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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Cairo Massacre And Winner-Takes-All Politics
By Noam Sheizaf |Published August 14, 2013
In one of the more insightful comments on the Egyptian military coup, The New Yorker’s George Packer wrote back in July on the political culture of “winner takes all” that dominates the country in the post-Mubarak era.
Islamists and secular-minded Egyptians regard one another as obstacles to power, not as legitimate players in a complex game that requires inclusion and consensus. Versions of this mutual negation can be seen across the region, from the liberal mini-uprising in Istanbul’s Taksim Square to the brutality of Syria’s sectarian civil war.
Clearly, today’s massacre (is there any other fitting word to describe what took place?) should strengthen this view.
Packer attributes this culture to post-tyrannical regimes. I think that the more likely explanation has to do with the disintegration of national societies, caused by global capitalism and the technological changes of the last decades.
In fact, one could clearly see the emergence of “winner takes all” politics in the Western countries too – whether in the new partisan culture in Washington, or in the on-going effort by the Israeli right to change the rules of the political game.
We live in an age in which states are more powerful than ever, but the societies they claim to represent are breaking into pieces.
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leveymg
(36,418 posts)pieces."
It suggests some sort of state-centered anarchy or the Hobbesian conception of the natural condition of mankind -- "an unending war of all against all" -- before the sovereign, The Leviathan, embodied and directed all the people's violence with a single absolute will.
A very scary thought that one or the other condition is the fate of mankind.
Igel
(35,382 posts)It's not anarchy. it's a fairly small number of largish factions. There may be a bunch of debris around the edges, smaller groups, but those can be ignored until they turn violent.
Some want to see every ailment of society in terms of money, so in this case capitalism and the money-mediated power arrangements that can develop under capitalism. However, societies have been breaking in these ways fairly consistently over time and it's just that given demographic changes in some countries, changing of the guard in others, loss of hegemony in a third group, a lot of societies are suddenly put to the test.
The OP assumes that the idea of good will, social trust, and a willingness to compromise are somehow born in us. They have to be inculcated. It used to be that social and economic elites had that among each other, so as they fought for power they'd still have some sort of respect and sense of what was fair and appropriate and what wasn't. Think of the Senate rules of civility that are now breaking down. The American middle class, to a large extent, appropriated these ideas. They horribly antiquated now, in most people's views. As I was told back in the '90s by some young progressives, politics is all about power--getting as much as you can. Presumably to be used for what they think is right, but the first goal is power.
Depressing.
leveymg
(36,418 posts)None of the Great Social Revolutions that Skocpol and Goldstone and the Tilleys studied were altogether bottom-up affairs. The fall of the Old Order -- whether it be the Glorious Revolution of 1630, the Overthrow of Louis XVI or the Bolshevik Revolution -- all followed a condition called "dual sovereignty" where alternative government with its own claim to popular legitimacy had already been constructed that was ready to step into the breach when institutions crumbled.
Without parallel structures, a revolution devolves into a series of coups and counter-coups or merely a ruinous civil war or religious war, of the sort we're witnessing spread across MENA.
FarCenter
(19,429 posts)For example, Stalin in the USSR or Mao in China.
The creation of a new order requires liquidation of the old order and counter-revolutionary forces.
leveymg
(36,418 posts)Most conflicts end up as stalemates or prompt outside interventions that impose limits on power by the eventual victor. I think it's curious that the US and NATO seem to not even have hinted at a threat of imposing limits on the Junta's efforts to break up the opposition. That's part of the reason I believe the coup and the crackdown is not an entirely internal Egyptian affair.
riderinthestorm
(23,272 posts)there's lots to chew on here.
Big K&R
