What the outcome of the current demonstrations and clashes in Egypt will be, no one know for sure, of course. The miraculous establishment of a Western style liberal democracy seems to this old guy unlikely.
It is one of the nostrums of the West that the desire for freedom is universal. George Bush and Michael Novak fall into that chant. I never believed it. After all, one of the consciously constructed mechanisms of our free society is a separation of powers designed precisely to thwart what the Founding Fathers knew as man's inherent and ineradicable drive for dominance. What was Franklin's phrase? "A republic, madam. If you can keep it."
When people say they want to be free, what they usually mean is that they themselves want to be free, free to live the kind of life they think best. The big problem with Western freedom is that it implies and demands that the freedom you take also be granted to others, who want to live lives differently. And every society has to limit that. What else is government if not constraint?
It is a rare and historically odd and delicate position to actually want the freedom of others who are different. Most of us want freedom to have the world reflect ourselves.
Arabs --and even if you grant that Egyptians are different, though deeply Arabized in language and religion-- and Muslims in general...where do they find the ground in their history and culture for the kind of government that the West sometimes achieves? Frankly, it seems alien to me. Their success rate so far is, to put it kindly, unimpressive.
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