I think this is a nearly universal phenomenon, and probably not exclusively modern.

I read somewhere that you get violent extremism where you have a large population of young people and high unemployment. When you stop to think about, that makes sense. In some of the middle eastern countries, over half the population is under age 25 and the employment rate is running 40 t0 50 percent.

Which is what you're seeing in the ME. We like to think it's all pro-democracy, because the people most likely to speak our lingo in the social media we frequent are Western-trained and speak in those terms.

Look just past them and you see, as in Tunisia, as in Libya, as in Egypt, the expectation that democracy = prosperity, and that as soon as you have democracy things must be prosperous.

For them "democracy" is more an economic than a political term and emphasizes outcomes and not processes. In the US, educated folk tend to regard democracy as a purely political term that is compatible with a variety of economic systems. We also tend to regard economic outcomes as imperfectly correlated to economic systems, so a capitalist system may produce greater average/overall prosperity but allows depressions, a command-and-control system might produce some kinds of economic growth but in the long term will falter, etc. The popular view flattens those two layers of thought.

Moreover, it's not just economic but also sexual and social. No economic prosperity = can't afford wife = can't be properly adult and meet adult obligations = humiliation. And that's the dominant way of expressing such concerns.