Rather than admit how wrong he was about Egypt — he was sure the despot was firmly entrenched — Daniel Larison, The American Conservative‘s resident foreign policy maven, is berating me for mentioning his prediction that the Egyptian despot would survive:
“It’s true that I doubted that Mubarak was going to leave. When I wrote that, three days after the protests had begun, that seemed reasonable. So, yes, I got that wrong along with maybe 90-95% of observers. The larger point that the regime behind Mubarak wasn’t going anywhere seems to have been basically correct.”
The conventional wisdom always seems “reasonable,” even when it’s totally wrong. What separates the wheat from the chaff is the ability to see through to the emerging reality. Surely having been wrong about this would cause an honest observer to question a pundit’s other prognostications — especially given how many words (thousands!) Larison has committed to “proving” that Mubarak would a) remain in power, and b) ought to remain there. It might even provoke some self-reflection on the pundit’s part.
Instead of being such a crybaby, Larison should look in the mirror and question some of his own assumptions. It is one thing to inveigh against what he calls “democracy promotion” by the US government, and an indigenous upsurge of democratic forces. Larison is so locked into his obsessive opposition to what he calls “democratism,” that he can sit there and watch the young people of Egypt stand up to tanks and the truncheons of the secret police and remain unmoved.
This is ironic, given his alleged “hyper-realism,” which supposedly eschews all ideology. Looks like “anti-Democratism” as an ideology can be just as disabling as “democratism” itself — and the evidence is the long trail of blog posts he has written over the entire course of Egypt’s 18-day revolution, disdaining the prospect of the tyrant’s overthrow and shamefully joining with the more extreme neocons in scare-mongering the Muslim Brotherhood issue.
