OPINION: Egypt’s (American) History Lesson

Regardless of what happens in Egypt, there is one thing that Westerners should understand, but don’t. “Democracy” took a different course in America than it has in the rest of the West. Most other free peoples owe their liberal heritage to the French Revolution, not to ours. Our revolution was not about liberty or equality.

Our revolution was about a different interpretation of the law than the one to which the Crown subscribed. The United States were a continuation of English customs, not a divergence from them. Messrs. Jefferson, Sherman, Adams, Livingston and Franklin did an excellent spin job when they declared that American independence was premised on the self-evident (to whom?) idea of natural rights, but Americans’ rights, natural or otherwise, were no different than those English rights that evolved from the Glorious Revolution and, to a great extent, before.

Indeed, the real cause of our revolution was that the Crown, increasingly, didn’t recognize the same constitutional privileges in the colonial assemblies that it recognized in Parliament. The American Revolution was a legal disagreement escalated to arms, not an innovative founding.

Representative government and the common law were British norms by the time the 1770s rolled around. Thus when “freedom” came to America in the late 18th century, it was an easy transition to make in the sense that we continued the same distinct political culture we had previously enjoyed.

There was great difficulty in the early days of our Republic, to be sure, stemming from economic woes, from revenue shortages, from constructing a loose federation out of previously independent colonies, and from the perpetual threat of war. But for the most part little changed in our English culture, at least, that is, until the Danbury Baptists built a proverbial wall, rights-speak prevailed, and the remnants of mercantilism died out. But that is another matter…

Egyptians – and Arabs generally – are not accustomed to ordered liberty in the English (or even in the more egalitarian French) sense. They don’t have entrenched republican institutions and a legal heritage like ours. Thus, “freeing” the popular masses in the world’s largest Arab country shouldn’t be cheered so thoughtlessly by those in the second group above. Everyone deserves to be free, yes, but “freedom,” which is not synonymous with “dignity,” means different things in different contexts, and the possibility of instability in a country that controls the Suez Canal seems like a preposterously perilous idea.

Who knows what will happen to the price of oil, to Israel and to the aggregate Islamist movement if the transition from Mubarak to his successor is not smooth? Regardless of Egypt’s outcome, Mubarak has been a better leader than Egyptians realize and a better ally than the West deserves.

Still, we should wait and see what happens in Cairo. That is, again, the marginally wisest approach, for expert and layman alike. But while we wait, we should remind ourselves, as we watch Egyptians take to the streets, that our great ‘experiment’ in government, which is forever at the forefront of our political discourse, was not about liberty or equality, but about the preservation of our English heritage. The world’s burgeoning democracies look different when our own is put in proper perspective.

Stephen B. Tippins Jr. is a Madison County resident and a staff attorney in Jefferson for the Superior Court of the Piedmont Circuit.