Do you remember the end of history?
I do.
You know, when the collapse of Soviet communism signaled the
final triumph of American style democratic republican politics and free market
economics…the victory that underlies the somewhat more scientific brand of
American exceptionalism practiced by President Obama and excuses the often
extralegal and violent insertion of the United States in world affairs?
But looking back at how the last twenty years have played
out, I have a different theory of history: mob vs. snob.
By my reading, what keeps regimes in power is not the
slavishness of their allegiance to democracy and free market tropes.
It’s whether they can command the united support of their
elites, largely by ensuring that there are no plausible and ready alternatives
for increasing and securing wealth and privilege regardless of whatever
violence is done to the slogans of “free markets” and “democracy”.
That’s what happening in China, where the Chinese Communist
Party has successfully fostered a “hang together or hang separately” vibe for the
political and business elites; it’s what’s happened in Egypt as elites have
rallied and united once again behind the army over the cadaver of the MB…and in
Syria, where Bashar al Assad’s minority, undemocratic, and none too impressive
regime has shown an astounding ability to retain the allegiance of its elites
and exhibited a remarkable resilience.
Thanks to serial miscalculations and misunderestimations of
the survival skills of Bashar al Assad, the grim history of Western
cheerleading for the Syrian revolution is usually ignored. However, the defeat of the genuine Syrian
revolution was the inability of the rural rebels to enlist the support of the urban
elites or their offspring in 2011. The
first fatal moral and tactical failing of the revolution—and its cynical
Western and Gulf backers--was to substitute armed insurrection for popular
uprising in Damascus and Aleppo as punishment for the cities’ lack of
revolutionary fervor, as well as an expression of the hope that a push for
regime collapse would…well, usher in something better than the obscene carnival
of murder, extremism, misery, and banditry that resulted.
Perhaps Syrian elites are now cleaving even more closely and
desperately to the Assad regime than they were back in 2011.
Elite solidarity is not what happened in the Soviet Union,
thanks to Gorbachev’s abandonment of the Communist monopoly and the subsequent
rush for the national exits by appalled apparatchiks, not into the dustbin of
history, but into control of government organs and enterprises throughout the
ex-Soviet empire.
And elite solidarity is not the best one-word description of
what’s happening in the United States.
I will illustrate my thesis by a romp through early American
history.
