As he sees it, such change is too slow and indefinite to be credited. As Barber sees it, the availability of such consumer goods, in the old Communist bloc or elsewhere, is a direct challenge to nascent democracy. Predictably enough, his chief evidence for such indoctrination is the electoral success of those with whom he disagrees, especially in those precincts where McWorld is most firmly established. By contrast, Barber has difficulty disguising his sympathy for Jihad. It is not that he considers himself an antimodern.
Barber specializes in such euphemisms for democratic tyranny.
It is hard to know whether it is naivete or just reckless indifference that leads him to cite ancient Athens, Puritan Massachusetts, and Jacobin France as democratic models. Barber's commitment to so all-encompassing a notion of democratic politics explains his perfunctory treatment of civil society in Jihad vs. McWorld . It is this willful indifference to the varied satisfactions available under liberal democracy that makes Barber's thought so exasperating. For him there is no middle ground, no way of life that can accommodate our many different needs. In this hysterical and sloppily composed book, one searches in vain for that spirit of moderation that has made the American system so attractive to the rest of the world in this era of democratic renewal.