So Much for Egypt's "Arab Spring"

A few years ago, I made the prediction that the so-called "Arab Spring" was doomed to fail in Egypt, in light of the fact that the vote had been given to millions of Egyptians with no real grasp of literacy, let alone the rarified Enlightenment concepts upon whose foundations Western liberal democracies had been constructed. I was admonished by at least one commenter back then about my lack of faith in the good sense of the average Egyptian, and indeed, a part of me hoped to be proven wrong by succeeding developments, but that is not quite what happened (to put it mildly).

First the Egyptian masses voted for political Islamists who lacked even the slightest competence at the practical aspects of governance, and then, after massive protests and political instability laid the ground for a coup, the very same masses have now thrown their support behind yet another military strongman in the familiar mould of Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak - and with that all of the accompanying suppression of dissent and "Intimidation by Mukhabarat" which has always been the stock in trade of such regimes. With events having come to this, the total achievement of Egypt's "Arab Spring" movement has amounted to absolutely nothing at all, the very scenario I feared would play out. The Egyptian "Arab Spring" has proved to be as lasting as Alexander Kerensky's ill-fated socialist republic.

If one lesson from Iraq, Egypt and Afghanistan should be clear by now, it is that it takes more than just giving every adult the vote to create a functioning liberal democracy: the necessary foundations have to exist in the form of a constituency which is unified behind the ideals of rule of law, limited government and individual rights which underpin any such state. Assuming one actually cares about the substance of liberal democracy more than the mere formalities of voting, one must be willing to admit that it's probably better in the long run to restrict voting only to those with the necessary education and personal assets to be invested in seeing the effort at a liberal constitutional order succeed.