San Francisco -- Watching anxious moments unfold in Cairo, while the Tea Party in the U.S. gets ready to stage its own private auto-da-fé/purge trial of insufficiently conservative senators like Orrin Hatch, I remembered one of our system's great strengths. Our politicians have repressive instincts, just like Tunisia's autocratic former president, Ben Ali. Our leaders get panicked into believing that they are on the back of a tiger and can't get off, just like Hosni Mubarak. Reform movements eat their young, as happened in Iran. And when a frustrated people suddenly feel empowered, they can go off the deep end, as some in Egypt seem likely to do.
But the consequences of those failings in our democratic system are not immediately lethal, and the potential for correcting them is hard-wired.
If the Utah Tea Party decides that Senator Hatch (American Conservative Union Lifetime and 2009 Rating 88 percent) is a closet leftist and defeats him in the Republican primary because he departed from orthodoxy and worked with Ted Kennedy, or if their colleagues in Indiana purge Senator Richard Lugar (92 percent ACU lifetime score), then what happens? The odds are that Utah would elect an even more conservative, and perhaps actually wacky, senator (something it has done before) and that Indianans would turn Lugar's seat over to a Democrat (again, something that's happened before.) And over time, it is likely that mainstream, ordinarily conservative Republicans in both of those states will get fed up and take their party back -- or that those two states will even trend Democratic.
In Egypt, things are much scarier. I spent two days there last month, leaving on the day Tunisia exploded. Cairo was a city literally, emotionally, and symbolically choking to death. The dust and pollution were horrendous. It took 2 1/2 hours to drive from Giza to Tahrir square on a Thursday evening -- about 6 kilometers. The day after we left, before street demonstrations began, emails to our friends in civil-society organizations suddenly couldn't be delivered -- the regime had preemptively cut off communications to anyone it saw as a potential leader outside of its control, however peaceful or seemingly irrelevant.
When we asked people in Egypt about their lives, about how many jobs they had to work to survive, and about where they could turn to make things better, we got a consistent answer: "You get used to it."
Only they didn't. They couldn't. That's why they're in the streets. While it's probably a hopeful sign that, at least momentarily, they have coalesced around the low-key figure of Mohamed ElBaradei rather than a more charismatic but also less-predictable figure, the reality is that the Egyptian regime has managed to prevent genuine leadership from emerging anywhere outside the mosques and its own controlled institutions.
In the recent New Yorker article on Tunisia, Steve Coll commented:
Yet, in Tunisia, external investments in civil society -- programs launched by the United States, European governments, and independent foundations, which were peaceful, gradual, and unrelated to war or invasion -- bore fruit. It was Tunisian women (empowered by constitutional rights), labor unions, human-rights campaigners, journalists, and artists who braved gunfire to trigger Ben Ali's overthrow. These democrats and their institutions survived Ben Ali's police state in part because outside supporters had promoted their legitimacy and built their capacity.
Sadly, far less of this was done in Egypt -- and now the world waits anxiously to see high the price of that neglect will be.