But the conservative imagination, judging from two columns on Friday, can be even more degraded when it comes to coups. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal is oblivious to the potential cost in Egyptian lives, and an op-ed in the Times by David Brooks, entitled “Defending the Coup,” disparages the possibilities of electoral politics and the capabilities of Egyptians, culminating in a dictum that is simply ugly.
The Journal had this wish:
Egyptians would be lucky if their new ruling generals turn out to be in the mold of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, who took power amid chaos but hired free-market reformers and midwifed a transition to democracy.
Quite a midwife, that Pinochet—available for a very extended period of labor. He and his fellow-officers seized power in 1973; the democratic transition began in 1990, and not at Pinochet’s instigation. Egyptians might not consider themselves as lucky if Cairo’s sports stadiums were turned into mass-execution sites, as Santiago’s were. (One wonders how many free passes for arbitrary arrests the Egyptian generals will earn from the Journal for each free-market reformer they hire.)
Pinochet lost power because neither Chileans nor the international community entirely gave up on the idea that elections mattered. When the opposition managed to win what was supposed to be a rubber-stamp referendum, he couldn’t just ignore it. (Jon Lee Anderson has more on that.) And yet Brooks merrily jettisons voting, tossing ballot boxes over his shoulder as he strides toward some point about the difference between democratic “process” and “substance.” “Process” means holding and respecting free elections—and how important is that, really?
The process side, Brooks argues, clings to a naïve belief that “members of the Muslim Brotherhood may come into office with radical beliefs, but then they have to fix potholes and worry about credit ratings and popular opinion. Governing will make them more moderate.” The substance camp believes that people like the Brothers “reject pluralism, secular democracy and, to some degree, modernity”:
The important thing is to get people like that out of power, even if it takes a coup. The goal is to weaken political Islam, by nearly any means.
“Nearly any means”—those words evoke various historical spectres, including the moment it seems to have dawned on John F. Kennedy that by sanctioning a coup against South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem he had said yes to his murder, and the torture of the founders of the Brotherhood in Egypt’s prisons. At the moment, Morsi’s whereabouts are unclear, the constitution is suspended, television stations sympathetic to the Brotherhood have been closed, a wide circle of its leaders are subject to arrest, and the police are shooting people in the streets of Cairo. Is this the substance of democracy?
Apparently so: “World events of the past few months have vindicated those who take the substance side of the argument,” Brooks writes. Best if political Islam had its seat removed from the table. Don’t even bother waiting for an election to vote them out.
One gaping hole here is what’s supposed to happen to political Islamists—the millions of Egyptian who elected Morsi and voted yes on the new, imperfect constitution. Their grievances won’t disappear, and neither will they. Here Brooks badly misses the point of process. He finds its effect on leaders wanting. But voting is transformative for voters, too. The truest classroom of democracy is not the cabinet room but, rather, the polling station.
Voters can recognize when they are cheated. On the same opinion page as Brooks’s column was one by Shadi Hamid, who argued that the coup undid the hard work of persuading Islamists throughout the region to give up violence for electoral politics: “To limit the fallout from this week’s events, Egypt’s new government must ensure that the Brotherhood and its Freedom and Justice Party are reincorporated into the political process and free to contest—and win—parliamentary and presidential elections.” Brooks-wise, that would be cause for a whole new coup.
But why a coup? There are plenty of complaints about Morsi, including that he manipulated the judiciary. But the charges with the most popular resonance have to do with the economy, and that, fundamentally, is a ballot-box issue, not cause for a constitutional crisis. If this is a philosophical problem with Islamism rather than a matter of seizing power, how is it that a rival Islamist party has given the coup its support? Why is Brooks so sure that the Brotherhood and its followers can’t handle democracy?
This is where Brooks drops off from a relatively mainstream (if often wrongheaded) discussion about Egypt’s messed-up political institutions and dips into something disgraceful. Islamists, he writes, are odd, stilted people: “they lack the mental equipment to govern”; “incompetence is built into the intellectual DNA of radical Islam”; “they have a strange fascination with a culture of death” (has he flipped through the lives of the saints lately?). Brooks approvingly quotes an essay arguing that Islamists don’t really get causality as a concept—it’s all divine magic to them—or the difference between a fact and a feeling. The best “outsiders” can do is promote the few “modern thinkers” among them—to wait, presumably, “in heavy harness / On fluttered folk and wild— / Your new-caught, sullen peoples / Half devil and half child.” That last bit is a quote from Rudyard Kipling, whom Brooks mimics, to the discredit of both.
Nor is his judgment confined to Islamists:
It’s not that Egypt doesn’t have a recipe for a democratic transition. It seems to lack even the basic mental ingredients.
“Egypt,” not just the Brotherhood; “basic mental,” not cultural. Maybe Brooks didn’t mean it the way it sounds—the way it is written, in plain language. The echo here is less Kipling than it is Al Campanis, who in 1987 said that blacks in baseball didn’t have the “necessities” for managerial jobs. What Brooks can’t claim is that it’s unfair to take his words amiss. Those two sentences are unsalvageable, and if they don’t convey what Brooks believes then he should take them back and apologize.
This is David Brooks’s particular problem. But there is a broader sense in which military coups in distant lands leave us, to borrow Kipling’s phrase, fluttered. Why the temptation, and why the complacency? How did we come by the conviction that certain people need the tutelage of a military junta before they can possibly be trusted to choose their own leaders? The coup in Cairo came hours before July 4th, the anniversary of a time when we were regarded as the wild children. The message in Egypt has been that the biggest crowd wins; is it really a surprise that supporters of the Brotherhood are gathering their own, and that mobs in Cairo have been fighting through the night?
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Amy Davidson
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