Via Real Clear Politics, I have found an exceptional essay by the excellent Fareed Zakaria on the problems Americans have perceiving the world’s vast move toward democratic revolution.

Zakaria writes that Americans are pretty convinced that their country is the beacon of freedom. And with its visa lines and 12-million-strong illegal alien count, who is to argue with us? But he discusses how inside countries like Russia and Singapore, there really are a lot of people who support their existing governments, flaws and all. And part of the reason they do is that they have the memory of the world economic disorder of the Clinton era as a caution. It exists in Latin America, in Asia, and certainly in Russia.

Like Pedro Camargo did in this essay here, Zakaria hits on something that’s rarely discussed and extremely important – the legacy of the monstrous currency devaluations that destroyed all savings and the failed privatizations of state-owned enterprises that made many political cronies rich as the people suffered. If that’s not going on now in places like Argentina and Russia and Venezuela, a lot of people are happy.

Those upheavals are still fresh in the minds of people who lived them and that’s why they are willing to give certain kinds of tyrants the benefit of the doubt if they can. The trauma of the recent past is too great. In short, the IMF era of the 1990s is responsible for a lot of the baffling choices of some voters who vote for economic morons rather than go back to the daddy-knows-best shock therapy world of the U.S.’s Jeffrey Sachs, who’s now advocating pork barrel spending as his new solution to world poverty. With guys like him around, you can see why much of the world remains suspicious of the U.S. and its aims which Zakaria notes, is above all characterized as a perception of arrogance.

I know this. As I wrote of Indonesia’s democratic revolution in 1998 last week, I was struck by how sharply the reaction against the IMF and its great love of currency devaluation was connected to the explosive and vast democratic revolution that overtook Indonesia in that year of blood, smoke and fire. And the exact word that Indonesians used to describe the U.S. in all this was: “arrogance.”

Zakaria’s essay is well worth reading here.