Well, concedes Fukuyama, Egyptian society isn’t all that liberal in the first place,
“But part of the blame lies with Egypt’s liberals themselves. They could organize protests and demonstrations, and act with often reckless courage to challenge the old regime. But they could not go on to rally around a single candidate, and then engage in the slow, dull, grinding work of organizing a political party that could contest an election, district by district. Political parties exist in order to institutionalize political participation; those who were best at organizing, like the Muslim Brotherhood, have walked off with most of the marbles. Facebook, it seems, produces a sharp, blinding flash in the pan, but it does not generate enough heat over an extended period to warm the house.”
Even as Fukuyama pours neo-Burkean, neo-Hegelian, neo-Hayekian, neo-Huntingtonian ridicule on the notion that one can come up with a “plan” to convert a corrupt, authoritarian, quasi-medieval regime into a prosperous, pluralistic, secular, democratic society in a year’s time, he pours ridicule on the Facebook crowd because they don’t have the plan that he says can’t exist. You kids! You think you’re so smart!
Afterwords
Francis sounds much more measured here, in an earlier piece on Egypt, written a year ago for the American Interest. He provides a reasonable take on American policy in Egypt, calling it a “good case of … policy incoherence,” but he can’t quite come out and identify the ultimate source of that incoherence—that source being the fact that the purpose of American policy in Egypt is to assist Israel rather than Egypt. When your policy towards one country is really determined by the interests of another country, your policy is bound to be incoherent.
Back in the good old days, before the utter incoherence of Bush Administration’s policy in the Middle East was exposed for all to see, Francis was fairly tight with the neo-cons. He taught at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Advanced International Studies, a little more than a stone’s throw from the offices of the American Enterprise Institute and Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard. Well, that was then, and now Francis is teaching a Stanford. But some rocks can travel awfully far, and Frank still likes to keep his head down.
