Against Wishful Thinking

M. Walzer: Against Wish- ful Thinking

WE HAVE new allies and comrades in the Arab world—the young people (and some older people too), who are fighting for freedom and democracy. We need to support their struggle, which means to make contact with them, ask what kind of help they think they need, and then try to provide it. We also need their political analyses. What do the democratic activists of Egypt, for example, think about the relative strength of the other political and social forces, their possible friends and enemies—the army, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Coptic Church, the old opposition parties, the existing labor unions, and the professional associations? What kind of organizations are the young democrats forming, and what is their reach into Egyptian society?

These are not easy questions, and although there are hundreds of reporters in Cairo, and thousands of dispatches, reports, and interviews have been published, I haven’t seen them addressed carefully or at length. Some academic observers, who know some of the rebels, have been talking with them and about them. But many of the journalistic pieces that I’ve been reading begin by saying that we don’t know what will happen (a line I will repeat in spades), and then go on as if the most important thing has already happened, and democracy is triumphant. It isn’t triumphant, not yet; the hardest fights lie ahead. The odds are not good—not because of any special features of Arab political culture but because they are never good. Democracy is difficult to establish and difficult to sustain; it is, so to speak, a high-maintenance regime. It isn’t just a matter of organizing free elections; anti-democratic forces often win free elections when other features of democratic life are absent. Democracy requires a lively civil society, with many different associations independent of each other and of the state; it requires a widespread acceptance of the right of opposition and of the possibility that today’s opposition will be tomorrow’s government; it requires a mood of tolerance and a willingness to compromise with political enemies; it requires a commitment to gender equality; it requires a fairly high level of citizenly participation. And it may require a secular politics.

All the great democratic revolutions took place in a time of religious decline or (as in the American colonies) of religious fragmentation. Anti-clericalism shook the Church in eighteenth-century France, and then in other Catholic countries, and gave rise to openly secularist commitments. The “dissidence of dissent” in the Protestant world provided a functional equivalent of secularism. It is hard to imagine democratic revolutions in, say, the decades of the European counter-reformation; it is hard to imagine a happy future for democracy in Russia today if there is a full-scale Orthodox revival. Indeed, any Christian, Jewish, or Muslim revivalist movement would, almost certainly, be hostile to democracy.

But the current uprisings in the Arab world are taking place in a time of religious excitement and zealotry. The zeal isn’t unopposed, and it doesn’t necessarily take political forms; it can sometimes take pietistic forms. Nonetheless, it is susceptible to politicization, and its political version is not likely to be democratic. We have seen evidence of this in the Iranian revolution, in the Algerian civil war, in the politics of the Taliban in Afghanistan, in the Iraqi “resistance,” and, in non-Islamic settings, among supporters of Hindutva in India, messianic Zionists in Israel, and evangelical fundamentalists in the United States. There is no reason to think that countries like Egypt are immune. What this means for the future of the uprisings is at this moment unknowable. These are “world-historical” considerations, and they will play out differently in different places. But they are an invitation to anxiety—I mean, friendly anxiety: they should inspire a wish to be helpful to the secular activists (and a refusal to pretend that they are not going to need a lot of help).

We don’t know what will happen. Will the Egyptian army allow genuinely free elections? If there are elections, will the heroes of the February revolution be able to organize a single party and win a majority or plurality of the votes? Will the internet serve a campaign as well as it served an uprising? Will there be a new government coalition of secular democrats and Muslims who reject Islamist zealotry? Is the Muslim Brotherhood what it claims to be, or what it always was? And, in either form, will it win a majority or plurality? Or will a popular general sweep the elections? Or a demagogue calling for jihad against Israel? Will the army intervene if it doesn’t like the outcome? Or will the votes be so widely dispersed among candidates and parties that only a weak government can be cobbled together? And what will happen if the new government, however it is constituted, cannot produce jobs for the unemployed and cannot end the pervasive corruption of a radically underpaid civil service? What comes after that?

No one knows, and it would be better if no one pretended to know. And that’s why we need to find our allies and comrades, the men and women committed to secular democracy, and talk to them. What do they want from the United States? What do they want from NGOs with democratic commitments? What do they want from fellow students in other countries, from intellectuals, professional people of all sorts, editors of little magazines? We need from them and from ourselves hard-headed and honest analyses of the coming political battles. Wishful thinking is no help, and enthusiasm that comes too easily won’t survive the tough slogging that lies ahead. Our friends can build on the excitement of the last weeks, but hope and worry, together, are necessary for the next stage.

Read Alan Johnson’s response along with a reply from Walzer here.

Michael Walzer is the co-editor of Dissent.

Image: Tahrir Square in Cairo the night after Mubarak’s resignation. (Joseph Hill/2011/Flickr creative commons)