The sudden overthrow of Tunisia’s strongman, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, has inspired a spate of speculation by journalists and analysts about which throne may shake next while the controlled press of nearby dictatorships are at pains to explain why “it can’t happen here.”

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Well, maybe not. But then again it couldn’t happen in Tunisia, either, and as far as I can see, no one predicted that it would. The regime, according to the ratings of Freedom House, was one of the four most repressive among the 17 states of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). And the repression seemed to have worked: all opposition parties had long since been crushed. Ben Ali had been in office for 23 years while his predecessor, Habib Bourguiba, had ruled for 31, and between them that accounted for the entire history of Tunisia as a country independent of foreign rule.

Economically, Tunisia was not badly off, with an estimated per capita income last year of $9,500, below that of the oil-rich states but above that of the rest of the region.

The CIA World Factbook the overall economic situation thus:

Progressive social policies also have helped raise living conditions in Tunisia relative to the region. Real growth, which averaged almost 5% over the past decade, declined to 4.6% in 2008 and to 3-4% in 2009-10 because of economic contraction and slowing of import demand in Europe — Tunisia’s largest export market. However, development of non-textile manufacturing, a recovery in agricultural production, and strong growth in the services sector somewhat mitigated the economic effect of slowing exports.

Moreover, poverty was negligible. Of the 12 MENA states for which the CIA had data on the poverty rate, Tunisia’s was the lowest by far. (The agency reported that no data were available for 5 of the 17 MENA countries.) Indeed, at 3.8 percent, Tunisia’s poverty rate looked a lot better than America’s, which stands at around 12 percent.

While economic ills are a frequent source of instability, another is ethnic strife. We’ve seen in Iraq how explosive that can be, literally. Tensions between Sunni and Shia also rile Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iran. Those between Muslims and Christians are often violent in Egypt and Lebanon. Other ethnic divisions make themselves felt between Palestinians and Bedouins in Jordan, moors and blacks in Mauritania, and Abadhis and other sects in Oman. And Kurdish minorities are in at odds with the majorities in Iran, Iraq, and Syria — with varying degrees of violence. But Tunisians are almost all Arabs, Muslims, Sunnis. No ethnic divisions there.

External conflicts can also undo governments. The war in the Falklands/Malvinas put paid to Argentina’s military regime, and World War One brought down four European empires. In the MENA region, Algeria, Morocco, and Mauritania have a four-sided competition with Spain over the Western Sahara. Syria controls Lebanon, tries to control the Palestinians, and is locked in enmity with Israel. Libya claims 32,000 square miles of Algeria and 25,000 square miles of Niger. Saudi Arabia has issues with Yemen, Iran, and Egypt, which itself has a border problem with Sudan. Oman and the United Arab Emirates say they have settled their border dispute, but neither side will reveal the terms. And Tunisia? Not a quarrel with anyone.

Tunisia is not the first place to have sprung a surprise. The CIA determined a year before the Shah fell in 1979 that Iran was not in a “pre-revolutionary” state; and in June 2009, before millions of Iranians took to the streets, all experts agreed that the country had grown quiescent. No one foresaw that Gorbachev would bring an end to Communism; and conversely when the Communist dominoes fell in 1989, accompanied by mass protests in Beijing, not many thought that Communism would endure in China another 21 years and counting.

What is the lesson in all this? Leo Strauss argued that the study of politics had gone astray when it tried to become science rather than philosophy, when it tried to figure out what would happen rather than what should happen, to focus on the “is” rather than the “ought.”

Tunisia’s events and all the other unanticipated political upheavals buttress the view that political “science” is futile. On the other hand, a couple of centuries have taught us a lot about what philosophers call “the good,” namely that democracy is both the most humane and the most effective form of government — and that it can take hold and serve the needs of people in diverse cultures.

America advocates democracy but not with the vigor it might. If Tunisia’s revolution fails to reach a happy ending, that will be in part because Communists and Islamists are easier to identify than committed democrats. Some here belittle democracy-promotion on the ground that we don’t know if it works. But that is only another way of saying that politics is not a science. We know that democracy is the best system, and we ought to propound that truth as forcefully as we can, even if we can have no certainty about when, where, or how it will come about.