Egypt and the model of the French Revolution

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Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. … Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

We cannot know whether the Egyptian revolution will prove a tragedy, a satisfying epic, or a farce, but the similarities to the French model are already notable:

  1. Scattered tumultuous days of action begin with some kind of popular upheaval or violence and change the course of the revolution. Les grandes journées of the French Revolution included July 14, 1789 (the storming of the Bastille), August 10, 1792 (the monarchy overthrown), and 18 Brumaire, 1799 (Napoleon’s coup), among many others. In the Egyptian revolution, Jan. 25, 2011 (the Day of Anger), Feb. 11, 2011 (the Friday of Departure–Mubarak’s resignation), and July 3, 2013 (the coup against Morsi) play similar roles.
  2. A mobilized urban populace in the huge capital city can bring down the government, but the urbanites may be at odds with the much more numerous rural population.
  3. The constitution is problematic–both in content and origin–but it offers the “rule of law.”
  4. The revolution is international. (Compare the Brabant Revolution of 1789 and Syria in 2012-13). The reaction is also international. (Today, Bashar al Assad plays the role of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II; Benjamin Netanyahu is William Pitt the Younger.)
  5. The ancien regime still has its supporters, who are perceived as threats to the revolution.
  6. Military leaders express support for the revolutionary constitution but are capable of taking over at will.
  7. Outside the government and official parliament, strongly ideological groups (Jacobins and Montagnards, Muslim Brothers and Salafis) debate and organize collective action.

To be sure, there are differences. For example, the most radical French revolutionaries were anti-clerical deists, but one form of radicalism in Egypt is ultra-religious and clerical. Another difference: the reactionaries outside Egypt are not massing on its borders.

Professor Joseph Mossad says the term “Arab Spring” is “part of a US strategy of controlling [the movement’s] aims and goals” in favor American-style liberal democracy. The phrase alludes to the “Prague Spring” liberal revolutions across Europe in 1848 (which prompted Marx’s article cited above). I don’t know if Mossad is right, but certainly analogizing current and past events has political significance. At the same time, Marx was right that the “tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” and revolutionaries “anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service.” So analogies are inevitable. The question is whether the Egyptians will borrow from Paris, 1789, Saint Petersburg, 1917,  Cairo, 1952, Tehran, 1979, or some other model.

I would recommend Prague, 1989. The Velvet Revolution (imitated by the various “color” revolutions of 2009) was not only nonviolent, but the revolutionaries were intentionally self-limiting. (See Timothy Garten Ash’s analysis.) But clearly, a whole substantive view of politics is built into that view.

the Oregon Citizens Initiative Review

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(This is the sixth in a series of blog posts by CIRCLE, which evaluated several initiatives funded by the Democracy Fund to inform and engage voters during the 2012 election. These posts discuss issues of general interest that emerged from specific evaluations. It is also on the Democracy Fund’s website.)

CIRCLE evaluated seven initiatives funded by the Democracy Fund during the 2012 election. These interventions were not comparable; they had diverse purposes and operated in various contexts and scales. We certainly do not have a favorite among them. But we do recommend that policymakers pay attention to one of the projects because it can be adopted by law—with positive effects.

In 2011, the Oregon legislature instituted a process called the Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR). This reform unifies two apparently contrasting forms of democracy, the popular initiative and the deliberative forum.

Presentation of Key findings from Measure 85, 2012 CIR, Healthy Democracy Fund
Presentation of Key findings from Measure 85, 2012 CIR, Healthy Democracy Fund

With a referendum, the public can circumvent entrenched interests and hold politicians accountable. A referendum honors the democratic principle of one person/one vote.

Oregon was one of the first states to institute referenda, initiatives, and recall elections. Perhaps the most famous advocate of these populist reforms was William Simon U’Ren, known nationally as “Referendum U’Ren,” who formed the Oregon Direct Legislation League in 1897. As a result of early initiatives, Oregon was the first state to elect its US Senators directly (1908), the first to hold a presidential primary election (1910), and one of the first to allow women to vote (1912).

These were achievements. But a referendum does not require people to learn, think, or discuss. As the number of referenda rises, the odds fall that voters will be thoughtful and well-informed about each ballot measure. Deliberation is a form of democracy that encourages people to be well-informed and thoughtful. Juries and New England town meetings are deliberative bodies that have deep roots in the United States, but governments can also create innovative deliberative forums today. For instance, several cities have asked AmericaSPEAKS to convene large numbers of representative citizens to discuss an issue—such as the city plan of New Orleans or the budget of Washington, DC—and give official input on the final decisions.

Referenda can easily reach large scale and offer every citizen an equal vote, but they may not reflect thoughtful opinion and may in fact present information in a format that is too complex or filled with jargon to be easily understood even by well-informed voters. They can even be manipulated by the authors of ballot measures or by groups that spend money on campaigns. Deliberation addresses those two problems, but deliberations tend to be small and would cost a great deal (in both money and participants’ time) to make widespread.

The Citizens Initiative Review process combines the best of both ideas. The text of an initiative is given to a randomly selected, representative body of 24 citizens who study it, hear testimony on both sides of the issue, and collaboratively write an explanatory statement. They spend five days on this work. Their explanation does not endorse or reject the initiative but gives deliberated and informed arguments for and against it. A copy is mailed to all households in Oregon as part of the state’s Voters Pamphlet.

CIR: How it Works, Healthy Democracy Fund
CIR: How it Works, Healthy Democracy Fund

Penn State Professor John Gastil found that nearly half of Oregon voters were aware of the CIR’s explanations in fall 2012. He also conducted a randomized experiment, surveying a sample of Oregonians who were given the explanations and a control group who were not. His experiment showed that the text produced by the CIR influenced people’s views of the ballot measure and increased their understanding of it. If many people knew about the explanation, and the explanation changed people’s opinions in an experiment, then the CIR probably changed many people’s opinions across the state.

CIRCLE conducted an analysis of media coverage of the CIR process in December of 2012.  With the bulk of coverage appearing in Oregon-based media outlets, it generally focused on the CIR process—describing it and communicating its validity and trustworthiness. Healthy Democracy, the organization that managed the CIR, created strong and consistent messages that guided this public conversation, which at times expanded into advocacy for the CIR or appeals to strengthen democracy through such processes. The media also used the CIR as a way to talk about deliberative dialogue in a concrete form. For the non-Oregon media especially, it offered a way to think about the possibilities for such processes in other locales. Advocating  deliberative processes and igniting the public imagination about new forms of engagement were clearly strong narrative threads in the public discourse caused by CIR media coverage.

CIRCLE is also in the final stages of interviewing political leaders from other states who have observed the CIR in Oregon or are engaged in other educational activities about the CIR. We are asking them what would influence their decision to adopt the reform. We will report our results here.

The previous entries in the series can be accessed below:

1 – Educating Voters in a Time of Political Polarization

2 – Supporting a Beleaguered New Industry

3 – How to Reach a Large Scale with High-Quality Messages

4 – Tell it Straight?  The Advantages and Dangers of Parody

5 – Educating the Public When People Don’t Trust Each Other

why young people do not form an interest group

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The recent increase in student loan rates is a significant injustice for people who hold student loans. But the politics of this issue is often presented misleadingly. It is treated as a generational question, much as a decrease in Social Security benefits would be a threat to seniors. There are two problems with that analysis: (1) most young people are not conventional college students or college graduates, and (2) many college students are not young.

The National Journal’s Elahe Izadi has a good piece making those points. She also notes that the most severe student loan burden falls on older grads (age 30+). She quotes me on politicians’ tendency to ignore issues that confront the non-college-bound youth. I say that working-class young people are “not really part of the political situation.”

More generally, young people do not act like a political interest group because their circumstances and interests vary too much, and because their horizons extend beyond youth, which is a short phase. The fact that they do not act like an interest group is one reason they are easy to ignore in politics.

the summer institute of civic studies

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This week and all of next week, my colleague Karol Soltan and I will be leading the fifth annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies, an intensive seminar for scholars, practitioners, and graduate students. I love the atmosphere of the class every year. I attribute it in part to the serious subject matter and in part to the fact that we charge no tuition and give no grades. People attend because they really care about the material.

Over the past 10 years, I have blogged about almost all of the voluminous readings. We begin with “inspirations and provocations.” One is the magnificent poem “The Republic of Conscience” by Seamus Heaney, which confronts you with the question: are you a citizen of the republic of conscience? We read it in a style pioneered by my friend Elizabeth Lynn of the Project for Civic Reflection. Our list of guiding questions is here.

I also like to use this as a provocation: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” It’s attributed to Margaret Mead, but I like to provoke people by suggesting that it is wrong on several levels. A brief definition of “civic studies” would be the discipline that provides more accurate and valid theories than this one.

Still on Day One, we move to our first actual theorist, the late and much lamented Elinor Ostrom. She essentially defined “good citizenship” as solving problems of collective action, such as free-riding and the tragedy of the commons. She showed that people can solve those problems, but they must design rules and norms well.

We alternate between theorists (in the mornings) and “venues” of civic action (in the afternoons). The first venue is the individual person in development. During the session devoted to that venue, we consider civic education and youth (not otherwise prominent themes in the course). We consider the individual in development because what it means to be a “good citizen” depends on how old you are—the answer is different if you are 8 or 80. Also, people don’t automatically learn to be good citizens; that has to be taught, which raises difficult issues: Who has a right to decide that they should learn? How should the state relate to parents if they have different goals? See the “civic education” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for a summary.

As new and unexpected issues arise in discussion, I may blog about them here.