Oh puz-leeze. It's an Op-Ed piece. What do you expect?
It starts with a complete red herring: "Democracies produced Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy". Well, up to a point: I'm not quite sure how democracy produced Mussolini's "March on Rome". And democracies got together to destroy both of those, once the US proved Churchill right in his classic statement "One can always rely on the Americans to do the right thing, after having exhausted all other possibilities"
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Then it continues in the same scattergun vein, trying to Scare The Whole World by extrapolating the specific economic problems of one country. There's even the obligatory namecheck of Greece as "birthplace of Athenian democracy", as if there's been some uninterrupted Aristotelian regime in place for 3000 years. This is just lazy polemical journalism as usual.
Another example: "Already, hundreds of thousands of middle-class people have thronged the streets of Paris and Rome, of Milan and Sarajevo, of Reykjavik and Bucharest (where demonstrators stormed the presidential palace, an insurgent act that evokes the spectre of revolution).". Whoa. Europe must be on fire, right? Middle-class people in the streets in their hundreds of thousands? Must be some other Europe than the one I live in. The number of people "storming the presidential palace" in Bucharest in June was, er, 600, who incidentally
failed to storm the palace. The people in Reykjavik were protesting about the banks stealing all their money, and proceeded to vote in the Social Democratic (ie, left of centre) party. And... Sarajevo? Who? When?
And a web site calling itself "World Socialists" claiming that there is rage ahead? Wow. Next you'll be telling us that the Tea Party doesn't like Obama, or that the Pope isn't big on Methodism. Never mind that "middle-class people" anywhere don't tend to like socialism. Just throw the mud. Democracy, socialism, government employees. He missed out immigrants, for some reason.
I notice that he also fails to propose any alternative. It reminds me of those people who say that the world will definitely end in 18 months and then you discover that they hold government bonds and just increased their IRA contributions.
It's particular ironic to find it in a Canadian publication. Canada was a democracy last time I checked, and they seem to be doing just fine right now on the public debt and bank bailout fronts.