Egypt: Democracy and Details

As I write this, Egypt is being convulsed by huge demonstrations, by some accounts larger than those that brought down Hosni Mubarak, demanding the resignation of the democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi. The Army has said it will step in if there is no resolution.

This presents a dilemma. Morsi is a fairly hard-core member of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose dedication to democracy is suspect. Indeed, many say he has shown authoritarian tendencies. And the size of the opposition cannot be disputed. On he other hand, he is the first democratically elected president in Egypt's history.

I don't have a suggestion for the short run. But for the long run, let's look at how we got to this point. Before Morsi was elected he had to get through a primary where the top two finishers went on to the final election. Here's what the results looked like:

1. Morsi 5,553,097 (25.30 per cent)
2. Shafiq 5,210,978 (23.74 per cent)
3. Sabbahi 4,739,983 (21.60 per cent)
4. Abul-Fotouh 3,936,264 (17.93 per cent)
5. Moussa 2,407,837 (10.97 per cent)

Morsi was considered the most hard-line Islamist in the race. Shafiq was prime minister under Mubarak, and was thus considered a representative of the old, pre-Arab-Spring regime. Faced with that choice, people narrowly chose Morsi. But notice that both final-round candidates combined were the first choice of fewer than half the voters

Now suppose that instead of using a top-two primary, Egypt had used what is known as instant-runoff voting, known in Britain as alternative voting. Under this system, people state not only their first choice, but their second choice, third choice, etc. If nobody gets more than fifty percent of the first choice votes, then we go on to second choice votes, and so on.

How would this have worked in Egypt? We don't know for sure, but my guess is that people who voted for one of the more centrist candidates were likely to have voted for other centrist candidates for their second and third choices. So Sabbahi or Abul-Fotouh (probably not Moussa) could have ended up as president. This is how instant-runoff voting is supposed to work; the winner is supposed to be someone that represents the views of the majority.

I discussed the case of Egypt a year ago. My point then, as now, is that there's more than one way to pick a democratically elected president. (More than two, in fact.) It was clear then that it was unjustified to say, "See? When Arabs get democracy, they just vote for radical Islamists." It's even clearer now. And, boring as this topic may be, it matters.

The Right and Egypt

As you may recall, I often spend time at right-wing websites. It has been striking how much discomfort the libertarian right  has shown with the revolution in Egypt.

After all, libertarians are supposed to be against tyranny, right? That seems like a pretty basic requirement. And the Tea Party arm is always talking about "taking back our country." Yet here are Egyptians doing just that, and libertarians have trouble supporting them.

The obvious problem is that Egyptians are mostly Muslim. Not that the right is intolerant. No, no, no, no, no. It's just that, according to the right, Muslims are intolerant. Also violent and lacking the traditions necessary for democracy. So we need to be careful. Accordingly, a few months ago voters in Oklahoma passed a remarkably silly ballot measure barring judges from considering sharia law in their courts. This, in turn, came a few months after the morally decayed Newt Gingrich (just so you know, I'm going to start using that as a sort of Homeric epithet, like "the wine-dark sea" or "the rosy-fingered dawn") proposed a Federal law to the same effect to apply nationwide, as a barrier against the "stealth jihadis."

So what about Egypt? People on the right explained, to those who had forgotten, that Iran had had a revolution, and look what happened to them. One blogger at the Volokh Conspiracy explained that he hadn't taken a position because it was too soon to know whether the revolution would make things better or worse. (I asked whether by the same logic he would be voting for Obama in 2012.)

Meanwhile, Glenn Beck raised my opinion of his ethics by moving from "probably an unscrupulous demagogue" to "probably mentally unhinged." He's now developed an elaborate theory in which the Muslim Brotherhood establishes a caliphate (it became the #3 search term on Google) with the collusion of leftists, and ends up divvying up most of the world with China and Russia, leaving North and South America  as the last holdouts.

That's the obvious problem that the right has with the Egyptian revolution. The hidden problem is that it makes the right's rhetoric about America look ridiculous. Tyranny in Egypt is arbitrary arrest, beatings, torture, state control of the media, rigged elections. Tyranny in America is having to pay a tax penalty if you don't buy health insurance. Lucky Egyptians-- they don't have to buy health insurance! In fact, most of them don't even have health insurance! Taking back your country meant, in Egypt, going out into the street to demonstrate peacefully and facing thugs throwing Molotov cocktails. Taking back your country in America means going to Town Hall meetings and shouting down the speaker. The nerve of those Egyptians-- who do they think they are?