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i don t think their lack of engaging in a political arena was any sort of miscalculation, part of their reality that they understood their power was going to come from this independent spaces that they never had access to before. critical to start dialoguing and building conversations in spaces that they could never have under military rule. this is impossible to have unless you know they are in that institution building, which you don t necessarily see. very briefly, i think the egyptian political seen is very devisive and we haven t seen liberals and seculars building a revolution and a coherent one that can put forward an alternative set of politics. young people engage in and building institutions and the brotherhood is, as i said, increase, well, it s increasingly questioned. but i want to say something about the u.s. the u.s. is used to having a patron client relationship with regimes in the middle east and
could have replaced. we recently saw a bunch of primary wheres they challenged more established democrats and they have lost a lot of them. they lost across the country. when you look at the polling, when you look at the polling, there is a reason that the democratic party is not as kind of idiological conservative. i would argue that part of the problem is if you don t deliver on this, it s hard to measure whether or not more progressive candidates will do well because, you know, one of the toughest parts about health care is that 80% of costs are by 20% of the people. most people do not realize how horrible their insurance is until they need it when it s too late and those are the people who this bill really does help. final point on this topic, and i believe this strongly. the reputation, the left or the center left, however you want to call it is tied to this president and tied to this bill whether people on the left like
who has been there for hoyears and not seen the protest was the direction it was going and that put us behind the curve. mona, is it perception, perception in egypt about the u.s. role fundamentally being a helpful one for democracy, a hindrance or maybe not as central as we america like to think we are. right. when we began our revolution last year, it was very clear that the revolution was clearly outpacing the u.s. administration. the u.s. administration at the time and i was in new york at the time and i was doing a lot of media and i was here and struggling to keep up with events on the ground and essentially people in egypt understand that they supported the dictator at the expense of our rights and our freedom because you offered them stability. this mirage of stability. so, now, people look and say, they are going to support them. if the military opposite to the u.s., they re going to support them. at the end of the day, the u.s.
is possible and you can t kill an idea. the reason that people came to the square in the first place, the young people, the hip-hop community, the reason that they came is still there and they have fallen back is because they have a vested interest. building horizontally doesn t change things. which changes things is the long, hard work of building institutions and working within political parties. this is a really important point of contention. i think the key question, the unanswered question about this, this vision of different calendars. working on a longer timescale and one finds corrupt or morally reprehensible and, instead, building an alternative set of strategy. the question is in the time it takes to do that, do the powers at be manage to consolidate their power and squash what emerges from those institutions? mona, to me, the big unanswered