Last week television viewers around the world witnessed images of hundreds of thousands of protesters uniting to celebrate the overthrow of the 30-year autocratic regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. One Economist blogger described the jubilation most elegantly: “The hot blush of liberation a dazzled sense of infinite possibility swelling millions of happy breasts is a precious thing of terrible unfathomable beauty and it won’t come to these people again. Whatever the future may hold this is the happiest many people will ever feel.”
While the future of Egypt is unclear insecurity about the future of the country and its effect on U.S. foreign policy in the region has given no one the excuse to hope for Mubarak to remain in power. Nevertheless many Americans have found themselves worried about the collapse of Mubarak’s regime failing to express solidarity with the 79 million Egyptians who will no longer have to live in fear of their own government.
Whether or not one finds him or herself concerned with potential instability in the region and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood we must not allow our fears of instability to trump our own values. What if the colonists had allowed their own fears of instability to prevent the revolution in 1776?
While many simply worry others have capitalized on the opportunity to stoke fear and mistrust of those in the Muslim world. Fox News host Glenn Beck went so far as to warn that if the protests continued to spread across the Middle East they could “begin to destabilize Europe and the rest of the world.” He even explained chalk in hand how a network of “Radicalists Islamists Communists and Socialists” were working together to fight Israel and capitalism in order to overturn global stability.
Most conservative commentators have steered clear of his theories criticizing him for his hysterics. William Kristol Fox News contributor and editor of the conservative Weekly Standard wrote “When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society.”
Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks also criticized Beck describing a conservative divergency between “Glenn Beck types really with delusional ravings about the caliphate coming back and I would say the conservative establishment which saw this as a fulfillment of Ronald Reagan’s democracy dream.”
While the criticism of Kristol and Brooks is useful and accurate it cannot reverse the damage done to the perceptions and beliefs of the two million people across the nation who regularly tune in to his weekday broadcasts many of whom are our own parents and grandparents.
Though Beck resides at the fringes of political commentary his views only diverge slightly from those of fellow Fox News host Sean Hannity who expressed a preference that Mubarak stay in power simply to eliminate the potential influence of the Muslim Brotherhood.
While an amount of worry is understood the choice to prefer autocracy and restriction over the opportunity of people to govern themselves is wrong. Commentators like Hannity and Beck are ignoring foundational principles laid out in our beloved Declaration of Independence which states “When a long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism it is their right it is their duty to throw off such Government and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
Does the situation in Egypt not qualify? Was 30 years of autocratic rule not long enough?
Maybe it’s best to heed the wisdom of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who reminded us last week that today’s headlines and history’s judgment are rarely the same.