Sudden Political Flux

Egypt is balanced on the thin edge of a knife tonight. We have seen "people power" uprisings enough over the past 30 years to know that what happens on Friday evening in Cairo may be dispositive. If the police and army turn out in force and brutally repress, then keep it up for a few more days, the government may survive. We have seen this happen in Tienanmen square in 1989 and Tehran in the summer of 2010. If they waiver and crowds grow, it may be all over very quickly. I can foresee terrible violence or a million people out in the streets of Cairo, plus huge crowds in all the other major cities, demanding Mubarak to leave. Mohammed El Baradei has come to play the role of Vaclav Havel, Cory Aquino, and many others who have offered themselves as a crisis solution. Because 2/3 of the population is under 30 with large unemplyment, the prospects for massive demonstrations of people that have known nobody but Mubarak as president are huge. At this point, the odds of the Egyptian government surviving are still better than even, but waning fast.

That's the situational read. But here's the deeper commentary I want to make. We've seen this over and over again and are still trying to understand how suddenly, one day, a seemingly stable regime can collapse in a matter of days. Politics normally moves at a glacial pace. But sometimes a situation can become entirely fluid. That metaphor may be helpful or not for understanding a phenomenon we could call sudden political flux. Here's how I offer to explain the situation. We can call a state an "institution" but in the end it's just a bunch of people. The body politic is a human thing. The primary mechanism for sustained political structures is expectational. We see the same thing in markets. While the stock market normally moves slowly, it can suddenly move into periods of wild fluctuation as we saw in the Fall of 2008 and into 2009. The metaphor of "free fall" is not bad either - it describes a sudden, unexpected, but accelerating and seemingly uncontrollable event. We have also seen sudden breakdowns of order in places like Los Angeles in the 1992 riots, 1968 riots nationwide. In fact, one lessons of the past 30 years, both political and economic, may be that crisis is endemic to human social, political, and economic systems.

I do not know if a model can be made to predict when crises will occur or how they will resolve. It may be possible, but part of what makes them crises - sudden political flux, market collapse, riots - is that they are not predicted and the relevant actors are unprepared for them. Their spontaneity is their main feature. Moreover, organized premeditated attempts to create political flux through general strikes are rarely effecive. They also involve a set of decisionmakers not normally involved in political decsionmaking. What happens on the streets of Cairo tomorrow will be decided by huge numbers of individual, ordinary people -- protestors, police, soldiers -- in addition to the normal actors, their commanders and powerbrokers. The prerequisite to sudden political flux is mass communication - not mass media. The ability of vast numbers of human beings to participate in political drama is necessary for crises to occur. It may be observed that market crises also appear to be connected with bubbles and mass participation.

So we wait anxiously to see if Egypt will suddenly change its political system over the next twenty four hours.

What may be observable about political crises of this kind is that, like market crises, they cannot be handled by slow ameliorative efforts. It only spirals further out of control. To use another metaphor, a situation like this is referred to as a movement. Only brutal, dramatic, swift, and stunning action can arrest (literally and figuratively) a movement in its tracks. The situation tomorrow may be determined in a matter of an hour.