wanted to go "Duh!"

Then again, Friedman rehashing Marx in his book would get awfully dull awfully fast, so there you have it.

Now we get David Brooks, whom I generally like even more because he's not so cut-and-runnish on Bush in general, who just last week declared Big Bang dead after just three years but now takes the long view on backsliding among the class of Huntington's "third wave of democratizaton" (Sam's best book by far, IMO).

Resurrecting the revolutions of 1848 (Marx's favorite intellectual stomping ground), he notes that many of those new dems slide back into authoritarianism, only to see these same states turn quite innovative, democracy-wise, a bit further down the road. So, taking a cue from both Russia and Iraq of today, he sees basically four stages of democratization, followed by chaos, followed by authoritarians restored, followed (hopefully, like the class of 1848) by gradual reform.

To me, this makes perfect sense: a rapid expansion of the Core is likely to unfold in this manner, hence a certain patience is in order and it's better to stress growing connectivity in the short term instead of rapid democratization--especially in Friedman's hypercompetitive flat world. Such conservatism in politics is an acceptable form of protectionism in the face of globalization's rapid embrace of your society It's the defensible social "tariff."