GHN offers article about Mikheil Saakashvili published in Forbes:
"The New York Times just published a positively fascinating profile of Georgia's ex-president, Mikheil Saakashvili. In what reads like an excerpt from a Gary Shteyngart novel, we see how Saakashvili, freed from the shackles of power and responsibility, spends his days riding his bike to and fro around Williamsburg, frequenting hipster cafes and bars that one does not usually associate with former heads of state.
The profile would have been worthwhile had it only conveyed a little bit of the strange world of idleness and wealth that is today's Williamsburg. But it does quite a lot more. Jason Horowitz, the article's author, got Misha to go on the record with some of his political views, and it's an eye-opening revelation:
"I used to look at this place from Manhattan, it was such a pity, it was mafia, a place where hit men dump bodies," he said, recalling his time in the 1990s as a Columbia University Law School student. Now he sees "a jazzy atmosphere" rife with energy and new construction.
"Williamsburg is part of the democratic transformation," he said.
This borders on caricature. Many of Saakashvili's critics have long noted that he tends to use "democracy" not as a description of specific political systems in which high office holders are freely elected by the public, but as a catch-all term that translates roughly to "things that I like." By explicitly equating gentrification with democracy building, Saakashvili has removed any lingering doubts: he simply does not understand what democracy actually is.
The transformation of Williamsburg, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with "democratic transformations." The neighborhood was part of a democratic political system when it was poor. It remains part of a democratic political system now that it is wealthy. The changes of the past fifteen years are laudable enough, but if you try to link them to any modification of New York city's electoral laws, or to any other reforms of the American political system, you will search in vain. Williamsburg's transformation is the result of a complicated interplay of demographic and market forces, not "people power" or any grand ideological crusade.
Saakashvilli is one of the rock stars of the democracy promotion industry, and he has close relationships with several of the highest-profile members of the "democracy solves everything" caucus, people like John McCain and Victoria Nuland. He's written widely on the supreme importance of democracy and on America's duty to spread it around the world in many of the country's highest-profile and most widely read publications. It's noteworthy, and more than a little bit ironic, that in reality Saakashvili has such a tenuous grasp of the concept to which he is so devoted.
Democracy is a wonderful solution if the problem being solved is an excessive concentration of political power. But democracy, as such, has very little, if any, impact on real estate markets or the prevalence of high-end coffee shops. Advocates of democracy promotion would be well advised learn from Saakashvili as he has provided a perfect example of how to not talk about the issue. To put it simply: if, like Saakashvili, you refer to your favorite restaurant as "democratic" you need to crack open a dictionary and become reacquainted with what democracy really means."