MICHAEL TOTTEN: THE INTERNATIONAL ELITE BUBBLE.
When I first showed up there during the Beirut Spring in 2005, I met one cosmopolitan liberal-minded person after another protesting Syria’s military occupation in Martyr’s Square in downtown Beirut. I interviewed some startlingly bigoted sectarians at the same time in the same place in the same crowd of activists, though they were the minority.
Had I left the country immediately after hanging with that crowd, I might have come away with a completely distorted impression. Or had that revolution of sorts taken place in any other country, I might have fallen right into the trap Kaplan describes and assumed Beirut was Berlin in 1989. The reason I didn’t, and couldn’t, is because I stuck around because Lebanon is also where Hezbollah lives.
Hezbollah was, and still is, far too big and powerful and nasty to ignore. So one of the first things I did after orienting myself in Martyr’s Square with Lebanon’s liberals was head down to the Hezbollah office in the dahiyeh south of Beirut, which gave me a serious education in totalitarian Islamist politics which I narrate in detail in my first book, The Road to Fatima Gate. The Beirut Spring was not enough to save Lebanon in 2005. Hezbollah blew the country to hell the very next year.
The first time I went to Egypt, also in 2005, I met the same kinds of people I met in Lebanon. Cosmopolitan, liberal-minded individuals who were like Arab versions of me. Egypt had nothing like Hezbollah controlling large swaths of the country and warmongering against the neighbors. No foreign army smothered the country. Instead it had a police state. The narrative there at first seemed to be: democrats against the regime. That’s what it looked like. But my experience in Lebanon prompted me to ask a question of my liberal Egyptian friends that seems not to have occurred to some of the other journalists and Western internationalists who have been there. I asked these Egyptian liberals, “how many Egyptians agree with you about politics?” The answer stopped me cold: five percent at the most.
These people felt profoundly alienated by their own society, but it didn’t seem to occur to them to tell me about it until I asked. Perhaps they thought I knew that already. And of course they knew they were a tiny minority. How could they not? They belonged to a smaller minority than a Republican in San Francisco or gay feminist activist in rural Utah. It isn’t possible to be so out of step with everybody around you and be clueless about it, at least not before the Arab Spring started.
Well north of five percent of Egyptians are secular, to be sure, but liberalism isn’t Egypt’s only secular ideology. Its biggest competitors after Islamism are Arab Nationalism and socialism.
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