Dan, I just read the article and I thought it was very well written. I don't think Ignatius was ignoring the long term benefits of globalization as such. He was simply pointing out the tradeoffs and the negative impacts that could come from globalization.

Think about it from this point of view -- globalization means that capital will flow to India, China etc. But countries that are hotbeds of extremism may not get capital (a lot of Middle East countries do have their own wealth to compensate, admittedly, but countries like Egypt and Pakistan do not). So what happens ? We get an angrier and angrier mass of jobless young men in some of these countries, making the terrorism issue worse. In short, globalization will work exactly as its intended to, making sure that the hard-working and peaceful countries do well, and that unstable, extreme countries do not. But that does not imply a transition from instability and extremism to peaceful commercialism.

Finally, his comment about how elites can fall out of touch with the people is important, especially in third world countries where a large chunk of the people are rural. Consider India 2 years back. Everyone was convinced the free market party in power would return to power after elections because the economy was doing well. But the rural economy was not doing well, and the rural vote overthrew the ruling party.

Or consider Iran. There is a large segment of well-educated pro-Western groups (such as most bloggers), but as the recent election shows, they can be overwhelmed by the rural and urban poor.

Dan,
The weimar republics weakness caused more than a little short term problem. On this site, every current world leader that is out step with the west is offered up as a Hitler in the making. Hitler did actually have origins in a failed weak democracy.

"Freedom" includes the freedom to fail.

erg,

You assume Iran's elections aren't fixed.

Iran's elections were fixed to the extent that a number of people were excluded. Beyond that, I've seen no evidence of fixing. Even the White House didn't say they were fixed.

Note the irony of pundits making sweeping, long-term predictions based on the short-term phenomenon of instantaneous internet reactions by a tiny minority of (male, wired, underemployed) politics addicts....

Re Fukuyama, he was happy to declare the End of History when liberal capitalism appeared, in his rosy purview, to be sweeping across eastern Europe, but somehow he's unwilling to grant the same kind of long view to the democratic project in the middle east. Having seen the complete collapse of liberal democracy in Yeltsin's and then Yeltsin-puppet Putin's, Russia, I would gladly wager that democracy in the middle east will develop faster and further and with more benign implications for US interests than democracy in the former Soviet Union ever will.

Beware snap judgments based on today's headlines.

Yes, well Germany's a former 'problem' that over the long term has worked out well - the short term was a real god damn mess though, and that's why it's not necessarily wrong to stress the short term over the long term - short term issues seem much less hypothetical.

"It's more a question of timing . . ."

Oh, really? You mean there will be some tension in the short term when "illiberal" or "authoritarian" states somehow become democratic overnight? However mad it must make Friedman for not having said it first, it makes me madder that someone is passing this off as epiphany.

I just hate them so much!

In fact the rise of "rage" within schlock political debate should be traced to 1980s television, not the internet. Specifically, to "Crossfire" and its imitators. It was Calvin Trillin who called these shows "the political equivalent of professional wrestling"; they're the originators of the genre. The internet merely allows everyone to imitate Novak and McLaughlin and Eleanor and Fred and Pebbles And Bam-Bam and the rest of the bloviators.

If there's a deeper trend here, it's that, as with global capitalism, what ultimately allowed the internet's politics of noise/rage/instant response to flourish is greater competition spurred by technological advances. Blame (or creidt, as you wish) not the blogosphere but the decline of monopolistic media, with its ability to set and contain a national news agenda, as was the case when the NYT determined which stories would make the front page of most dailies in the US and Walter and then Dan, Tom and Peter would determine which images and story angles most US households would swallow with their dinners. For all their faults, one virtue of those talking heads was their tendency to split differences, seek mushy middle ground, soothe or paper over areas of social conflict.

Can't say we're not better off now that our TV anchors are no longer able to convince an entire nation that victory is defeat, but we could definitely use a lot more of the sensible, moderate tone they adopted as standard. Our culture's poorer for the rise of LGF/Kos/Limbaugh/DU and their ilk. Screw 'em, to coin a phrase.