Adam McConnel
Thomas Friedman is probably one of the world’s best-known and most influential pundits. Anyone following Friedman for the more than twenty years that he has had a soap box on the NYT’s op-ed page, will know that he writes on literally any topic that crosses his mind. Whether he actually has solid information about the particular topic that he decides to write on is an entirely different matter. And so it has come to pass, that in the aftermath of the failed Turkish coup, Friedman decided that he would write about Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan.
Friedman’s column, titled “Trump and the Sultan” (1), should be used in journalism schools to demonstrate what not to do — as an example of journalists violating the basic ethical standards of their profession. The premise of Friedman’s column is extremely facile and superficial: Trump = Erdoğan. After stating in the first paragraph that “Erdogan and Donald Trump were separated at birth”, Friedman goes on to display a general ignorance about most all Turkish political realities — which for the Western press is, to borrow one of Friedman’s omnipresent golf expressions, par for the course.
There is no doubt that Donald Trump is a repulsive figure who marks a new low in U.S. political history. The Republican Party’s moral and ethical disintegration (2), a steadily unfolding process beginning in the Reagan era, has resulted in the selection of progressively more fanatical and demagogical candidates appealing to the U.S. far right’s peculiar mixture of libertarian economic and political concepts with intensely conservative, even racist cultural and social policies. Trump is simply the most recent and most extreme product of this trend. But Trump has never been elected, and (crossing my fingers) is unlikely to be elected in November. Trump has never borne the responsibility of elected office. President Erdoğan, on the other hand, was first elected to office in the early 1990s, and has continually held public office since 2003, winning election after election by massive margins.
Just this one point, with all its underlying corollaries (extending to a purely negative, reactive versus a positive appeal, or to a one-man populism versus a well-organized party, or the question of sustained, demonstrable public trust), is enough to illustrate clearly that Tayyip Erdoğan and Donald Trump are categorically different figures. For a rational, objective observer, there is no possible comparison between them. But Friedman’s aims are not about rational analysis; instead he intends to rhetorically tar-and-feather a political figure. He is like a pretended Puritan pointing a righteous finger at an accused witch whom he doesn’t like or understand.
Friedman’s narrative is the opposite of reality right from the beginning. For example, one wonders which “once successful country” Friedman refers to in the second paragraph. Before the AKP came to power in 2002, Turkey in the 1990s was going through an era of frozen political immobility in the face of a deepening economic and political crisis. Further back, the three decades previous to the 1990s were all inaugurated through military coups (1960, 1971, 1980). Still further back, fully democratic and non-fraudulent elections were only initiated in 1950 after twenty-five years of a harsh one-party régime. I have lived and worked in Turkey for nearly seventeen years, and love doing so. And I can provide a much more realistic and accurate assessment of Turkey’s history than Mr. Friedman.
In the third paragraph the reader learns with some surprise that Erdoğan has “maneuvered himself into the previously symbolic role of president and got all key powers shifted to that position.” How “maneuvered”? And did those key powers not exist previously? First, Friedman is clueless about the history or the actual, legal powers of the Turkish presidency. Second, he simply omits the salient fact that it was the Turkish people who (in a three-candidate race) elected Erdoğan president in August 2014 with 52 percent of the vote. Maybe Mr. Friedman isn’t so fond of democracy after all?
So it seems, for then Mr. Friedman goes further to make a key confession — apparently Mr. Erdoğan “had it coming.” Friedman then reiterates a stereotypical list of crimes that has become a cliché in itself. Erdoğan is supposed to have “mounted a silent, drip-by-drip coup of his own against Turkish democracy.” Apart from the various distortions or outright falsehoods that it contains, this once more puts the Turkish people in the position of facilitators who do not know what they are doing as they keep reelecting Erdoğan and the AKP against the wishes of experts like Friedman.
Ah, but of course Friedman doesn’t fail to give a shout out to those that are his favored Turkish citizens — the “many secular Turks” who provided a “truly impressive act of collective wisdom and a display of democratic sensibilities” in joining the masses to resist the junta. Now we know where Friedman truly stands on the issue. What this means is that Friedman, like most other Western journalists and pundits, still longs for the good old days when the Turkish military could direct events from behind the curtain through the influence it exercised on the civilian Kemalist elites. It was these last who, as strict secularists, could be identified as the real democrats (despite all their authoritarian yearnings). Otherwise put, it was they who could be really trusted to toe the line on all issues critical to the U.S. view of the world. Those were the days of top-down Turkish Westernization. Although Friedman does not seem to realize it, this is a model that reduces democracy to progress through authoritarian modernization.
Still, Friedman is somewhat aware of the weak logic behind his column because he closes the section on Erdoğan with a quick summary of how Erdoğan supposedly manipulates Turkish society “to stay in power.” He has to find a way of coping with the fact that Erdoğan is actually a democratically-elected leader — though he does not mention it even once in his entire column. Instead, here and there he makes obscure references to democracy that only those readers who already know that Erdoğan is an elected leader would understand. But most of his readership would not recognize that, given the overt hatred and misinformation that has been directed by the Western press at Turkey’s president over the past five to six years.
Finally, even though it isn’t really necessary, I might mention that President Erdoğan has already condemned Trump’s anti-Muslim hate speech and expressed regret for attending the opening ceremony of Istanbul’s Trump Towers (3). It’s unlikely that Trump, if elected (God forbid!), would have a cozy relationship with Erdoğan.
NOTES
(1) http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/20/opinion/trump-and-the-sultan.html?_r=0.
(2) http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/opinion/all-the-nominees-enablers.html; http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/13/opinion/a-party-agrift.html.
(3) http://www.haberler.com/erdogan-o-markanin-suratle-kaldirilmasi-lazim-8558970-haberi/.