Egypt and Turkey are an interesting comparison, and having just spent time there in the last couple of weeks (I’m sending this on a layover in Munich), the contrasts are all very fresh in my mind.

First off, Egypt is a place where the government is intentionally trying to demobilize the public, and Turkey is a place where contenders for power are trying to mobilize them. One of the too-rarely commented on aspects of Egyptian politics is that the voter rolls are hopelessly screwed up, to the point where a Senator (a Senator!) told me he had never voted because whenever he goes to the polling place, they tell him he’s not registered there. It is not that the Egyptian government doesn’t care about voting, but quite the opposite: they want to be able to produce “legitimate” outcomes at will, and this is one of a host of ways that they control the ballot box. It would take years to straighten out this mess, and despite all sorts of talk of political reform in Egypt, the Egyptian government has shown no interest whatsoever in doing so.

In Turkey, by contrast, the various sides are competing to bring people out into the streets. That’s not to say that people in the streets will determine the decisions of the government, but instead that the both the civilian and military authorities both believe that they can use mobilization as a political tool, and that having people in the streets does not threaten disorder leading to chaos and collapse.

The other quite striking difference is the way in which people talk about the militaries in both places. I spoke with a wide range of Egyptian journalists—from employees in the state-run press to authors of the shrill and sometimes libelous scandal sheets—and they agreed on one thing: the only remaining red line in the Egyptian press is the military, and that line is bright and bold. The press has been able to criticize ministers for decades, and in the last couple of years, direct criticism of the President and his seemingly ambitious son have become commonplace. But journalist after journalist told me not only can they not criticize the military, they can’t mention it at all. Contrast this to Turkey, where the military is a shadowy organization, but certainly not an unknown one, nor one exempt from any scrutiny.

Some of the difference, it seems to me, comes from the fact that Egypt’s leader has been a general since 1952, while Turkey’s veneration of Ataturk has meant that various actors have sought to position themselves as his most legitimate heir. Egypt’s leaders command, while Turkey’s appeal for support. At least it seems that way.

It’s also worth underlining one of Steven’s key contentions, which is the stability of it all. It has become commonplace to say that governance patterns in the Middle East aren’t sustainable. Poppycock. Other than our Iraq adventure, there hasn’t been a change in leadership in an Arab country that has changed the form of government—from monarchy to republic, for example—since Libya in 1969. Compare the last four decades to the two decades prior to them. Coups and revolutions used to be commonplace. These regimes have not only learned to rule their own societies, they have learned from each other. Ineluctably, the monarchies are becoming more like republics, and the republics are becoming more like monarchies. They are all morphing into similar, durable, semi-authoritarian states.

Finally, on the Egyptian succession question, I don’t think anyone knows what will happen, including Gamal Mubarak. His boosters tout his polish, his sophistication and his intellect, and his detractors highlight his lack of accomplishment, his inheritance of rule, and his lack of legitimacy. There is certainly no likely—or even possible—alternative on the horizon. Yet in dozens of conversations with Egyptians, I came away with a common conclusion: when the time comes to choose Egypt’s next leader, it will be the military’s decision. Perhaps they will choose Gamal, perhaps a prominent general, and perhaps a low-profile officer whom the other officers trust. No one knows how that choice will be made. In all of my discussions, with people high and low in Egypt, one thing was strikingly common: I never met a single person who thought they’d have any input at all into choosing the next ruler of Egypt or determining the nature of the coming regime.