Adam Gurri

You have to have a degree of freedom of association so that opposition parties can organize.

Otherwise, it's not democracy, in my opinion.

And I think there's...

Shady Hamid at the Washington Post, and he's a political scientist, I believe, he wrote a book about democracy in which he made the argument against liberalism and democracy.

He said you could just have mere democracy because his focus is on the Middle East.

And he felt that it was often unfair democracy.

That nascent democracies in the Middle East were held to unfair standards by Westerners because the people that were going to win were going to be Muslim Brotherhood types.

And he said we should just be comfortable with Muslim Brotherhood types winning, which I do agree with, by the way.

I do actually agree with that particular point.

What I disagree with him on is the idea that you can disentangle that from liberalism.

You can have...

a Muslim Brotherhood run democracy that is fairly illiberal on the whole, like in terms of like the policies that they have.

But you would need to allow women, for example, to have a degree of freedom of speech.

They would have to be enfranchised on a secret ballot so that their husbands wouldn't coerce them or something.

and freedom of association on their own, forming women's organizations, that I don't think societies like that would allow, frankly.

And if they don't allow that, then they're not really a democracy.

I mean, they're an imperfect democracy, say, or they're a competitive autocracy of some kind.

And that's probably better than a straight-up democracy where the elections don't mean anything.

But it's not great, and it's not a democracy, not really.

It's not free and fair elections.