The 25th anniversary of the protests in Tiananmen Square on June 4 passed largely unnoticed in China. This dismal indifference to an awful atrocity should be blamed as much on a rising, self-absorbed middle class as state censorship. But this wasn't the only sobering recent news for those of us who prize individual liberty and the political methods, popular participation in government, best equipped to secure it. Democratic experiments in Thailand and Egypt have collapsed. Their middle classes now openly back military despots of the kind — arrogant, ruthless and preposterously vain — last witnessed in the 1980s.
Among financial and political elites globally, there seems to be a disconcertingly broad consensus that, as an Egyptian analyst told the Financial Times, "pluralism is divisive, of no value and a loss of resources and that what we need is someone resolute enough to identify the public good and implement it."
"Rule us, rule us hard, rule us ruthlessly," a well-known investor exhorted India's new prime minister in the country's leading business daily the Economic Times. "But for Lord Ram's sake, give us real growth, and income. The means don't matter. We just want happy endings." Even the Economist claims that "China's leaders have been able to tackle some of the big problems of state-building that can take decades to deal with in a democracy."