What kind of government can Egypt expect to establish now?

With all the revolutionary activity and removal of current governments going on in North Africa and the Arabian peninsula, the question naturally arises about what kind of government will follow. Bruce Ackerman has addressed that question and provided some interesting insights. His teaser at Balkinization lays the basic issue out very clearly. A presidential system like that in France or the U.S. flows directly from the nature of the revolution it came from. That revolution produced clear leaders who became a charismatic head of state. Either that head of state "constitutionalizes his charisma" into a Presidential system or that a charismatic dictatorship is the likely outcome. But in either case, there had to be a known opposition leader to take the position of leader.

In Egypt there has been a leaderless revolution. Mubarak's dictatorship successfully repressed the opposition until it collapsed. There is no organized opposition to take over from Mubarak. Ackerman says that in this case:

a parliamentary system provides a far more promising constitutional transition to democracy than its presidential counterpart. The presidential form requires the revolutionaries to anoint a single leader prematurely -- thereby preempting a desirable period of democratic contestation, in which rival leaders compete for power. In contrast, a parliamentary system allows a number of political parties to project a number of different leaders onto the stage under conditions of relative equality, allowing them to present a set of competing options in a series of coalition governments.

Then he points out one major problem in the Egyptian situation:

The case for parliamentarianism is especially compelling in Egypt, since the Mubarak regime was selectively repressive – crushing secular dissent but allowing the Moslem Brotherhood to survive as the only organized opposition group.

This appears to be a good argument for Egypt to establish a parliamentarian system rather than a Presidential system. But whatever the case, the fact of the revolution having removed Mubarak does not in any way guarantee that Egypt will become the democracy the Egyptians really want. Egypt has a long way to go.

Wealth, Power and Revolutions: What is happening in North Africa?

Jon Taplin posted a very interesting essay at TPMCAFE about the causes of the revolutions we are watching in the Arabic Middle East right now. It set me to thinking about the interaction of globalization and political power. What I took away from his essay is the following:

Cheap money allows those with wealth to purchase wealth-producing assets and take control of them. So it benefits those with wealth and the banks which manage their money.

Commodities increase in value at a more rapid pace than do sources of intellectual wealth, since the sources of intellectual wealth are uncertain while commodity prices are the inverse of the cost of the cheap money.

So wealth itself becomes the primary source of wealth. The productive economy declines in both value (as measured in money) and in social importance (as measured in political power.)

To state that wealth itself becomes the primary source of wealth and to suggest that political power shifts towards that wealth and away from real economic production is to describe how the economy has been financialized.

The thing I have rarely seen discussed is the "power effect" of money. Possession of money gives an individual the power to influence the decision of those who want the money, and in the financial economy in which we all depend on others for the basic factors of living, this gives those with large accumulations of money great power over lots of people. The Koch brothers are a prime example of this. But there are no reliable and consistent accounting measures of power as there are of money, so economists tend to dismiss power and power effects. The interesting thing, though, is if you go into an organization and conduct a survey of who has power and who does not, the results are quite clear. Everyone knows who has power. But there are no power statements to put in power point alongside financial statements when higher managers make decisions. Those with power can easily dismiss the power aspects of their decisions.

I have attributed the violence in the Middle East largely to the effects of globalization. Globalization is the process of replacing traditional economies with money economies. It is possible to audit and manage the economic changes in a money economy, but because there is no valid and reliable measure of power through society, the power effects of such changes are neither widely recognized nor are they managed. In fact, Libertarianism is the justification presented by the powerful for refusing to manage the social power effects of financializing society.

A revolution is what happens when power moves away from large numbers of people who depend on having the power they need to live their lives with dignity and some predictability.

Hillary is not the revolutionary leader that Obama is.

There is no doubt that the conservative movement has brought America to a very sad low state. We are ineffectively fighting multiple wars in the Middle East while our economy moves into the tank and the middle class is finding itself losing economic ground for the first time since the Depression. Americans are unhappy with the government we have gotten, and the mid-term elections of 2006 are a down payment on that unhappiness. Something is changing, and most of the politicians are unaware of it. The mass media has no clue. It's time for changes. Big changes. The crowds surrounding Barack Obama suggest that he has tapped into the nature of the times, and the times are going to be revolutionary. So what makes the times so revolutionary?

Sara Robinson reports some very interesting research into the causes of revolutions. Some sociologists have study revolution, and they have established a set of conditions that, when they occur, result in revolution. The seven criteria are

1. Economic conditions for most people soar, then crash


2. The upper classes no longer consider the condition of the lower classes to be important to what happens to them. There ceases to be a general consensus across all the society that everyone is in it together.


3. The career and social expectations of the professional and upper military classes cease to be tied to those of the very wealthy. Instead of the best qualified being able to reach the top jobs through talent and hard work, they find that those top jobs are filled by the well-born and wealthy but less competent - like George Bush.


4. Conservatives who do not believe that government should exist run the government. The result is invariably incompetent government and a great deal of corruption. This is the natural result of putting conservatives in charge of government.


5. The world is changing rapidly, yet the top government leaders do not react and lead.


6. The economy is mismanaged to the point of indebtedness, bankruptcy, and currency collapse. Whether through ineptness or corruption is unimportant, although I can identify a great deal of both in the present situation.


7. The use of force is irrational and unproductive.
   • Domestically criminal punishments are widely seen to be unfair and inappropriate, with clear criminals getting no punishment ("Scooter" Libby) or alternatively, punishments wildly excessive to the crimes are handed out (see the mandatory drug sentencing laws.)
   • Outside the U.S. The military is used in wars that offer no benefit to the nation (Iraq is, of course, a classic example.) "These misadventures not only reduce the country's international prestige and contribute to economic declines; they often create a class of displaced soldiers who return home with both the skills and the motivation to turn political unrest into a full-fledged shooting war." Timothy McVeigh would be a classic example of this latter case.

[If I have not adequately summarized the seven items then the error is mine, not Sara Robinson's.]

I have seen every one of these conditions occur in the last two decades, and have grown more and more upset.

The Vietnam war was a beginning of a lot of it. It was clearly a war we did not need to fight, but our conservatives held every other progressive action the government could take hostage until LBJ was forced to send half-a-million soldiers to that country. His goal was to pass Medicare, the Civil Rights Bill, and the Voting Rights Bill. As bad as the Vietnam War was, LBJ was leading America to the solution of the social problems of lack of health care for the elderly and was resolving the problems of Racism and segregation that have plagued America since European settlers arrived. There has not been an example of national leadership since then, unless you want to count the totally negative attacks on modernity that Ronald Reagan represented. Conservatives don't solve social problems. They shoot the messengers who describe real problems and move into gated communities while siphoning as much money off the middle and lower classes as they can. The predator lending that is represented by payday loans, subprime loans, and increased credit card interest with hidden and surprise fees are just the tip of the iceberg. The bankruptcy bill was another step in the same system of predatory lending. All of that sucks money from the middle and lower classes and hands if over to the wealthy and extremely wealthy, who, unsurprisingly, have been purchasing tax breaks from their Congressmen.

If you want to know why the crowds are surrounding Obama as they are, he is the person who is promising the leadership out of this morass. Hillary, for all her technical skills, simply has not demonstrated the awareness or the leadership to make the changes needed to break up the disaster America has become under the Reagan Revolution and the Bush administration.

The conditions for a real revolution are ripe. Obama has tapped into the feelings the conditions have created, and he is stoking them. Will he be able to provide the real leadership that is going to be required at this time of change?

That is always the question. In Obama we seem to have a man who recognizes the nature of the times and who is offering his leadership to deal with them. The question always remains whether he has the abilities. But one thing is becoming more and more clear - there is no one else on the horizon even willing to try.