The anti-antidemocrats of Cairo
To continue from my Wednesday column: egypt’s brief experiment with democracy may end in a violent confrontation tomorrow. The egyptian opposition is organizing what it expects to be a massive rally. They’re shared purpose is to recall the country’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, for — well, for being insufficiently democratic.
even a casual observer of egyptian politics might say, well, surprise, surprise! How could dr. Morsi be anything else, having been the stalking horse of the profoundly undemocratic Muslim Brotherhood? People ought to have known he would be insufficiently democratic before they voted for him.
We must assume that many picked him for that very reason. We may think it’s incongruous to elect someone because he promises to deprive us of the opportunity to elect anyone ever again, but if it makes sense to Muslim Brotherhood supporters who are qualified voters in egypt, it doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else. After all, dr. Morsi’s opponents, egypt’s secular liberals and their allies, see nothing incongruous about nullifying democratic election results by street demonstrations.
In the words of an articul at e egyptian e xpatriate correspondent, the “Islami st thugs” who voted the president into power are “trying to deface the country and destroy its main characteristics and social fabric.” She describes how “the government is appointing its allies to critical positions where they can control all aspects of civic life” — even, apparently, replacing the head of the egyptian Opera with one of their own. A ride in dr. Morsi’s time machine would be a trip from the 21st to the 11th century. For a modern, educated woman, it would amount to a loss of identity.
dr. Morsi’s supporters wax confrontational. “Our dead will be in heaven, and their dead will be in hell,” a member of the Muslim Brotherhood is quoted as saying. They, too, seem to be suffering from an identity crisis without a caliphate of their own. “Our battle is an identity battle” reads a banner at a government-organized counterdemonstration.
dr. Morsi himself, though admitting that he has made “mistakes,” remains defiant. As far as he is concerned, whatever the final tally on the petition asking him to step down (currently, it stands at 15 million signatures) he is going nowhere. egypt’s military appears ready to intervene to prevent a civil war and a bloodbath; but if it has to do so, the country reverts to being the fiefdom of a junta, a military dictatorship, not a self-governing democracy.
democracy is easy to worship but hard to practice and almost impossible to export, perhaps because we use the d-word as if it were some formula that led to good governance: freedom, transparency, prosperity, security, or justice. It isn’t, though. democracy is just a system we use to let governments succeed each other by having a majority of qualified voters elect legislators, usually for a fixed term. It’s a method of power transfer favoured by societies that have already achieved a level of freedom, prosperity, security and justice.
As I’ve written before, democracy is not for sissies. It is uncorking bottles on a beach and watching as genie after genie emerges, always powerful, not always benign. Capturing and re-corking malignant genies is a leading industry of democracies. democrats capture and re-cork. It’s a never-ending job and requires patience.
democracy’s rent is paid in the coin of endurance. If you elect the wrong leaders, you pay by enduring them. Try not to elect them twice. democracy lets you vote, but it can’t vote for you.
Building democracy without democrats is impossible. But, fortunately, democrats develop as individuals, before their countries become democracies, and they may eventually turn their nations into democratic societies. It’s unlikely to happen, though, while one political faction considers the other destined to hell. As long as the parties are millennia apart, they are unlikely to coexist as “government” and “loyal opposition.” Countries with highly asymmetrical degrees of cultural development are poor candidates for democracies.
The good news is they don’t have to be. It isn’t democracy that creates good government. It’s liberty, responsibility, transparency, and the rule of law. Good government, in turn, creates democracy. It will in egypt one day, whatever happens tomorrow.