Headless, Bottom-Up Revolution

Now that Hosni Mubarak has finally ceded power and the demonstrators are filtering out of Tahrir Square (ready at an instant to return if they think the situation warrants it), there are more questions than answered about wht what happened occurred, and what all this means for the future of Egypt, and American interests in the Middle East. What happens now?

Anyone who thinks they can answer that question today with any certitude is kidding himself or herself. The quest for understanding what all this means for the future lies in the dynamics of what has just occurred, for at least two reasons. The first is that the underlying dynamics of the Egyptian uprising probably have within them somewhere the kernel of where the situation will head next. Unfortunately, we cannot be sure at this point. Second, the dynamics will also offer some as yet unknown guidance about how much the dynamics of Egypt are idiosyncratic or generalizble to other places. Still don’t know that either.

What is fairly clear (if not all that illuminating for either question) is that this was very much a bottom-up uprising that was started and proceeded without any obvious leadership. Its motive force was decidely populist–aimed at overthrowing an octogenarian dictator and replacing him with a people-run democracy. The first part of the goal was easy to articulate–it was a succinct, bumper-sticker kind of appeal. It was also a message of the kind and length that fits very well into the method by which it was spread, electronic social media. Moreover, its achievement was a discreet, measurable thing–the demonstrators stayed until Mubarak was gone. Game, set, but not yet match!

The problem, of course, is translating the bumper-sticker, “tweet” slogan of democracy into something meaningful. Doing so is immeasurably more difficult than the first part, for at least three reasons. One is that it is a goal not universally shared, within or outside Egypt. Does the ruling elite in Egypt really want democratization, given they benefited from and were associated with the autocracy? When the Egyptian prime minister went on state television today and said that restoring order was the first task, he was, of course, right in one sense, but is “order” a code word for returned repression? And can he be trusted, given that he was Mubarak’s prime minister? Even assuming the rank-and-file and younger officers of the Egyptian army support the popular movement, what about their leaders, who were, in many cases, cronies of the departed president? The Army is currently in charge, and they have not yet acted against the demonstrators. But can they be trusted to stay that way?

Outside Egypt, there is similar, if less overtly stated opposition. The Israelis in particular were comfortable with Mubarak because he was “the devil we know,” and they are almost certainly going to be less happy with whoever follows. The Army says it will honor the peace treaty, and there has been nothing that anyone within the “movement” has said that indicates that a democratic Egypt is violently anti-Israeli. At the same time, Israel and Mubarak are equated in many Egyptian minds. Similarly, the American government has also operated from the assumption that Mubarak was our stalwart in the region because he brought “stability.” It is not the first time we have backed a despot because of his commitment to a status quo with which we were happy; such support often turns sour, however, and we hope our long-time support for Mubarak will not translate into an anti-American successor. If it does, however, we will largely have no one to blame but ourselves.

The second reason is that since the revolution is headless, it is also in a sense mindless. What I mean by that is that there is no coherent philosophical base on which the demonstrators can base an orderly progression toward their generalized goal of democracy. The reason is, of course, the lack of revolutionary leadership, itself the large result of Mubarak’s systematic, 30-year suppression of anybody who opposed him. Somewhere out there is the next leadership, but it probably does not know who it is or what it will try to do, and neither do we. The hope is, of course, that it will be a leadership devoted to what we (and hopefully the Egyptians themselves) hope it is–movement toeard a secular democracy. But maybe it is not, which is the great fear for Egypt and its contagious potential. Third, fashioning and creating a new, democratic system is a lot more complicated and time-consuming than tearing the old one down. That takes leadership and intellectual coherence that has not yet popped to the surface.  

The Egyptian uprising stands on the cusp of Crane Brinton’s (Anatomy of Revolution) classic second step, “the reign of terror and virtue.” It is the unsettled period, when the most radical elements come out and in the struggle for power various groups emerge and vie for defining what is virtue. Every real revolution has such a period, which will eventually be followed by a cooling off period in which the winners consolidate the outcome (Brinton’s thermidor). The question is whether this stage becomes radicalized or not: in the American Revolution, it did not (although the British of the time would not have agreed); in Russia and France (two of Brinton’s other case studies) it did. Which way will Egypt go?

One can become too readily apocalytical about the prospects. Egypt is, happily, not Iran, which makes its headlessness a virtue of sorts: in radical fundamentalist Iran and its spokesman Ruhollah Khomeini, the Iranians had a charismatic leader who defined virtue and commissioned the terror to implement it; Egypt does not. Whether the Egyptian movement will follow a path toward the kind of democracy–secular sounds nice to us, but probably not so much to Muslim Egyptians–that would be a beacon to the region is still an open question the answer which will depend on what Egyptians and outsiders (but especially Egyptians) do in the months that follow. Sitting and waiting for what happens next is hard for activist Americans to do, but it is probably the best we can do.

Iranian Wishful Thinking–One More Time!

The ability of Americans to believe that Iran secretly wants to be just like us but is repressed by unrepresentative opponents never ceases to amaze me, and the dynamic is at work once again surrounding the funueral of “dissident” Grand Ayatollah Mir Hussein Montazeri.

Predictably, the death of one of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s original associates who turned against the current ruling class has energized the persistent minority in Iran that seeks modernization and westernization, complete with massive urban demonstrations and repressive reactions by the theocracy that rules the country. Thanks to modern technology, the images are available to us all, and they bring sparks of hope among westernized Iranian expatriates and Americans who firmly want to believe Iranians are “just like us” and that maybe, just maybe, the result will be genuine reform this time–by which we mean the adoption by Iran of western-style democracy or something like it. As the New York Times gushed in today’s edition, reaction surrounding Montazeri’s death has raised “the possibility that the cleric’s death could serve as a catalyst for an opposition movement.”

The key word here, of course, is “possibility,” because the real prospect is no more than the most remote possibility of change toward westernizing Iran and thereby lessening the animosity between Iran and the United States that has dominated Iranian politics since the 1979 Iranian Revolution and has its roots back into the immediate post-World War II period.

The belief that some Iranians would like to become westernized is not entirely baseless, of course. The whole thrust of Shah Reza Pahlevi’s White Revolutionwas to transform the Peacock Empire into a modern, competitive (aka westernized) society as a way to restore Iran’s historic place in the world. In the proces, Iran did develop an urbanized, educated, and westernized class, and some of that group and its successor generations are still found in the cities and provide the nucleus of the dissident movement. They did not then and certainly do not now represent anything like a majority of the population or the government’s support base, which is based in the highly religious, Shiite rural masses who view the theocracy as their natural leaders and the urbanized sophisticates in the cities as apostate unbelievers who would undermine Islam. When the regime reacts to protests by turning loose the Basij militias to stomp on reformers, it does so with the tacit consent of a fairly large part of the population.

These dynamics have history behind them, in at least two ways. One is that westernization, which is nearly universally associated with the Satanic Americans, undercuts the traditional values of one of the most traditional peoples in the world–rural Iranian Shiites. Change threatens them, and they correspondingly have little sympathy with agents of a change they can only oppose. Second, the dissident middle class in Iran has, over the years, proven pitifully politically inept. They could not keep the democratically elected Mossadeqh regime in power in the 1950s in the face of a CIA-backed coup, and they failed miserably to seize control in 1979, when their leaders felt certain they could gain power over the “country bumpkin” Ayatollahs whom we have learned to know and love so well.

Despite all this, we in the west wax ebullient whenever Iranians take to the street. Anybody to the political left of Ahmedinejad is seen as a democratizing savior, whether he is or not. Have we so quickly forgotten the euphoria associated with the loud dissidence of Mir Hussein Moussavi protesting that the elections earlier in the year that returned Ahmedinejad to power were rigged? In that euphoria, we forgot that Moussavi had been approved as a candidate by the Supreme Council, an endorsement he would hardly have achieved were he truly anti-regime. Similarly, Montazeri spoke out against the regime, but he did not threaten the system. Had he, he would not have been allowed to stick around.

So off we go again, spinning the stuff of dreams about yet another round of “reform.” Like all the preceding rounds, this will die off in a few days, and things will return depressingly to normal in Iran. That may not be the way we would like it, but it is the way things are in Iran.