Once Upon a Revolution

by Thanassis Cambanis

  Just before he retired from the army, el-Sisi had himself appointed field marshal. Perhaps he was as vain as he was ambitious, or perhaps he calculated that the credential was necessary if he was to retain power. A year after the coup, el-Sisi ran a presidential campaign notable for its scolding, detached tone. There were no public events, only a handful of television interviews in which el-Sisi declared that as president he would be beholden to no one. The felool fat cats delivered their own volunteer ad campaigns on el-Sisi’s behalf, but the candidate told them not to expect any favors in return. He refused to publish a platform or describe his economic plan beyond several hectoring references to the sacrifices he expected from Egyptians rich and poor. The election followed the script of dictatorial referendums from times past. There was a nominal challenge from Hamdeen Sabbahi, but el-Sisi won with 96.9 percent of the vote in May 2014. Even dictators have constituencies and need support, but el-Sisi seemed to equate any form of coalition building with pandering. He refused to court Mubarak’s old elite. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries spent more than $12 billion to bring el-Sisi to power and promised further payments to keep him there. Beyond the foreign cash, el-Sisi offered no hints on how he planned to govern.

  At the time of this writing, Basem and Moaz are studying their mistakes, each seeking another path to his goals. So are the scores of thinkers and activists in prison and exile who have not discarded their ideas but who recognize that their efforts in the first three years after Mubarak did not suffice. We who chronicled the uprising have a responsibility to try to be honest and fair. In my estimation, Egypt’s revolution was defeated so readily because it wasn’t organized, it wasn’t political enough, and, most fatally, it didn’t have a compelling, constructive idea at its center. It had many other significant ingredients and was led by inspiring, brave individuals. What took place was rare enough: a population pushed to the edge lost its fear and challenged a rotten regime. That alone commands admiration and emulation. But it wasn’t enough to make a revolution. It wasn’t enough to change a country.

  Many Egyptian activists and revolutionaries have blamed this miscarriage on the revolution’s internal tactical choices or its external circumstances. On the tactical level, the revolution never developed any alternative or supplement to street protests. Crowds were its only tool and only measure, and revolutionary fervor is always just a stroke away from the frenzy of the mob. There are arguments about whether the revolutionaries used too much violence, alienating the public with their street fights, or not enough, because a street militia might have won bigger concessions. Many said that if protesters had remained in the square after Mubarak quit, his regime would have followed suit; but the fact is there was no will at the time to continue testing authorities after people got most of what they thought they wanted. Some reasonable theories focus on the private deals between secretive elites and the military that left little opportunity for a revolutionary agenda. The guiltiest party on this front was the Muslim Brotherhood, followed by some of the secular politicians and the bureaucracy of the state.

  These critiques all have some merit but limited explanatory power. Ultimately, the status quo is not an immutable law of nature; it is the result of inherently malleable quantities: political circumstances and institutional power. Perception and personality matter in politics. A single man’s momentary lapse of confidence can alter the course of a dictatorship. Popular momentum can swamp even a force as potent as Egypt’s deep state. For a while, perhaps for as long as a year, that’s what appeared to be happening in Egypt. All the status quo powers teetered on the defensive, unsure how they might survive: the military, the Muslim Brotherhood, the felool, and the established politicians. Slowly, however, the legacy powers regrouped as they sized up the popular force and recognized its incoherence. The kings and kingmakers realized that their fearsome adversaries were easily distracted and fragmented. It might take time, but the revolution could be defeated, brought back to earth, fattened, manipulated, silenced. Charged with energy, the revolution agitated against the abuses of the state but aspired to no single aim. For what did it stand? That depended on whom you asked, and the overwhelming majority of the young people who gave the revolution its striking force also rejected its would-be leaders.

  I am not saying that the revolutionaries are at fault for the horrible things done by those in charge. No, responsibility for Egypt’s terrible condition lies in the hands of those who held power and trust, and abused it: the military, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the old ruling party, in that order. They did the damage; they ruined the country. But the revolutionaries are to blame for failing to make a coherent, plausible revolution. Had they done so, they might still have been defeated, but they would have contested the established powers to a degree that they never managed.

  The revolutionaries collapsed on three different levels: their organization, their politics, and their ideas. They were constrained by their society, with its terrible education system, endemic poverty, and lack of resources. Yet their failures weren’t inevitable, as evinced by the successes within the revolution.

  Organizationally, revolutionaries performed their best on narrow, tangible issues. A group called No to Military Trials did incredible work tracking and trying to represent the thousands of civilians detained by the military. A collective of videographers called Mosireen documented Egypt’s struggle better than any media outlet. Resourceful and brilliant Egyptians weathered a concerted state assault to work as human rights monitors and defenders, and as independent journalists. They displayed fabulous inventiveness at protests and in clashes with police. In those ventures, revolutionary efforts were disciplined, organized, and sustained. But the best revolutionary organizations were one-person shows or tiny collectives; they never were able to transcend the small cell and organize adaptable institutions that could transcend and survive individual personalities.

  Politically, the revolutionaries shied away from compromise. They displayed surprisingly little interest in crafting a platform or dogma to market. Initially refreshing, the absence of political thought and planning over time came to seem pathological. A century-long propaganda assault against the very idea of politics had paid off for Egypt’s rulers. The activists who chose politics as their field of play fared poorly. Even the activists who understood the utility of building coalitions never succeeded, perhaps because they didn’t know how to do the work or because they lacked the resources to entice various constituencies. For example, several revolutionaries desperately tried to form a united front with labor unions; their failure to do so wasn’t through lack of trying, but it was a failure all the same.

  The failure of ideas is perhaps the most painful. At the beginning in Tahrir Square, revolutionaries spoke in bold strokes. They believed the end of the age of Arab authoritarians had come, and that the popular revolts were ushering in a dawn of Arab democracy. Their initial thoughts were profound and creative. Activists in the square spoke of a democracy built on justice and responsibility. They didn’t intend to fetishize elections. Their first priority was to choose a government charged with providing freedom but justice as well, and by justice they meant a life of dignity: rule of law, employment, food, and health care. They imagined citizens who exercised rights while enjoying new freedoms. They borrowed some elements of European social democracy, and some from the American system, but they drew heavily on Egyptian and Arab history as well. As a starting point, they couldn’t have been more ambitious. But that creative energy ebbed during the first year and failed to coalesce. The aspirations never distilled into something actionable.

  It feels disrespectful, almost sacrilegious, to put it this way, but in the ripeness of time, it becomes clear: Tahrir was bursting with ideals, but it had a surprisingly small number of fully baked ideas. What did Tahrir want? The people in the square couldn’t even agree on a starting slogan like “Freedom.” No, even at the vaguest level, they wanted everything: “Bread, freedom, social justice.” So vast a demand as to be
meaningless, even thematically. If you want everything, you focus on nothing. And if, like Basem, you do manage to focus on a single goal (in his case, the pursuit of power through a viable political party), your journey will be tainted if it lacks a coherent ideological focus. There the revolution failed, and over time, it did not adapt and grow.

  There were thinkers who tried to expand the complexity and thoughtfulness of the revolutionary political program, like the blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah and the academic-turned-politician Amr Hamzawy. There was a larger group of people such as Moaz who sought to keep revolutionaries focused on ending the old regime before squabbling over its replacement. None of them, however, managed to dominate even their factions, much less the revolutionary space. Even after a year or two, when I asked revolutionaries what they wanted, I would get a laundry list. The Egyptian system was rigged to marginalize and discredit political thinking, and the leaders who did emerge in the different islands of the revolution never tried to make themselves into leaders of the entire archipelago. Each member of the Revolutionary Youth Coalition aimed only to represent a tiny slice, and the modesty of those ambitions, along with the lack of a coherent idea, spelled doom.

  Furthermore, like destructive germs, Egypt’s excessive nationalism and pride in the army festered within revolutionaries, like within most Egyptians. Even faced with overwhelming evidence of the military’s malfeasance, too many revolutionaries were willing to trust the military as an impartial referee. The revolution never sought to dispel the shibboleth that Egypt’s army was sacred. Far too many revolutionaries succumbed to a belief in historical exceptionalism: Egypt, the mother of the world, was crafting its own history, immune to the forces that affected other nations. They avoided studying parallel cases of revolution and militarism, and were blindsided by predictable developments such as the machinations of the military, the return of the felool, the breakdown of the economy.

  I say again, because it is worth repeating, that the revolutionaries bear no responsibility for the torture, murder, and miscarriage of justice that persisted from the rule of Mubarak through the periods of the SCAF, Morsi, and el-Sisi. However, the revolutionaries are responsible for their own shortcomings: their incoherence, their absence of tactical innovation, their inability to forge ideas. When and if the revolutionaries repair these deficiencies, they will be able to bring to life the notional Republic of Tahrir.

  Moaz tried his best and preserved his moral integrity. Basem tried his best and preserved a sliver of his political project. There are a few thousand like them who honorably gave their all in an attempt to change their country, and who still are trying. As they do their time in exile, in prison, or under the corrosion of a reconstituted dictatorship, perhaps they’ll find a way to speak of politics with a vocabulary that is equally open to Islamist and secular freedoms. Perhaps they’ll find themselves able to choose just one goal to begin with, and to think through the types of morally ambiguous choices needed to reach it. Bread, freedom, or social justice. One day, perhaps, they’ll agree on a single idea, and a plan will follow. Then they might change the course of history even more than they did in those first eighteen days in the square.

  Almost two and a half millennia ago, in the midst of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians landed on the neutral island of Milos and ordered it to surrender. Otherwise Athens would slaughter the men and enslave the women and children. Even by the standards of the time, the ultimatum sounded like a war crime. The leaders of Milos appealed to justice and morals. They had a right to remain neutral in the war. As the ancient Greek historian Thucydides tells the story, the Athenians, self-styled progenitors of democracy and moral philosophy, laughed away the objections of Milos. “The strong do as they can, and the weak suffer what they must,” they said. Milos stood by its convictions and was destroyed.

  Tahrir, like Milos, was right and just and moral. Victory always needs something more than that, even today. The internet age hasn’t reconfigured the calculus of power. Guns and money trump words alone, even if those words are published on a brilliant and flexible open-source web platform. Revolution comes when a narrative persuades the guns and money to change sides. Egypt’s revolution and counterrevolution reminded us of the power of words, as well as the limits of that power.

  The Tahrir Revolution reminded the world that authoritarianism isn’t preordained. Some had argued that the Arab world was destined to live under dictatorship, or preferred it. The Arab uprisings of 2010 and 2011 dispelled that lazy and racist idea for good, hopefully. Egypt’s revolution reminded us of some other truths. History never stops. There is no such thing as universal agreement. Power is never static. Three years after Tahrir, many revolutionaries are in prison, in exile, dead, or otherwise silenced. A few are still striving in the claustrophobic confines of political space not yet destroyed by the deep state. El-Sisi won control, and he won fawning love. But his victory still doesn’t mean that authoritarianism will prevail forever. It isn’t culturally determined. Its tide can be turned. It can be destroyed. That’s what Tahrir proved.

  Demonstrators in Egypt pushed aside three regimes in three years. It wasn’t entirely the same crowd that bayed against Mubarak, the SCAF, and Morsi, but during that three-year stretch, probably every thinking person in Egypt took to the streets and demanded that one ruler or another leave. That public ownership of the political process didn’t disappear with restoration of a military despot. The very nature of the governed has changed unequivocally. The overwhelming majority of Egypt’s citizens came to feel entitled to decide who ruled them. Their consecration for el-Sisi carried a tinge of poison, whether he recognized it or not: the people made him, and they could break him. That connection was without precedent in Egypt and in most despotic countries. In such places, “the people” is a concept in which the sovereign’s power is vested; it is not supposed to act as a force in its own right. But through revolution, all these different Egyptians had acquired an awareness of their agency: revolutionary and felool, young and old, thuggish and bourgeois. They had also sharpened their sense of historic destiny. Egypt’s revolution prompted uprisings across the Arab world, and caused anxiety among authoritarians in faraway China and Russia. The square resonated as a metaphor and a cautionary tale. Antigovernment protesters in Kiev in early 2014 studied the Egyptian revolt, determined to emulate its strengths and avoid its mistakes. Egypt’s revolutionary ideas reverberated on the world stage even as they were ghettoized inside Egypt.

  As I write these words, a smothering majority of Egyptians are choosing to return to military dictatorship, welcoming violence and the repression of dissenters. Does this mean we should understand the idealists in Egypt as some endangered species in a culture that is primed for fascism? I believe that the uprising, with its deep historical roots and its implications stretching far into the future, teaches us the opposite. Egyptians propelled their revolution with their own unexpected agency and bravery. They opposed epochal injustice, and although it remained inchoate, they conjured a vision of Arab democracy that was compelling and authentic. That seed remains, as do the manifold impediments to its taking root.

  I think we have to acknowledge that, in Egypt’s case, love of the military and comfort with authoritarianism run deep. The dominance of authoritarians is not guaranteed, but their presence in the political discourse is. Any future change will have to make some accommodation for them, just like it will have to find some space for Islamists. Throughout history, many people have freely chosen juntas (and later came to regret it), and many countries seemingly conditioned for life under abusive caprice have somehow raised themselves into a more just condition. Egypt is neither doomed nor condemned, though for the time being it has reached an impossibly sad juncture. After Tahrir, Egypt is a much harder nation to subordinate. In just his first year in control, el-Sisi killed and arrested more people than Mubarak did in nearly three decades. He faced only token opposition on his way to the presidency, and he refused to campaign, make promises, or even publish a
platform. He chided Egyptians for asking him questions. With a heavy hand he brushed off the few remaining dissidents as well as the felool businessmen who supported him. His imperious style could be a sign of el-Sisi’s Machiavellian fierceness, or it could be evidence of weakness. The uprising against Mubarak and the events that followed were not a dream. Everyone involved said and did things of consequence. Even those who surrendered did so as changed individuals. None of them was the same person he or she had been in 2010.

  We also ought to reserve some empathy for the stability crowd. I find it impossible to approve of someone who condones torture but find it possible to relate to the desire to live under a predictable, centralized state—even a problematic one. Among those relieved at el-Sisi’s rise, we find reasonable people who have grown tired of uncertainty. Critical thinking and political experimentation lead in the short term to more questions, more criticisms, and more open-ended changes: an unsettling condition even for those who crave the democratic experiment. In Egypt’s case, even mere reform entails the loss of stability. If the familiar framework of paralysis is cast aside, no one can predict the path forward. As a result, some reasonable people choose stability and the familiar, even if it means repression or even fascism.