In many minds, Freedom and Democracy are synonyms, where benevolent governments obey the will of the people, and prosperity follows. The spread of "democracy" has been highly heralded in recent years, after a few years of slogans that we can't force "democracy" on others. Our Founding Fathers did not predict the "elections" of Islamist dictators in Iran or Egypt, or the perpetual "re-elections" of Communist Premiers in the Socialist Democratic Republics, but they did understand that democracy can be a detriment to Freedom.
They understood that those that seek power, i.e. politicians, can never be satisified with the amount of power they attain. As they looked around the political landscape of the day, they saw Princes who dreamed of Kingdoms, and Kings who could not be satisfied with Empires.
The Founders rebelled against monopolistic power of Monarchs, against the most democratic Empire of their day, because it had usurped the Rights of the People.
The 20th Century brought a new kind of tyranny, Communism and Socialism, whereby dictators ruled completely by convincing the workers to shed their blood in pursuit of the tyrant's governmental monopoly. Attempts of Empire by Hitler's National Socialist Party and Stalin's International Socialist Worker's Party were equally tyrannical and murderous, all in the name of "the People."
The deciding defining difference between the democracies of the Iron curtain, Islamist Iran, the democratic monarchies, and the United States, was and is the Bill of Rights. The Constitution affords no caveat to the Sovereign Citizen's Right to Free Speech, to Bear Arms, or to Remain Silent in their own defense. The Constitution sets itself as above all desires, or laws, of the politicians. It sets the Rights of the People, above their democratic right to vote the Rights away from their fellow Citizens, or the politicians democratically elected to represent them.
The missing link in "pro-democracy revolutions" of the Middle East, as well "Occupy" movements, has been that while rebelling against a suppression of rights (or perceived rights), they espoused the denial of Freedoms of others. Egypt did not even have a Constitution when the Islamist President called for a worldwide ban on speech that "slandered" Mohammed. While committing violence against fellow citizens, "Occupiers" called for the banning of other Citizens to start or run businesses. Claiming to be "the 99%," they have an unusual number of the top 1% of wage earners, and unrepresentatively small number of "the masses" they claim to be.
It isn't that the rich elites of socialist/communist movements wish to give up their own financial well-being or power, but that they wish to consolidate even greater power under their own hand of government. Unsatisfied with the shared financial successes in a competitive system, they want to control all finance, in a government monopoly.
But large swathes of politicians find the chants of the entitled "Occupiers" intoxicating, and hoped it would find traction. The growth of government means a growth of power of the politicians that rule the government, and popular support for the monopolism of swathes of the economy by those political elite would mean monopolies of power.
While democracy makes allowances for the voters to suppress the Rights of others, Freedom prevents even the most powerful, with widespread support, from removing those Rights. Freedom means protecting the right, but not the implementation of Speech calling to curtail Free Speech. Freedom cannot survive, without the force of the strong protecting the weak, from the masses.
Freedom not only means the Right to pursue success, and happiness, but the right to fail in those pursuits, on one's own merits, and to keep whatever was gained, or to lose what was risked in those pursuits.
While Iran has a "right to speech," as well, it is caveated that the government can ban speech it doesn't like, and does ban that speech which is "anti-Islamic."
"We, The People" laid down rules and restrictions on the Government in the US Constitution, which not even the popular will of we the people can take away, no matter how power hungry the politicians we democratically elect may be. And when, we, the people, accept the specious slogans of the party to overturn the God-given Rights of Our Fellow Citizens, we have given away Our Own Freedoms, and in the end, our own prosperity.
Stumble It!