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| Tahrir Square |
For the past few weeks, we have watched the people of Tunisia and then Egypt revolt against the power elites that govern them. It has been thrilling, speaking as someone who is not a member of a power elite. It reminds me of the dock strikes in Poland before the collapse of the USSR or the massive rallies in Prague that culminated in the Velvet Revolution. The big rallies against the War in Vietnam are nearest equivalent to these events in my own life, but we were attempting to overturn a policy of the government, not the power elite itself.
I am using "elite" here deliberately and "power elite," the term of social critic C. Wright Mills, specifically. And, I am using them as the editors of n+1, a magazine of the Left, used them in a recent article called "Revolt of the Elites". That essay discusses two sorts of elitism -- power and cultural -- and how they have come into conflict, and it argues that culture is the only sphere that the power elites don't control completely. We'll talk about that in a moment.
The language of Egypt right now is familiar to us -- democracy, human rights, representative government, self-determination, equality before the law. We may be skeptical that Egypt ultimately will act on those ideas, create a society that attempts to live by them. It's a big place with lots of competing ideologies, religious and otherwise, that aren't very democratic. But the purity of the language now is almost as thrilling as the video of the rallies in Tahrir Square. Here is what Mohammad Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood said: "We aim to remove all forms of injustice, tyranny, autocracy and dictatorship, and we call for the implementation of a democratic multiparty all-inclusive political system that excludes no one."
Where did that language originate? From the cultural elites of the 17th and 18th century, who argued against the Divine Right of Kings and for the essential dignity of the individual. We could name a few -- Locke, Hume, Montesquieu. And we can point to the Americans who took those ideas and made them real -- Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and Franklin, our own cultural elite -- in a functioning Constitution.
To this day, the great lessons that the American cultural elite learn (and that they then teach) involve this language and the ideas of freedom and self-government that are at the root of it. And it never fails to unsettle the power elites. Even in America. Especially in America. Which is why the power elites have attempted to co-opt culture at every turn by commodifying and sanitizing it, waged the Culture Wars of the 1990s, played so deftly the game of turning the very citizens that the cultural elites champion into their enemies by labeling them -- elitist. A strategy as thrilling in its way as the rallies in Cairo -- the dominate elite charges their only enduring opposition with elitism, and because it controls most of the mechanisms of culture-making, manages to make it stick!
