Egypt as a Lens

Egypt is an interesting lens through which to view democracy. Yes, I know. I have a bit of a hang-up here. Egypt keeps recurring on this blog, in the current context especially here, here, and here earlier. The country is more than  97 percent Muslim; in the last parliamentary elections, the vote was 30 percent secular, 60 percent Muslim; Mohamed Morsi won his election by 51.7 percent of the vote. Not good enough, evidently.

The sentimentalized view of democracy as “rule of the people” is too simple. For it to work effectively, not only must the people be extraordinarily homogeneous in culture, they must also be predominantly secular in their convictions. Democracy is the governing institution of secular mercantile peoples. It is uncomfortable with genuinely held religious belief. And the surrounding environment is also important. Imagine the situation in Egypt if it were reversed. Suppose that 60 percent of the country was secular, that the demonstrators, agitators, and Tahrir-squarers were all Muslim fundamentalists and a minority, and the Army were siding with them. Would the U.S. government’s reactions then be muted and sort of hands off?

Yes. But How to Make Money From It?

Quite obviously democracy is evolving. The form it is now taking is major eruptions of well-off young people in country after country. No sooner has Turkey calmed a little than Brazil explodes. And what with nearly two hundred countries in the world, the end is not yet in sight. This got me to thinking along capitalist lines. How does a person take advantage of this opportunity? Is there a way to cash in on all these many Springs? Deep thought eventually produced an answer. Why not invest in tear gas manufacturers? Why just the other day—its own spring now yesterday—Egypt purchased $2.5 million worth of tear gas for future virtual elections. And that stuff came from here. So who are the suppliers?

Well, fellow investors, things actually don’t look all that promising. The three leading tear gas suppliers in this country are Combined Systems Inc. (Jamestown, PA) (Egypt’s supplier), Nonlethal Technologies (Homer City, PA), and Defense Technology (Casper Wyoming). Only the last of these is, in a manner of speaking, publicly traded. Defense Technology is a subsidiary of Safariland LLC. Safari itself is owned by the UK defense giant BAE Systems PLC. Now you can buy BAE stock, but milking this new emerging market by way of privately held companies is just a little difficult.

How does a domestic supplier sell to other countries—like Egypt, Turkey, and Brazil? Well, with the permission of the State Department. The State Department offers its form DSP-83 (link). The foreign buyer must fill out the form. If State approves, the vendor can ship its shiny tear gas canisters. But if you are hoping to sell tear gas to Brazil, you might want to think twice. The competition may be too tough. Brazil has its own company, Condor Non-Lethal Technologies, based in Rio de Janeiro. Condor is a major force—specializing in all kinds of devices for launching non-lethal munitions, not least rubber bullets, and also, of course, what in the trade are called lachrymatory grenades. But the shorter phrase to use, when making inquiries, is “aerosol defense.” That will get you beyond mere tear gas into other useful ways non-lethally to stop democracy when it evolves too fast.

In researching my future means of survival, after Congress nixes my Social Security, I discovered a helpful list from the National Institute of Justice yet (link). That brochure shows 16 manufacturers of pepper sprays, as of 1994. The stock of some of those companies is surely sold on some exchange. But researching that list is still ahead….

Egyptian Time Perspective

At 4:31 p.m. Egyptian time, which was 10:31 a.m. here in Detroit, an hour-and-a-half late, the final results of the presidential election there were made known to the public. The Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate, Mohamed Morsi, won the office with 51 percent of the vote; his opponent, the ex-general Ahmed Shafiq, garnered 48 percent. So it is over? Well, in a way. The country’s military oligarchy seems still to hold the thicker strings that guide this Egyptian puppet in its motions. They engineered the parliament’s demise just before the run-off vote was held, perhaps thus hoping to shoo in their candidate.

Interests me, this whole business—if for arcane reasons. Using the Muslim calendar, we are now in 1433. But the Islamic calendar is based on 12 lunar months; these yield 354 or 355 days per year. Using 354.5 as an average, 1433 produces 1390 years of 365.25 days—suggesting that the calendar began in 622 AD. Yep. That also happens to be the official starting year of the calendar, the year of Mohammed’s flight (hegira) from Mecca to Medina. Hegira (or hejira) is also used to mark the Muslim year, combined with the Latin anno; this year, therefore (until November 14), is 1433 AH.

Now supposing we imagine that civilizations are more or less organic phenomena—rather than mechanical—thus that they develop and age “naturally.” In that case the Islamic one is in its fourteenth century—a time which, in ours, felt not even a whiff of democracy yet; the authentic, spontaneous thing would have to wait another 400 years or so. Which is another way of saying that the tenor of events in Egypt, with the authoritarian hand of the military still holding the reins (to change metaphors), seems to be about right. The democratic form is not, in this view at least, “natural” to the Muslim culture at this time. It is imposed by its overwhelming presence round about that country—to its North and, across the ocean, to its West.

Is that the reason why this announcement was late in coming—even if only by an hour-and-a-half? Were the Egyptians sort of hoping that, if they delayed, time would catch them up to an alien modernity? If so, they didn’t wait long enough.

Egypt: Twixt Rock and Hard Place

The up-swell of Islamist protest in Egypt. Fascinating. It pits the military (read the monarchical impulse) against the Muslim Brotherhood. The modernists and liberals, meanwhile, watch with minority trepidations from the side-lines. The military as “defender of the constitution” brings memories of Turkey and of Kemal Ataturk. Ataturk, of course, was the modernizer. Above all he wished to free Turkey of religious dominance. But the hard place, ultimately, is democracy. Now we see the same pattern once again, and once more in a modernizing Muslim state. Democracy comes of age when the genuine elites are secular by deep conviction and the religious faith is shattered into numerous-enough little pieces so that no one can hope to dominate. That was the case in 1776 or thereabouts. Our Washingtons and Hamiltons, our Jeffersons and Franklins? Secular to their very enlightenment cores. And the religious character of the American population was a scatter of parts left by an explosion called the Reformation…

A Certain Weakness…

A certain weakness in democracy is that, functionally, the only real qualification of an elected official is the ability to persuade a majority of ordinary people to vote for him or her. Popularity, one might say, is thus a constant (as in a mathematical context); it was thus in the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and still is in the twenty-first century. But effective rule then becomes the function of at least two variables that can and do change over time. One of these is the size of the electorate that votes for any one representative. The other is the quality of the electors measured in education, wisdom, and sense of responsibility.

When the number of electors is relatively small, the candidates are better known; as that number increases, the electors’ knowledge of the individual thins out and therefore becomes more and more abstract. The costs of learning about the candidate mount—for the individual voter; knowledge certainly requires, minimally, expenditure of much more time. More and more mechanical means of communications (beyond personal contact and word-of-mouth reputation) must be used; money becomes ever more necessary to use the new means. Natural candidates—who emerge quite, ah, naturally in day-to-day contacts (and this still happens at the village level)—may not even come close to running. Huge competitions precede even the first stage, that of achieving the status of candidacy!

The quality of the electorate changes as the franchise is granted to people of ever less “natural” (that word again) qualification. The minimum is that of a householder, male or female, to be sure. To this one might add—of a certain age. In our history the age qualification was moved downward; it should have been moved up. Property qualifications have been removed—whereas they should have been retained but modernized: must pay a mortgage or pay rent. The combination of extending the franchise to anyone—and removing the candidate from direct contact with the public by increasing size, produces a new kind of representative who, quite evidently, is no longer capable of effective rule.

This came to mind today when Brigitte read me an editorial in New York Times titled “Dangerous Imports,” reporting on Congressional efforts to cut the FDA’s budget—despite the fact that two-thirds of fruits and vegetables, 80 percent of seafood, half of the medical devices, and 80 percent of active ingredients in medications are imported. We have, alas, far too many legislators who believe that regulation (not least of food safety) is some kind of arbitrary malevolence directed by the Left against the corporate sector—rather than a by now traditional process of protecting public health.

Voting for the Weather

The first decennial census in the Unite States took place in 1790. The results of that count were used then, as they still are, to apportion congressional seats and to define congressional districts of roughly the same size, emphasis on roughly: people will settle in clusters and drawing perfect boundaries isn’t always practical. That year, for instance the third congressional district of Virginia had a population of 30,145, the fourth district of Maryland 53,913. The average population of a congressional district was 33,000 people. Slavery existed in those days; slaves weren’t counted until 1850. That’s a dark subject but not central to my point today. The gross numbers are.

In attempts to make that eighteenth century situation personal, I toted up the population of my current neighborhood, the so-called Grosse Pointes in Michigan (some four communities). These had a population of 44,283 in the 2000 census. Now I can reach the boundaries of this area on foot in any direction in under an hour-and-half. The major centers of this area, places where people might engage in political action, are a good deal closer. If this were a farming community and therefore much more dispersed, reaching its centers, its markets, would take a good deal more time, but not that much more—and I’d have the use of a horse. The congressional district, therefore would seem to be at the right scale, certainly accessible. I’d be a cipher, to be sure, 1 of 44,000, but, well, that is a graspable segment of the collective; adults would be roughly half of that number today, probably less than a third in 1790.

Our current congressional district, the thirteenth, had a 2000 population of 662,563. We moved here from the fifth district of Minnesota, where the population in 2000 had been 614,935. The average congressional district’s population is today 646,000—omitting the very thinly populated states where the districts are much bigger. Now one voice in 33,000 (the 1790 situation) is more easily heard than one voice in 646,000. To give it some magnitude, the modern voice is muted by a factor of 20! If we view this ratio from the perspective of the candidate for office, it is at least 20 times more costly for the candidate to be heard—meaning that it will cost a great deal more money today than it did in the eighteenth century. Sticking to averages, and comparing the costs of sending a single letter to every person in each district (okay, even babies get letters), it would cost to $14,190 to reach a 1790-sized district—and $277,780 to reach a district today. That’s in today’s dollars and using today’s postage for a first-class letter.

To give this some visual impact, I include here a graphic that shows the two districts in a bar chart, with my own Grosse Pointes placed in the middle and colored true blue.

Now let me add a few more observations. The Minnesota-fifth and the Michigan-thirteenth are alike. Both are urban centers where our location was or is on the edge. In both one party rules and elections are decided in primaries—when they are contested at all. Our representatives must deal with complexities the eighteenth century couldn’t even dream of—such as (to grab wildly at random) nuclear proliferation, stem cell research, and petroleum floods of whole coast-lines. The ability of the average person to understand these issues in a comprehensive way has probably diminished by more than twenty-fold. The huge numbers imply a great mixing of many different kinds of people, the vast majority of whom are ill-educated. Here I might add, parenthetically, that the folks in Montana (whose single district has 902,000 inhabitants) or the folks in South Dakota (with one district of 755,000 people) are heard even more faintly.

These are some, but by no means all, of the structural underpinnings of a system where democratic politics absolutely demands vast amounts of money, where an Electoral Industry is active at all times, where fundraising is continuous, and where the issues must be abstracted to such an extent, even to be heard, that they shrink to almost meaningless tokens. Any feeling of genuine participation in public governance, already fairly minimal in a district of, say, 44,000 people, is altogether lost—unless we make it an active and semi-professional avocation. The touch of one-six-hundred-and-forty-six-thousandth of the population is not exactly felt by a representative. Intermediate structures, therefore, develop to bring pressure to bear. These groups are not elected; they are self-appointed; and they also require money to maintain. Here I am showing straightforward quantitative descriptions of the system; and the description omits all of the detail. But what such data show, at the bottom of the cup, is the reason for uproars of discontent—and also why these voices often sound so ignorant. Voting for the weather may seem a much more rational activity, these days, than voting for people who, supposedly, represent our interests.