Some Quick and Dirty Democratic Rules

I have seen more strange stuff about Egypt, so let's go through the basic rules of democracy:

1. People you don't like get elected.  Democracy requires a willingness to accept losing.
2. Folks who do get elected have to accept losing power via subsequent elections or term limits.
3. Outsiders will often dislike those who get elected.  US didn't like Morsi.... Well, lots of folks didn't like Bush.
4. If elections really matter, then outsiders have very little impact.  Indeed, trying to shape outcomes usually backfires, tainting those that you support.  Having great power does not mean that one can actually deploy it successfully when wanting to influence the domestic politics of other countries.  No magic wands or wish machines.
5. If such efforts don't backfire, the winner is still tainted by your support and is seen as your agent (Karzai?). 
6. Militaries do not change who governs.  If the military does change who governs, it is not a democracy anymore.  Might become one again but that would require widely accepted/legitimate rules and elections, not just appointments by the military. 
7. A key ingredient of advanced democracies is that the military is not even relevant during political crises.  The classic case is, of course, Bush v. Gore in 2000.  Nobody sought to ask the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff what to do.  More recently, where was Brazil's military during the big protests?  Um, not on the front page and not anywhere else that mattered.  The military stayed out of it.  Sure, Brazil has been a democracy since the mid-1980s, so we don't notice the absence of the military.  But we should as silent dogs can tell us as much or more than the barking ones.  

Ok, and while I am doing something that I hate--talking about defintions--as I am not that precise of a person, let's talk about revolutions for a second.  A revolution involves significant, lasting change of the political system.  It ain't a revolution if it is just for a year or two.  The American Revolution was not 1776 but a political process from before that through until at least victory over the British, if not the ratification of the Constitution.  The French Revolution, well, that went on for awhile, didn't it?  The Russian Revolution did not end with the overthrow of the Czar but went on through the Civil War.  The outcome and the effects were in doubt for quite a while. 

Once does not have to buy into Skocpol's definition of a Revolution, which I tend to, where it involves bigtime social change, but a Revolution is not just the replacement of the current leader with another.  It involves a dramatic change in who governs, how they govern, and so on.  Right now, Egypt looks a lot like it did three years ago, with a military regime repressing the Muslim Brotherhood.  Coups, regime change, and civil wars do not equate to or necessarily lead to revolutions.  It is too damned soon to tell if this is Revolutionary, but there has been plenty of time to be able to call this a coup. 

Coup Be Coup

Fittingly, I was in Budapest when Egypt's democracy started to come to an end.  Why is this fitting?  Because the tide of democracy can be reversed in spots, if not all over the world, and Hungary preceded Egypt in backtracking.  Hungary's democracy has been eroded by those who won the election and then revised the rules quite significantly.  I am no expert on Egypt, but it seems like the risk of this happening there was, well, pre-empted by tossing the rules aside entirely via military coup.

To be clear, a popular military coup is still a military coup (also see here).  Indeed, what made this coup less coup-ish was not that the public seemed to favor it but that it was no surprise at all.  Most successful coups involve fragments of a military trying to seize power quickly before anyone can react, forcing the first use of force decision to be in the hands of opponents to the government.  In this case, well, not so much.

Political scientists can debate what makes a democracy a democracy and all that in very specific and some arcane ways, but two essential elements that are related are key: one has to accept losing and one cannot play with the rules too much.  I am not a big fan of the Muslim Brotherhood, but in a democracy, one has to deal with reality that your party, whatever it is, is going to lose much of the time.  Trying to avoid that fate is natural, but changing the rules to do so is a bad idea.  That millions of Egyptians are cheering the coup--well, that is disturbing indeed.  On the other hand, the coup happened in part, as far as I can tell, as the government was not so constrained by the rules of the system.  Which poses dangers of another kind.

What makes a democracy mature is when its politicians accept both the rules of the system and the reality that one is going to lose some of the time--in elections, in votes over legislation, and even over rulings by the Courts.  Everyone in the US could be displeased last week, as the Supreme Court ruled in ways where some folks won some battles but lost others--that the Voting Rights Act was stripped of much of its relevance while gays and lesbians won a huge battle at the federal level.  One can work within the system to blunt the impact of whichever decision one finds problematic, but thus far no one has called out the military to adjudicate this stuff, just as the US military did not come into play during the contested election in 2000.

Up here in Canada, I have gotten some pushback on twitter and elsewhere for my post criticizing arguments about Canada's petro-state-ness.   My key assertion is that Canada is not a petro-state like the way such places are commonly conceived--that Canada's stances on oil are subject not just to votes in parliament and decisions by the Supreme Court of Canada but also in the next set of elections.  Which apparently will be contested.  When we think of petro-states, we think of places where there are weak societies that cannot counter authoritarian states--Saudi Arabia comes to mind.  Canada is not that--there will be an election in a couple of years, the Conservatives seem to be facing more competition than I would have guessed, and the politics and process will have implications for how Canada harvests its mineral wealth.  If the people vote for more of the same, well, that sucks for the environmentalists, but democracy means that people lose.  Respect for democracy means that the winners treat the losers decently.  That does not always happen, of course.  But in mature democracies, the prospect of being a loser at some point usually constrains the winners to a degree.  That and the rules of the system.

Democracy is not perfect--it is just better than the alternatives (I am citing Churchill a lot lately).  I am not sure Egypt was especially democratic last week, but it is certainly not today and will not be as long as the guys in uniforms rule.

Great Minds Think Alike

Ok, my mind is not so great as those of Will Moore and Christian Davenport, but I was glad to hear that I am not alone: the Egyptian political change of 2011 was not a revolution but a coup.  I made this distinction before: here and here.  Changing the leader and changing the political system are entirely two separate things, whether one needs heaps of social change (Skocpol) to count a political change as a revolution.

Mubarak was a former military commander, leading an authoritarian regime.  The "transitional" military folks running Egypt now are leading an authoritarian regime that has a patina of democracy gloss.  Events of this past week suggest that little has fundamentally changed: serious repression when dissent gets to be a bit troublesome.  Sure, constitutions are being written, but until they are actually implemented and until they re-distribute power away from the military, not a revolution, not a regime change, just a coup. 

Do listen to the Will and Chris podcast for a discussion of coups versus revolutions but also far more than that, as they consider the coverage by the media in depth, and raise all kinds of good questions, including:

Who should the media be talking to?  Area experts may know Egypt or Tunisia or Syria well, but if they do not study dissent, social movements and/or repression, how much insight can they shed? 

Israeli Narcissism

As a narcissist, perhaps it takes one to know one?  Israel's take on the events in Egypt are all about Israel.  I get that--Egypt has been an ally, more or less for more than thirty years.  The one neighbor they could take for granted.  And now they cannot.  I find it alternatively amusing and appalling to see Israelis and fans of Israel defend Mubarak and his authoritarian rule.  Israel used to stand for being a democracy, but whenever there is a choice between security and liberty, well, we know which way that goes.  Yes, Israel is vulnerable, but selling one's soul is usually not a good idea.  Plus supporting authoritarianism today usually means that sometime down the road things get ugly. 

The future of Egypt is uncertain, but let's not over-romanticize its pas.  It has been a breeding ground for extremism, including significant numbers of folks working in and with Al Qaeda.  Repression has that effect.  [Indeed, one way to quickly determine that Petraeus is very sharp is to see how much focus he puts on getting detention straight.  He gets that prisons generally become breeding grounds for more and more extremism]

What these events should demonstrate to Israel is that the US has its own interests and values and identities, and it cannot count on the US to support whatever Israel thinks is best for Israel.  Of course, the irony here is that if the US focuses on what is best for the US, it might end up doing things that are best for Israel in the long run.  Certainly, Israel has been doing a crappy job of late defending its own interests.  How well did that last invasion of Lebanon work out?