The reason much of Africa and the Middle East is not, and probably never can or will be, democratic is the tribal attitude of the population. Where you seek power only to benefit your own tribe and followers, you will always need repressive government.
Epicureans should approve of approve of democratic forms of government (where they survive) because this are the least arbitrary types. You cannot have ataraxia if you are concerned that habeus corpus is being suspended , the secret service might be monitoring the phones or the government is creating monopolies at your expense to reward their supporters.
There are powerful forces in the West effectively trying to introduce forms of tribalism.
I am thinking about the huge and growing issue of the gap between rich and poor, deliberately created, and the creation of the new monopolies (e.g the mobile phone companies – – anyone who has been in Europe and has choice of provider and service, has to be amazed at the new and perverse restrictions on competition in the US. Americans are so sure of the superiority of their economic system and so unaware of how they are manipulated. The whole business of the sub-prime market will be sorted out – – the greedy perpetrators of the current crisis will be bailed out and the other tribe, the poorer people , will obviously pay in any number of ways. Good one!
Wouldn’t it be helpful if destroying another person’s ataraxia were made a felony or a major crime? Or how about the old remedy we learned in civics class? “citizen’s arrest.” The offense would be punishable by fines and incarceration. What a pack of criminal political idiots we could toss in the brig and thus regain sanity in our public discourse. Yes, I know, wild dreaming.
Here’s an optimistic gambit: there’s no genetic marker for “tribalism,” it is not part of the DNA sequence, it arises out of historical circumstances going back to our human origins. Historical developments have changed the way people organize –e.g., clan, tribe, kinship, polis, villages, kingdoms, states, and (cringe) empires — so tribe is not destiny. Does that imply that improvements are theoretically possible?