What George Washington could teach Egyptians

In 1782, General George Washington's officers— having defeated the mighty British army, only to suffer mistreatment at the hands of Congress— suggested that the American army set up a monarchy with Washington as its king. Washington replied that he viewed the idea with "abhorrence" and ordered the officers to "banish these thoughts from your mind."

Now fast-forward more than two centuries. Egypt's first fragile experiment in democracy ended last week when its army, purportedly responding to the will of some 14 million street demonstrators, removed from the presidency an incompetent, unpopular, dictatorial religious extremist who, whatever his failings as a politician and statesman, did manage to attract 52 percent of his country's popular vote two years ago, or more than Barack Obama's winning percentage in our own 2012 presidential election.

Like the Egyptian Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1952, as well as Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Hafez al-Assad of Syria and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran— not to mention Putin and Lenin in Russia, Castro in Cuba and General Victoriano Huerta in Mexico— the Egyptian generals pointed to their supporters in the streets rather than to democratic institutions as the source of their legitimacy. But this week, when supporters of the ousted President Mohammed Morsi mounted their own street demonstrations to protest the army's coup, the generals responded by firing into the crowd, with a loss of at least 50 lives.

ElBaradei's faint prospects

In the Internet age, Arab protesters from Tunisia to Syria have astutely grasped the use of viral social media— e-mail, Twitter, Facebook— to organize demonstrations and bring down tyrannical governments. But they've been less adept at organizing political parties and civic institutions that will assure minorities that their rights can be protected though peaceful means.

At this transitional moment, what Egypt lacks— like Iraq, Syria, Iran, Russia and Cuba— is a leader capable of inspiring confidence in the democratic process among the country's contentious factions without being tempted to seize power for himself.

Egypt's most prominent liberal, Mohammed ElBaradei, the respected legal scholar who won the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize for his work as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, could fill that role. In an interview last Friday, he defended the military takeover as "the least painful option" but called for "reconciliation and an inclusive approach" and courageously pointed out that "being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood is no crime." Unfortunately, ElBaradei seems to lack a constituency in the Egyptian street (most of his admirers seem to be Western observers like me).

Washington's "'slow mind'

Which brings me to the original point of this column: Isn't it time we Americans stopped taking George Washington for granted?

As a Virginia legislator, Washington seldom made speeches and submitted no important bills. At the first Continental Congress, in 1774, he made no speeches at all and was not appointed to any committees. As president of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he played no known part in drafting its provisions. As the nation's first president, he was surrounded by men more brilliant than he: In Jefferson, Adams, Madison and Hamilton he had the architects, respectively, of democracy, the revolution, the Constitution and the federal system. Why, then, did these luminaries instinctively defer to Washington's leadership, often unanimously?

His mind, wrote Jefferson after Washington's death, "was slow in operation, being little aided by invention or imagination, but sure in conclusion…. Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence, never acting until every circumstance, every consideration was maturely weighed." But why would caution and prudence— so widely dismissed by American voters today— have been so valued in Washington's day?

Mohammed Morsi's opposite

To Barry Schwartz, in George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol (1987), Washington was a construct invented by American society to meet its own changing social and political needs; precisely because he seemed so impassively devoted to duty, he provided an ideal canvas onto which the new nation's admired virtues could be projected. In this respect Washington was the opposite of Mohammed Morsi, who tried to impose the Muslim Brotherhood's image onto Egypt's multi-colored canvas.

Every new institution (especially those dealing in intangible concepts) gains acceptance at first not through its virtues per se but through the reputations of individual associated with it. The name of Lincoln or J.P. Morgan on a bank or insurance company conveys a sense of strength and integrity. In Washington's day, abstract notions like independence and democracy were lost on most Americans (only about 2 percent of whom actually voted). But they believed in Washington— for his commanding figure, for his apparent solidity, for his willingness to share the miseries of his soldiers and for his courage in persisting in the face of military defeat.

Washington gave Americans something to look up to when the American nation itself was still a dubious prospect. "If you were lost to America," the Marquis de Lafayette wrote him in 1777, "there is nobody who could keep the Army and revolution for six months."

Hunger for respect

But Washington was more than a convenient figurehead. In The Invention of George Washington (1988), Paul Longmore noted two critical elements of Washington's personality: first, he thirsted for public respect and honor; and second, he hungered to deserve honor. Consequently, Washington sought public service but shrank from seizing power.

This attitude instinctively reflected the spirit of democracy— that power is wielded through respect and persuasion rather than coercion— at precisely the moment when the modern world's first democracy was struggling to get off the ground. Or as Gary Wills has put it, "He perfected the art of getting power by giving it away."

During the Revolution, when King George III asked the exiled American painter Benjamin West what Washington would do if he should win, West said Washington would probably return to his farm. King George is said to have replied, "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world."

Tocqueville on power

Elizabeth I, in the 16th Century, was the first head of state (at least since Pericles in ancient Athens) to perceive that a ruler's crown is more secure if her subjects are happy. Washington's refusal to accept a crown endowed him with greater prestige and power than any crown could provide. Democratic government, as Tocqueville observed in 1835, confers greater power than any king or general at the head of an army.

Yet it took two centuries after Washington and Jefferson for most of the world to embrace the concept of democracy; and even today, as events in Egypt remind us, many of the world's would-be democratic leaders still haven't shaken off the notion that power comes from the barrel of a gun. We Americans are indeed lucky that, in our case, the right man showed up at precisely the right time.