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Ideologically, the president is trying to depose so-called mainstream media in favor of the media he likes — Breitbart News and the rest. Another way of making this point is to say that he’s trying to substitute news for propaganda, information for boosterism.

“Many people say” is what’s known as an argumentum ad populum. If we were a nation of logicians, we would dismiss the argument as dumb.We are not a nation of logicians.

The president is responding to a claim of fact not by denying the fact, but by denying the claim that facts are supposed to have on an argument

This is a version of Thrasymachus’s argument in Plato’s Republic that justice is the advantage of the stronger and that injustice “if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterly than justice.”

Truth is what you can get away with.

The interesting conversation concerns how we come to accept those lies.

If a public figure tells a whopping lie once in his life, it’ll haunt him into his grave. If he lies morning, noon and night, it will become almost impossible to remember any one particular lie. Outrage will fall victim to its own ubiquity. It’s the same truth contained in Stalin’s famous remark that the death of one man is a tragedy but the death of a million is a statistic.

explanation becomes rationalization, which in turn becomes justification

Here’s a simple truth about a politics of dishonesty, insult and scandal: It’s entertaining. Politics as we’ve had it for most of my life has, with just a few exceptions, been distant and dull.

it’s exhilarating. Haven’t all of us noticed that everything feels speeded up, more vivid, more intense and consequential? One of the benefits of an alternative-facts administration is that fiction can take you anywhere.

we adopt new metrics of judgment, in which politics becomes more about perceptions than performance—of how a given action is perceived as being perceived. If a reporter for the New York Times says that Trump’s press conference probably plays well in Peoria, then that increases the chances that it will play well in Peoria.

Some people became desensitized by the never-ending assaults on what was once quaintly known as “human decency.” Others seemed to positively admire the comments as refreshing examples of personal authenticity and political incorrectness.

anxiety and anger are their own justifications these days

In his 1953 masterpiece, “The Captive Mind,” the Polish poet and dissident Czeslaw Milosz analyzed the psychological and intellectual pathways through which some of his former colleagues in Poland’s post-war Communist regime allowed themselves to be converted into ardent Stalinists. In none of the cases that Milosz analyzed was coercion the main reason for the conversion.They wanted to believe. They were willing to adapt. They thought they could do more good from the inside. They convinced themselves that their former principles didn’t fit with the march of history, or that to hold fast to one’s beliefs was a sign of priggishness and pig-headedness. They felt that to reject the new order of things was to relegate themselves to irrelevance and oblivion. They mocked their former friends who refused to join the new order as morally vain reactionaries. They convinced themselves that, brutal and capricious as Stalinism might be, it couldn’t possibly be worse than the exploitative capitalism of the West.

I fear we are witnessing a similar process unfold among many conservative intellectuals on the right. It has been stunning to watch a movement that once believed in the benefits of free trade and free enterprise merrily give itself over to a champion of protectionism whose economic instincts recall the corporatism of 1930s Italy or 1950s Argentina. It is no less stunning to watch people once mocked Obama for being too soft on Russia suddenly discover the virtues of Trump’s “pragmatism” on the subject.

George Orwell wrote, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

Not to look around, or beyond, or away from the facts, but to look straight at them, to recognize and call them for what they are, nothing more or less. To see things as they are before we re-interpret them into what we’d like them to be. To believe in an epistemology that can distinguish between truth and falsity, facts and opinions, evidence and wishes. To defend habits of mind and institutions of society, above all a free press, which preserve that epistemology. To hold fast to a set of intellectual standards and moral convictions that won’t waver amid changes of political fashion or tides of unfavorable opinion. To speak the truth irrespective of what it means for our popularity or influence.

The readings noted below should thus be approached largely but not solely as selective entry points to the study of authoritarianism in the Middle East from the perspective of comparative politics and political economy

Jennifer Ghandi and Ellen Lust in their article, “Elections Under Authoritarianism," Annual Review of Political Science Vol. 12 (2015), 403-422

Hanna Batatu’s magisterial study of Iraq, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (now available in a paperback edition from Saqi Books, 2004), and Madawi al-Rashid’s A History of Saudi Arabia, 2nd Edition (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Giacomo Luciani, ed., The Arab State (University of California Press, 1990); Suad Joseph, ed., Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East (Syracuse University Press, 2000); Marsha Pripstein Posusney and Michele Penner Angrist, eds., Authoritarianism in The Middle East: Regimes and Resistance (Lynne Rienner, 2005); and Oliver Schlumberger, ed. Debating Arab Authoritarianism (Stanford University Press, 2007)

Lisa Wedeen’s Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (University of Chicago, 2015), explores why people comply with, and even extend the appearance of legitimacy to, a regime that rests on demonstrably false claims

In Counting Islam: Religion, Class, and Elections in Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Tarek Masoud helps us understand why Islamist parties take part in elections they know are neither free nor fair.

Asef Bayat’s Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East, 2nd Edition (Stanford University Press, 2013) examine how consolidated and encompassing authoritarian systems of rule shape practices and modes of resistance, and generate politically potent forms of alienation among citizens.

a good overview of debates about whether the Middle East is exceptional in the resilience of its authoritarian regimes can be found in Ghassan Salame, ed., Democracy Without Democrats?: The Renewal of Politics in the Muslim World (London: I.B. Tauris, 1994), and in an article by Larry Diamond that appeared just prior to the onset of the uprisings: “Why Are There No Arab Democracies?,” Journal of Democracy 21, no. 1 (January 2010), 93-112

Roger Owen’s The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life (Harvard University Press, 2014), and Joseph Sassoon’s Anatomy of Authoritarianism in the Arab Republics (Cambridge University Press, 2016)

Abdullah Hammoudi’s Master and Disciple: The Cultural Foundations of Moroccan Authoritarianism (University of Chicago Press, 1997)

Two distinctive but related research programs of particular interest have developed since the 1990s and taken on new forms since the mass protests of 2011: one focusing on questions of authoritarian resilience and authoritarian modes of political and economic liberalization, another on the strategies that authoritarian regimes have embraced to respond to the changing configurations of challenges they have confronted with the rise of neoliberal globalization, technological change, new communications technologies, and the emergence of a post-democratization international order.

Two articles by Eva Bellin highlight conditions that contribute to the resilience of authoritarianism at a regional level, “The Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Exceptionalism in Comparative Perspective,” Comparative Politics 36, no. 2 (January 2004), 139-157, and a follow-up article Bellin published in the wake of the uprisings of 2011, “Reconsidering the Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Lessons from the Arab Spring,” Comparative Politics 44, no. 2 (January 2012), 127-149. Two further articles by Daniel Brumberg unpack the strategic logics that guide authoritarian regimes as they work to contain challenges to their long-term survival: “The Trap of Liberalized Autocracy,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 4 (October 2002), 56-68, and “Transforming the Arab World’s Protection-Racket Politics,” Journal of Democracy 24, no. 3 (July 2013), 88-103. In addition, readers will benefit from Jason Brownlee’s Authoritarianism in an Age of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Nicola Pratt’s Democracy and Authoritarianism in the Arab World (Lynn Rienner, 2006).

“Upgrading Authoritarianism in the Arab World” (Brookings, 2007), describes the tactics authoritarian regimes across the region adopted to address the specific challenges they confronted in the 1990s and early 2000s; these tactics remain relevant in the post-uprising era

Transformations within authoritarianism, as opposed to transitions from authoritarianism to something else, will continue to be relevant across the region, save for the case of Tunisia, the only Arab country thus far to experience a transition from authoritarianism to democracy.

Project on Middle East Political Science, The Arab Thermidor: The Resurgence of the Security State, POMEPS Special Studies 11 (February 2015)

If there is one overarching sensibility that distinguishes important contributions to research on authoritarianism in the Middle East, it is an appreciation for how fluid, malleable, and adaptive it has been and remains. The appearance of stability, even stagnation, in the decades prior to the 2011 uprisings often obscured an enormously varied and vibrant environment of contestation, resistance, competition and conflict both within and among regimes, and between regimes and the societies over which they govern. As the Middle East moves today through a post-uprising phase in which in which regimes are reconfiguring authoritarian practices in the context of highly mobilized societies, violent conflict that has caused massive levels of human displacement and suffering, climate change, the declining influence of the United States, the rise of Russia and Iran as important actors, and continued demands for neoliberal restructuring of political economies, there can be little question that the study of authoritarianism in the Middle East will continue to occupy the attention of students and scholars of the region.

Nothing is sadder than the emergence of opportunistic “journalists” and “writers” under authoritarianism. Some of these figures will be older writers who have not had the kind of success they want, and are determined to take advantage of the crackdown, with hopes of climbing fast. Others will be neophytes eager to reap benefits from darkness and chaos. In Turkey, we now have a cohort of such people, who publicly call for the arrest of their colleagues and celebrate when their wishes come true.

Writers from wobbly geographies are being compelled to write and talk about politics like never before. Every day we face the challenge of how to balance the mundane and the momentous, the banal and the sublime, the “inside” and the “outside.” Every day we face the challenge of how to defend nuances in a culture of gross generalizations, how to build bridges of empathy where pitting one side of the society against the other plays into the hands of populist demagogues. And although the Turkish case is in some ways uniquely depressing, it is part of a much larger trend. Wave after wave of nationalism, isolationism, and tribalism have hit the shores of countries across Europe, and they have reached the United States. Jingoism and xenophobia are on the rise. It is an Age of Angst—and it is a short step from angst to anger and from anger to aggression.

Published in the first few months after the 2011 uprising, Ben Mhenni’s book is the most euphoric of the four testimonies. Much of the narrative is a celebration of the power of cyber dissidence, which Ben Mhenni defines as a combination of citizen journalism (blogging and filming events) and on-the-ground activism

Convinced that the stultifying bureaucracy of political parties made them incapable of meeting the demands of the leaderless Arab Spring revolt, Ben Mbarek sought to create autonomous regional cells of civil rights activists throughout the country. Their job would be to address each region’s specific political needs

This testimony is more chronological and personal than Ben Mhenni’s. It constructs the author’s life teleologically as a journey from bourgeois indifference in suburbia to grassroots activism in the country’s downtrodden interior. It also documents Ben Mbarek’s co-founding of the civil rights network, Dostourna, which marked her renewed faith in “the power of citizens.”

Like Ben Mhenni, Ben Mbarek celebrates the politicizing power of social media, crediting Facebook for encouraging the rise of citizen journalism, which sparked her political (re)awakening. As she argues, it was thanks to citizen journalists from besieged cities that she finally felt connected to the leftist cause long championed by her father.

While acknowledging how her parents’ history of resistance as members of the UGTT prepared her for a life of activism, Ben Mhenni attributes much of her political development to the “real-world” friendships she established with cyber dissidents in the Tunisian blogosphere.

As a professor of philosophy, Belhaj Yahia champions the values of the Enlightenment and believes in the vital importance of dialogue. Accordingly, her text probes the origins of the discord between Islamists and secularists, in order to understand the tensions marking the post-Ben Ali period

she analyzes the “schizophrenic” discourses of her diasporic family members and the “narcissistic wounds” of old dissidents, who are now mimicking Ben Ali’s authoritarianism. She also critiques the regional and class disparities perpetrated by the old regime

Belhaj Yahia believes she is the product of a moderate and worldly national education, which is currently under threat in Tunisia. She locates this threat in the state’s gradual abandonment of public education and the resurgence of conservative ideologies

Her book ends with a call for other Tunisians to publish their own self-reflections, in the belief that writing and reading autobiographical accounts can pave the way for more understanding between the different factions comprising Tunisian society.

Fakhfakh’s book is a fictionalized diary written between January 14, 2011, the day of Ben Ali’s ouster, and May 18, 2015

Each diary entry is comprised of two parts. The first part is a summary of national and regional events with a brief commentary from the author; the second part is a biography of a pioneering Tunisian woman

As the author notes throughout the book, state attempts to propagate an institutional-form of feminism have devalued women’s history

The author worries that women’s achievements are constantly erased, in order to accommodate the ego of male leaders, like Bourguiba. She is also concerned that the rise of political Islam may eventually obscure Tunisian women’s “legacy of freedom” even further

Fakhfakh embraces the narrative of “Tunisian exceptionalism,” in which Tunisian women are presented as the most progressive in the Arab and Islamic world. This nationalist mythology about Tunisian women is common, even among Tunisian intellectuals, and is used as a means of differentiating and elevating Tunisian women above Arab and Muslim women more broadly. The inherent divisiveness of this narrative is problematic, and is left unexamined in Fakhfakh’s book

I wanted to understand how they sought to imagine and build a world greater than the sum of their religious or ethnic parts—commitments that remain evident, if one is prepared to recognize them, in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt and beyond. I call this modern iteration of coexistence the “ecumenical frame” to underscore the modern active attempt on the part of individuals and communities in the region to both recognize the salience of religious pluralism and yet also to try and transcend sectarian difference into a secular, unifying political community

Tribalism, communalism and sectarianism all refer to parallel formations in Africa, South Asia and the Middle East respectively that assume an unchanging essence that separates members of a single sovereignty or putative sovereignty. They are all static ideological interpretations of pluralism, and have all, to a greater or lesser degree, been massively influenced and even in many ways formally classified and invented by Western colonial powers

subject to conflicting interpretations that valorized “real” religion and demonized sectarianism, often in contradictory and conservative modes, but also in more liberal and even radical ways

The Orientalist view of sectarianism frequently analogizes sect as “like race” and, furthermore, it assumes that sectarian differences are inherent cultural and political differences similar to race. What do you think is the relationship of sect to race?  How should race figure in the story of coexistence you relate?

the Orientalists idealize the West in order to Orientalize the East. Second, as you suggest, this view transforms religious pluralism in the Middle East into a structure of age-old monolithic antagonistic communities so that one can speak of medieval and modern Maronites, Jews, Muslims and so on as if these have been unchanging communities and as if all ideological diversity in the Middle East ultimately is reducible to religion and religious community

The religious sect is conflated with the political sect; the secular is understood to be a thin veneer that conceals the allegedly “real” and unchanging religious essence of the Middle East. This view is dangerous, misleading and tendentious.

both race and sect urgently need to be historicized and contextualized—race belongs to US (and Western) political vocabulary; sect to Arab political vocabulary. Both the notion of age-old sects and that of immutable races are ideological fictions that have been manipulated to serve power

US scholars Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields have suggested we think of “racecraft” rather than “race relations” to underscore the ideological fundament of racist thinking that appears totally natural to its proponents. As I allude to in my book, so too might we think of “sectcraft” rather than sectarian or communal relations, both to underscore the ideological aspect of sectarianism and to emphasize the amount of work that goes into making sectarianism appear to be inherent, inevitable and unchangeable

to trace how an extraordinary idea of Muslim and Christian and Jewish civic and political community rooted in secular equality went from unimaginability to ubiquity in the course of a single century, and nowhere more so than in the Arab East after 1860

many scholars gravitate toward using categories and experiences that emerge in the US context and apply them, sometimes indiscriminately and often very problematically, to other parts of the world. I think it is important at some level to respect the fact that in the modern Middle East, progressive scholars and laypeople, men and women belonging to different religious communities, have throughout the twentieth century typically described and conceptualized their struggles against injustice and tyranny as struggles against sectarianism and colonialism, but not necessarily as a struggle against racism.

the national polities of the post-Ottoman period in the Arab East were established by European colonial powers. These European powers massively distorted the ecumenical trajectory evident in the late Ottoman Arab East. First, they broke up the region into dependent and weak states, and second, they divided the region along explicitly sectarian lines

the colonial dimension is crucial, and it clearly separates the US and the European period of nationalization from that of the colonized Middle East

why the investment in and privileging of certain epistemic categories of domination as opposed to others? The question of migrant labor illustrates how race and class and geography and history are intertwined in very specific ways—the Middle Eastern cases (whether the Gulf or in Lebanon) are indeed different from that of the history of migrant labor in the United States, which has always been implicated in settler colonialism.

One key difference, of course, between modern Western colonialism and early modern Islamic empires is that the latter, like their early modern Christian counterparts, did not pretend to uphold liberal representation, political equality or self-determination. So, temporality is one essential difference: ethnic, racist or sectarian discrimination in the Islamic empires was not justified or imagined as a benevolent burden to uplift others into an ostensibly equal level of civilization. There was no pretense of a colonial tutelage to help natives achieve independence in the fullness of time

In the Ottoman Islamic empire, there were indeed professions of Islamic superiority, notions of ethnic, tribal and religious discrimination, forms of bondage and slavery, and myriad chauvinisms and prejudices tied to kinship, geography, language, culture and ethnicity and so on, but not a notion of biological racism or the obsession with racial segregation and miscegenation that has been the hallmark of modern Western colonialism

a new and distinctive defensiveness among leading Muslim Arab intellectuals—that is, their need to defend Islam and Islamic society from missionary and colonial assault whilst also embracing or reconciling themselves to compatriotship with Arab Christians and Jews. This defensiveness persists

the great problem of scholars and governments in the West who have long instrumentalized and Orientalized discrimination against non-Muslims to suggest that there is some peculiar problem with Islam and Muslims

I think that scholars of gender and women’s history have a lot to teach us in this regard: that is Arab, Turkish, Iranian and other scholars who have explored the long history of gender discrimination—who have defied the fundamentalists—without succumbing to racist Orientalism or self-loathing

really historicize! It really is an effective antidote in the face of those who peddle in chauvinism, racism, sectarianism, tribalism and communalism

The defining slogan of Lebanon’s uprising — “all of them means all of them” (kellon yani kellon) — called out the country’s entire ruling class, which includes Hezbollah. One pointed variation on the slogan was “All of them means all of them, and Nasrallah is one of them.”

Hezbollah’s attacks on the demonstrators were not only physical but rhetorical, framing the popular revolt as part of a foreign plot against Hezbollah and its regional allies in the “Axis of Resistance” — accusations that were “met with ridicule

Hezbollah is “now viewed by many demonstrators as part of the corrupt and morally bankrupt political establishment that must be replaced,”

The Lebanese writer and podcaster Joey Ayoub captures the Orwellian upside-down-ness of this ideological sleight of hand in his formulation “Hezbollah’s Resistance™ against resistance.”[33] Hezbollah, he shows, tries to have it both ways: on the one hand, defending the status quo and maintaining Lebanon’s “sectarian-capitalist structures,” while at the same time banking on its membership in the so-called “Axis of Resistance.” That is, posturing as a force for “resistance” — a zombie category amid Lebanon’s current political landscape — while attacking people engaged in actual resistance to the ruling system and undermining progressive social movements.

The parallels between the Iraqi and Lebanese revolts are manifold, starting with their timing: mass protests engulfed both countries starting in October 2019. Iraqi and Lebanese protesters were conscious of the connections between their struggles: “in the different protest squares people are shouting: ‘One revolution, from Baghdad to Beirut,’” notes Sami Adnan, an activist in Baghdad with the group Workers Against Sectarianism.[34] It’s also important to see the two upheavals in their wider regional context, as part of the “second wave” of Arab uprisings that also included momentous popular movements in Algeria and Sudan — or, as some argue, the uprisings that have been ongoing across the Middle East and North Africa since December 2010.

in the face of popular uprisings expressing emancipatory demands, Iran sides not with the protesters but with the ruling establishments they’re protesting against

the 2019 protests represented “the most serious challenge yet to the post-2003 political order,” the Iraq scholar Fanar Haddad observes

the movement “classified itself as a ‘revolution’ in terms of discourse, demands, and objectives.” “[E]ven if the current movement fails to achieve a political revolution,” Haddad argues, “and even if it is not a revolution, it is undoubtedly a revolutionary movement that has already achieved a cultural revolution.”

As Berman, Clarke, and Majed note: A movement demanding wholesale political change represented a real threat to the system of cronyism and rapaciousness that has enriched Iraq’s politicians over the last two decades, and these elites quickly mobilized an array of state and non-state security agents in an attempt to quash this challenge.[54] Mohammad al Basri, a figure affiliated with Iraq’s paramilitary Popular Mobilization Units, expressed this mindset with rare bluntness: “Do they really think that we would hand over a state, an economy, one that we have built over 15 years? That they can just casually come and take it? Impossible! This is a state that was built with blood.”

Iran is deeply implicated in this counter-revolutionary repression — both indirectly, as the chief political ally and patron of the Iraqi government over the last 15 years, and directly, through the web of militias and paramilitary forces coordinated by the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which have opened fire on protesters

Tehran also intervened politically, maneuvering to keep Iraqi Prime Minister Abdel Abdul Mahdi in power in the face of demands from protesters that he step down.[66] (Mahdi eventually did resign, in late November 2019 — a major victory for the protest movement that Tehran endeavored to circumvent.)

Iraqi protesters weren’t just rebelling against Iran’s local allies, but against Iran itself. Protesters in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square smashed banners of Khamenei with their shoes.[67] Others put up a white banner with red Xs drawn through photographs of Khamenei and Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, the architect of Iran’s regional policy.[68] “Images of Ayatollah Khomeini were removed from cities like Najaf, and pro-Iran political parties with prominent militias that were involved in the violence against the protesters had their branch offices attacked and burned,” Alkinani notes.[69] Most spectacularly, protesters set fire to the Iranian consulate in Karbala and Najaf amid chants of “Iran out of Iraq”.[70]

The protests that erupted in Iraq in October 2019 were arguably the “biggest grassroots socio-political mobilization” in the country’s history.[37] At root, that mobilization was “about the poor, the disempowered and the marginalized demanding a new system,” notes the Iraqi sociologist Zahra Ali.[38] The Tishreen (October) uprising, as it came to be known, quickly spread to “cities and towns across central and southern Iraq”[39] and eventually “engulfed virtually the whole country (though they were most concentrated in Baghdad and the Shia-dominated southern governorates).”

Iran’s official narrative is that its role in Syria is all about fighting terrorism — specifically Al Qaeda and ISIS. But this is a classic case of reading history backwards. In fact, Iran rushed to the defense of the Assad regime as soon as the uprising began — when there was no Al Qaeda or ISIS presence whatsoever (the only jihadists were the ones the regime intentionally let out of its prisons as part of its jihadization strategy).[78] “From the very moment Assad faced popular protests, the Quds Force and Tehran were ready to do all they could to save the rule of the Baath Party,” notes Arash Azizi. Indeed, the Islamic Republic’s emissaries “were pushing on Assad to suppress the uprising mercilessly.”[79] And that is precisely what the regime did

The Islamic Republic’s “first reaction” to the demonstrations in Syria “was to open its own playbook and show Assad pages from the post-election protests in 2009,” he observes. “Decision-makers appear to have hoped that Assad would use enough brute force — arrests, beatings, and a limited amount of killings — to spread fear and quickly re-establish control.”

Iran helped flip the script and present the Syrian protests not as part of the wave of Arab uprisings — which it decidedly was — but as a foreign-inspired terrorist plot. This rhetorical framing was awkward for the Islamic Republic, which had voiced support for other Arab uprisings — those in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, and Libya. This put Tehran in a bind, praising the people of the region for rising up against the dictators that oppressed them but siding with the dictator in Syria.[84] Amin Saikal characterizes this Syrian exception as “an intervention that ran counter to Tehran’s declared rhetoric of supporting the downtrodden masses.”

the Islamic Republic intensified its support for the Assad regime in 2011 but its stalwart support for the dynastic dictatorship in Damascus goes back several decades — and while the Assad regime exponentially heightened its level of repression in 2011, violence has been at the very core of its rule throughout

“[t]he ‘revolutionary’ slogans of Iran’s ‘resistance’ are empty rhetoric that merely back whatever policies benefit the corrupt ruling elite in Tehran.”

the so-called Axis of Resistance, “ostensibly dedicated to furthering the emancipatory aspirations of the Arab and Muslim masses,” has in reality “played a critical role in containing regional revolution and preventing the emergence of a more democratically oriented regional order.”

The Islamic Republic “sounds more and more like those same sclerotic rulers it once railed against,” Daragahi observes — “suspicious of any new development that threatens the status quo it dominates.”

We need to retire zombie categories — like that of Iran as a “revolutionary” force in the Middle East, and the fiction of the “Axis of Resistance”

Both the Islamic Republic and the Saudi Kingdom play counter-revolutionary roles in the Middle East. They are competing counter-revolutionary powers, each pursuing its counter-revolutionary agenda in its respective sphere of influence within the region.

produced by Middle East Broadcasting Centre, or MBC, which was brought under government control after its founder was among hundreds of royals, businessmen and former officials detained in 2017 at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh as part of an anti-corruption campaign

a Saudi-Israeli friendship blossoming on a TV show aired by a state-controlled broadcaster immediately raised speculation that the kingdom wanted to encourage Saudis to accept the normalisation of ties with Jerusalem

MBC has defended its decision to broach such subjects on the screen. “If the choice is between a stereotypical image of the Arab world and one where MBC shows tolerance, mutual living and meetings between religions and cultures, then so be it,” spokesman Mazen Hayek said earlier this week on the network’s Egyptian channel. “At least we would be helping to heal wounds and bring people together.”

The older generation remains mainly supportive of the Palestinian cause and official government statements emphasise that support. But some young Saudis, who have adopted an ultranationalist agenda, view the conflict as a distraction and argue that citizens must focus on their own country and ignore pan-Arab issues.

Given increased government control of the entertainment industry over the past four years, some observers said that tackling controversial topics, such as Israel and homosexuality, was now easier for broadcasters than criticising official institutions or raising the real issues that affect people’s daily lives — something that past Ramadan shows, featuring the same actors, have done to strong effect.

“Even though it managed to stir controversy and generate much discussion, the topics [the programme] deals with so far remain distant from the daily concerns of Saudi citizens making it seem like an alien imposition even if performed by familiar faces.”

Leaks reveal insiders’ growing uneasiness, which points to the elephant-in-the-room question: Will MBS’ grandiose venture bankrupt the kingdom?

Saudi private investors will also be encouraged to pitch in during a potential public listing of Neom in 2024. That raises questions about how consensual this private investment will be. Indeed, Saudi Arabia reportedly “bullied” several of the kingdom’s wealthiest families to become cornerstone investors out of “patriotic duty” in the IPO of Saudi energy firm Aramco in 2019.

a large chunk of Saudi money carefully set aside for decades to fund the transition to a post-oil era will pay for Neom's astronomical price tag. A bet on an unproven vision

“Infrastructure spending is like doing lines of cocaine; you have to do bigger and bigger and bigger lines just to feel high,”

Neom’s initial burst of economic activity, if unsustainable at a similar pace, would simply be "stealing" future economic benefits to create an illusion of growth right now

perhaps the motive is not sustainable growth at all, but creating what Pettis calls a "pyramid effect." This would be an attempt to copy monarchs of ancient Egypt who redistributed wealth to the population through jobs – paid laborers built Egyptian pyramids, not slaves. Although Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth is already redistributed to ordinary Saudis through public-sector jobs and subsidies, a large tranche is retained and stored in its sovereign wealth funds and U.S. Treasuries. In theory, flushing Saudi citizens with cash would stimulate the local non-oil economy. But in practice, the pyramid effect is likely to first and foremost cause economic leakages, as the kingdom imports most of what it consumes locally, including labor, despite the “Saudification” of the labor market being one of Vision 2030’s key priorities. Migrant workers account for about 77 percent of private sector jobs. At Neom, highly paid Western consultants are toiling to match MBS’ demands, and Asian low-income workers are building it, remitting Saudi money home.

Riyadh sweetened the project’s launch party with a flurry of social reforms, such as lifting the ban on women driving. (Saudi Arabia was the last country in the world to lift this kind of ban, and it didn’t do so as a principled stand on behalf of women’s rights.) The idea was not only creating a buzz among investors and the global public, but whipping up aspirational momentum among Saudis.

60 skyscrapers that were built in Riyadh’s financial center are still standing largely empty.

MBS, high on his visionary self-branding and his concentration of power, may have to pay the costs of bankruptcy – whether by admitting full responsibility or via a renewed deployment of decidedly imperious and despotic tactics to crush dissent. The latter path is, of course, what the late Shah of Iran chose, with notorious results.