Roundup: Media's Take

Adam Kirsch: The Trouble with Anger

[Adam Kirsch is a senior editor for The New Republic.] In the brief national soul-searching that followed the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, many observers, including President Obama, reflected on the troubling excess of anger and moral indignation in our political discourse—the kind of indignation that turns opponents into enemies, and campaigns into crusades. Yet, even as responsible figures on the right and the left in America are urging their fellow-citizens (in Roger Ailes’s s

Brian Goldsmith: What Palin (and Other GOP Leaders) Doesn't Get About Ronald Reagan

[Brian Goldsmith is a contributor to TheAtlantic.com. A former political producer for the CBS Evening News, he is now a student at Stanford Law School.] Earlier this month, the media world suspended its cynicism to celebrate -- and not just to recognize -- the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth. Republican leaders went further: Newt Gingrich said the former president was "a beacon of light whose faith in the American people will continue to inspire." Republican Nat

Tina Rosenberg: What Egypt Learned from the Students Who Overthrew Milosevic

[Tina Rosenberg is the author of the forthcoming Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World, from which parts of this article are adapted.] Early in 2008, workers at a government-owned textile factory in the Egyptian mill town of El-Mahalla el-Kubra announced that they were going on strike on the first Sunday in April to protest high food prices and low wages. They caught the attention of a group of tech-savvy young people an hour's drive to the south in the capital ci

Leon Hadar: Don’t Party Like It’s 1989 - It's More Like 1848

[Leon Hadar is a research fellow at the Cato Institute.] The uprising in Egypt and challenge to the Middle East’s autocratic rulers could have produced a sense of déjà vu for the late German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt. Notwithstanding her reputation as a progressive thinker, Arendt believed that the erosion in the power of Europe’s conservative ruling elites and the strong national states they controlled helped set the stage for rise of totalitarianism and the horrific wars th

James Purnell: Why the west is losing the battle for Arab hearts and minds

[James Purnell is a British Labour Party politician, who was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Stalybridge and Hyde from 2001 to 2010. He is currently the Head of the Open Left project at the left leaning think tank Demos.] The crowds in Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia should be holding up replica Statues of Liberty. Instead, the west is losing the battle for Arab hearts and minds at the very moment they are winning their battle for democracy and freedom. I blame Donald Rumsfeld and Dick C

Dani Rodrik: The Poverty of Dictatorship

[Dani Rodrik is professor of political economy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and author of “One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth.”] Perhaps the most striking finding in the United Nations’ recent 20th anniversary “Human Development Report” is the outstanding performance of the Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa. Here was Tunisia, ranked sixth among 135 countries in terms of improvement in its H

Donald J. Kochan: Reading Adam Smith in Arabic ... The region needs 'The Wealth of Nations' now more than ever

[Mr. Kochan is an associate professor of law at Chapman University.] At this time of unrest and transition in the Arab world, the United States's capacity to communicate core values of democracy and individual liberty is a priority. Our capability to translate them into Arabic is a necessity. We need to expose the Arab world to the fundamental texts of Western political and philosophical thought. Indeed, the export of ideas may be the most valuable commodity we have to offer.

John B. Judis: Stop Calling It Egypt’s Revolution … because the country hasn’t yet had one

[John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.] The massive protests that forced Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s departure have been widely described as a revolution. And that’s fine. If there is an Internet revolution, a Reagan revolution, and even an Obama revolution, then there has certainly been an Egyptian revolution. But there is another meaning of revolution that applies specifically to events

Maureen Dowd: Worth a Bottle of Whiskey

[Maureen Dowd writes for the NYT.] Our 3,413th day at war in Afghanistan seemed like a good day to learn about Afghanistan. The longest stretch of war in American history has merited the shortest attention span. I didn’t go to Kabul on the secretary of defense’s Doomsday plane this time. I signed up with the Pentagon for time travel, flying through history watching a remarkable seven-hour marathon of a 12-play series called “The Great Game.” The plays use r

Patrick Seale: Has the Israel-Egypt peace treaty really helped 'stability'?

[Patrick Seale is a British writer, who specializes in Middle East affairs. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East.] Israel has been unnerved by Egypt's revolution. The reason is simple: it fears for the survival of the 1979 peace treaty - a treaty which by neutralizing Egypt, guaranteed Israel's military dominance over the region for the next three decades. By removing Egypt -- the strongest and most

Olivier Roy: This is not an Islamic revolution

[Olivier Roy is professor of social and political theory at the European University Institute in Florence. His most recent book is "Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways".] In Europe, the popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East have been interpreted using a model that is more than 30 years old: the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. Commentators have been expecting to see Islamist groups - the Muslim Brotherhood and their local equivalents - eithe

Ahmed Rashid: Cairo needs help to avoid al-Qaeda’s grip

[The writer’s latest book is Descent into Chaos. A revised edition of his Taliban was published last summer.] Despite victory for democratic forces in Egypt, current instability may still give al-Qaeda and other extremist Islamic groups the chance to expand their influence. Egypt needs international help quickly to ensure the reform agenda is speeded up, and that extremists cannot lay down roots. For centuries Egypt has been the heart of the Arab world; its trend setter

Jonathan Freedland: A better way to push democracy, but the west's love-bombing has risks too

[Jonathan Freedland writes a weekly column for the Guardian.] They say that if failure is an orphan, then success has many fathers – and Egypt's revolution has proved the truth of that aged wisdom all over again. The latest to file a paternity claim is Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary to George W Bush. Out hawking his new memoir, Known and Unknown, Rumsfeld reckons it was Bush's "freedom agenda" that paved the way for the current revolutionary spirit sweeping the Arab wo

Jen Marlowe: From An Israeli Prison to Tahrir Square

[Jen Marlowe is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, author, playwright, human rights advocate, and founder of donkeysaddle projects. Her new book, The Hour of Sunlight: One Palestinian’s Journey from Prisoner to Peacemaker, co-written with and about Palestinian peace activist Sami Al Jundi, has just been published by Nation Books. H

Peter Hitchens: Communism Fell, but Liberty Has Yet to Arrive in Central Asia

[Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the London Mail on Sunday and is the author of The Rage Against God.] Beyond, behind, mysterious and unvisited, the great expanse of what was once Soviet Central Asia sits ignored somewhere near the end of the world. Its single largest and most important segment is the Republic of Kazakhstan, a giant slice of virtually indefensible real estate, crammed with valuable minerals and bursting with gas and oil, and with a population of just 16 million. I

Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, David Held, and Alia Brahimi: The Arab 1989?

[Kristian Coates Ulrichsen is a Research Fellow at LSE Global Governance. David Held is Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Co-Director of LSE Global Governance. Alia Brahimi is a Research Fellow at LSE Global Governance.] An extraordinary wave of upheaval is beginning to sweep across the Arab world, with the potential to transform the political order in the Middle East. Mohamed Bouazizi’s desperate

Michael Lind: Hey, Liberals: Time to Give the Beck Bashing a Rest

[Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution."] What dumb thing did Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann or Glenn Beck just say? You don’t need to watch Fox News to find out. The progressive media will tell you. The economy is still in a coma, revolution is rocking the Middle East -- but you can be sure that Rachel Maddow and Chri

Dennis Prager: In Vietnam, Hating Communism Anew

[Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. He may be contacted through his website, dennisprager.com.] It was difficult to control my emotions — specifically my anger — during my visit to Vietnam last week. The more I came to admire the Vietnamese people — their intelligence, love of life, dignity, and hard work — the more rage I felt for the Communists who brought them (and, of course, us Americans) so much suffering in the second half of the 20th

Anne Applebaum: Channeling Egypt's Energy of the Crowd into Positive Change

[Anne Applebaum is a columnist for the WaPo.] I didn't have a pen in hand when I heard the broadcast from Cairo over the weekend, and I didn't write down the precise words used by a woman demonstrator, interviewed at length by a BBC radio journalist, just after she heard the news of Hosni Mubarak's resignation. But I remember the sentiments with great precision: Exhilaration, excitement, elation, euphoria. She was proud to be an Egyptian. She had never thought it was possible that E

Scott Turow, Paul Aiken, and James Shapiro: Would the Bard Have Survived the Web?

[Scott Turow, a novelist, is the president of the Authors Guild. Paul Aiken is its executive director. James Shapiro, a member of the guild’s board, teaches Shakespeare at Columbia.] ARCHAEOLOGISTS finished a remarkable dig last summer in East London. Among their finds were seven earthenware knobs, physical evidence of a near perfect 16th-century experiment into the link between commerce and culture. When William Shakespeare was growing up in rural Stratford-upon-Avon,