Egypt Comes to Wisconsin

jack miles

Is Egypt ready for self-government? Is Libya? As questions like these are asked in the wake of the Arab Revolt of 2011, Americans might do well to recall how many other peoples their country earlier deemed unready for the blessings of liberty. During the previous century, the United States unabashedly argued that since Spain and Portugal had never had the tutorial of the Protestant Reformation, quasi-papal authoritarianism was the only form of government their cultural descendants in Latin America understood. During the Cold War, American Realpolitik justified support for a string of dictators in South Korea, for example, partly by arguing that Confucianist Korean culture was inherently authoritarian and paternalistic. As for the Soviet Union, well, the benighted Russians had never gone through either the Reformation or the Enlightenment, so what could you expect? In all these cases, realism was understood to dictate dealing with the dictator rather than funding the dissident who challenged him. An Andre Sakharov in Russia might be a brave man, but the future did not belong to him. No, it belonged to the likes of President Leonid Brezhnev and to Americans like President Ronald Reagan who could take Leonid for a walk in the woods and accomplish in an hour what futile human rights bleating could not accomplish in a generation.

Political realism, it has been observed, is not a philosophy but a boast. Egyptian dissidents like Saad Eddin Ibrahim have long argued that if such alleged contradictions in terms as Spanish Catholic democracy, Korean Confucianist democracy, and Russian Orthodox democracy have come to pass, then the alleged contradiction of Arab Islamic democracy might come to pass as well. Is the revolt we have been witnessing in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and even Jordan the natal cry of a newborn contradiction? Is Arab Islamic democracy being born before our eyes—or is it being aborted?

The historic encounter of civilizations that Samuel Huntington characterized as a clash began long before 9/11 and is larger, on the Muslim side, than the Arab world. Yet the Ummah still has an Arab heart. As China, rather than creating the Sino-Islamic axis that Huntington so feared, has broadly thrown in its lot with the international community as shaped by the West, as India has done the same despite its large Muslim minority, the result for all Muslims to varying degrees but most especially for Arab Muslims has been a perception of simultaneous encirclement and exclusion. It has been on the one hand, A Sense of Siege, to cite the title of an astute little book by Graham Fuller and Ian Lesser, subtitled The Geopolitics of Islam and the West (Westview Press), and on the other a sense of yearning and aspiration.

Such is the larger pond into which the American invasion of Iraq tossed an exploding pebble. At the cost of about a trillion dollars, the United States has installed a legitimately elected government in a major Arab state. In the process, by accident rather than design, it has created the first Shiite government that the Arab world has seen in centuries and enormously enhanced the influence of adjacent Shiite Iran. Are the majority Shiite Arabs of nearby Bahrain, ruled by a Sunni monarch, erupting as the majority or as Shiites? Does it matter to them that President George W. Bush said in his second inaugural address, with reference to the war he had begun in Iraq:

All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.

In a CNN interview, former CIA Director R. James Woolsey, Jr., a leading foreign policy hawk, quipped a bit dryly that there were more neo-cons in Egypt than anyone guessed. If the oppressed of Bahrain need American help, will they now turn to the U.S. Fifth Fleet, which anchors there? Democrats, of course, prefer to credit President Barack Hussein Obama’s much-noticed 2008 speech in Cairo and his scrupulously multilateral “limited military intervention” in Libya. (Everyone but Congress had to vote in favor first.) Eddin Ibrahim, jailed by President Hosni Mubarak as a traitor, said at a speech in Los Angeles in 2005 that the Iraq War might have unforeseeably positive as well as unforeseeably negative consequences. The Arab Revolt promises to be unforeseeably both.

Meanwhile, an entirely unforeseen eruption on the American domestic scene has provoked troubling comparisons to the eruption in Arab world. Flush with confidence after major electoral gains in November 2010, Republicans in state as well as federal office have been implementing the mandate they claim to have received—a mandate, namely, to cut taxes and, with revenue predictably down, to then cut services by laying off state workers because “there is no money.” However, when Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker tried to rush through Wisconsin’s state legislature a bill abolishing collective bargaining for state employees, the fourteen Democrats in the 33-member Wisconsin state senate rather astonishingly moved south across the state line into Illinois so as to deny the governor the quorum needed to pass budget legislation.

What ensued was much more astonishing: the largest labor demonstration not merely in years but actually in generations. Government business in Madison, home of the University of Wisconsin as well as the state’s capital, was brought to a standstill. Then, in a rump session held at night without notice on March 9, 2011, the nineteen Republicans of the Wisconsin Senate voted 18-1 in favor of a bill that cleverly segregated the real target, collective bargaining as an issue in regulatory law, from the pending budget bill and thus permitted passage without the larger quorum that a budget vote requires.

Now what?

On the morning after the secret night session of the Wisconsin Senate, the Los Angeles Times headline read: “Union Rights Impasse Broken.” The New York Times headline read: “Wisconsin G.O.P. Ends Stalemate with Maneuver.” And yet, one wondered: What really had ended? The Wisconsin Democrats vowed to continue the fight in court, and a judge promptly stayed implementation of the new law. Both Republicans and Democrats have initiated recall actions against members of the other party whom they believe they could defeat in a fresh election. The governor himself is thought to be particularly vulnerable. Bill Cronon, president-elect of the American Historical Association and a professor at the University of Wisconsin, published a blog drawing attention to a conservative network that drafted model bills for Republicans to introduce in state legislators and was startled when the post attracted half a million hits in two days. In response, the Republican Party of Wisconsin demanded that the University of Wisconsin surrender to it all of Prof. Cronon’s email that mentioned the governor’s name or any of at least a dozen other names plus a list of keywords such as union and recall. That unprecedented demand then brought Wisconsin quickly back onto the radar screen of the New York Times. The stalemate was ended, but it appeared a war of sorts was just beginning. If the unionized workers went on strike, as they might, and the governor declared them laid off, as he had threatened to do, or fired them outright, would they occupy the statehouse again? A pot of some kind seemed to be boiling over.

As it became clear on Tahrir Square that popular Egyptian resentment at economic polarization and political corruption rather than Islamic fanaticism was bringing the Mubarak regime down, some began to draw pointed parallels with the United States. Charles M. Blow, a black New York Times columnist who specializes in demographic analysis, published a graph on February 5, 2011charting income polarization in twenty-three Middle Eastern and North African countries. Iran, concentrating its wealth in the hands of its Revolutionary Guard, was the most polarized of all, yet the United States—included “for comparison”—was more polarized still.

American income inequality was once justified with the slogan, “A rising tide lifts all boats,” but a study released by the “nonprofit but progressive” Economic Policy Institute on February 9, 2011 reported that “during the most recent expansion between 2000 and 2007, the period that led up to the Great Recession, the richest 10% accounted for a full 100% of average income growth.” According to a poll done by the Food Research & Action Center, 20% of Californians answer yes to the question, “Have there been times in the past twelve months when you did not have enough money to buy food that you or your family needed?” The tide metaphor may no longer apply to the United States. Too many American boats have sunk to the bottom for good.

Revolutions, however, rarely start at the very bottom. They start with the able, angry, and unemployed, above all with young men abruptly disenfranchised or impoverished by overweening political power. The Arab Revolt has riveted the world’s attention, and rightly so, but keep a weather eye on Wisconsin. As the jocular American saying goes, it ain’t over till the fat lady sings, and she may be rehearsing a new number.

Jack Miles is senior fellow for religion and international relations with the Pacific Council on International Policy and professor of English and religious studies at the University of California, Irvine.

[Not for publication: john.jack.miles@gmail.com; 949-387-7542]