Revolution & the construction of social reality

John Searle suggests a description of social organization in where the fundamental organising principle is collective intentionality articulated in declarations, essentially statements in the form of X counts as Y in context C (e.g. shells count as money on our island.  In this game, let's make it that you're the daddy and I'm the mummy...). I mention it because it was helpful in the following case:

There was a terribly stupid and uncivil article on the abc news web-site by Ted Lapkin, alleging that the American right's foreign policy in the Bush years is being vindicated in the 'awakening' revolts across the middle-east, and citing this as a terrible slap in the face for those who criticised America. It had a point in bashing the potential for relativism and philosophical hand-folding on the left, but it is hard to give any credibility to someone who views the Bush years as wise pursuit and accomplishment of the best available goals.

Thanks to John Searle I was able to pull my thoughts together:
The function of a democracy depends on personal commitment to its institutions by people. Such commitment cannot be imposed from without (as it can in authoritarian regimes), and to some extent, cannot be negotiated in a single rapid step, because it takes practice to build confidence. This is why Iraq and Afghanistan are making flakey democracies - people are not that committed to or comfortable with the institutions, and commitment and comfort are the stuff that makes institutions (not just voting and parliament, also rule of law, judges, policing, limited liability companies, etc etc).

The recent 'awakening' style popular revolutions are not the shining example of unity we would like to take them for, but they are firmly founded on commitment of the people who would have to make democracy work. If they get captured by some older institution, it's unfortunate, and possibly a case where the foreign powers could make a difference.

I think Ted's complaint is that the left is sometimes too invested in the way they think things actually are - 'Arabs don't believe most of the 'self-evident' enlightenment truths' they might say. The right is too invested in the way things 'theoretically' should be - according to their pet theories anyway - let's not have a lot of leftist theory about how much trouble we'll have making an ommelette when we can get on breaking eggs.

Where we both go wrong is when the background shifts unnoticed - when the huge bulge of young people have surprising new perspectives, synthesising their old world and the new.