I had the opportunity to interview Elliott Abrams this morning on the situation in Egypt. His take on this subject is fascinating to me for a number of reasons, particularly because of his outspoken defense of George W. Bush's approach to Middle East policy. On Egypt, he raised several points of note in the interview, including this one about the nature of class and revolution:
'If you look at Egypt over the past ten years, there's been a tremendous amount of foreign investment, and the Egyptian stock market has been fabulous -- you would've been a lot better investing in it than in the New York Stock Exchange or the London Stock Exchange. But there's no trickle down -- the rich get richer. If you look at the Forbes list of billionaires, you'll see a number of Egyptians on it now. The rich in Egypt are very rich indeed -- their own planes, their own yachts, so there's a lot of money floating around -- but it's floating around at the top levels. The Egyptian office worker, the Egyptian farmer is still exceptionally poor. And what this has done is create a sense, in Tunisia and in much of Egypt, a sense that everything is being stolen, that there's nothing here for the common man, it's just all for the rich.And that is exacerbated by a second thing: there's a ruling system here, there's a ruling party -- the National Democratic Party and the security forces -- and if you're plugged into those, you have ways of beating the system. If you're not plugged in -- if you don't have people who can look out for you inside the system, officials of the party -- then you're not going to see any money, you just work and work and work and get nothing for it.
You were born in a social and economic class. You die there. Your children will die there, too. There's no social mobility.
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The podcast is here. I hope you'll listen to the whole thing.