On May 16, the world finally learned the fate of deposed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi: death. Morsi, who has languished in a series of jails since July 3, 2013, was sentenced to execution for allegedly helping to plot a series of prison breaks that occurred during the tumult of the revolution in 2011. Barring a rare and non-binding intervention by the country’s highest religious authority, the Grand Mufti, Morsi along with 105 supporters – some of whom were sentenced in absentia – will have the verdict finalized on June 2.

The sentence came on the heels of an earlier court decision in which Morsi received 20 years for “intimidation and violence” when protests erupted against his government in 2012. The former president was acquitted on charges of inciting the murder of protesters, while the military that toppled him is believed to have killed more than 2,500 people since the coup – including opponents of Morsi, leftists and human rights activists.

The timing of Morsi's death sentence couldn’t have been better for Egyptian authorities – since U.S. news media that week was focused on another high profile death sentence, for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev. The Morsi verdict stands in sharp contrast to the three years imprisonment received by former President Hosni Mubarak – the only reckoning thus far for a 30-year reign of corruption and terror that brought about Egypt's 2011 revolution in the first place.

An anonymous State Department official later condemned the death sentence ruling and the Egyptian government’s use of mass trials as “inconsistent with Egypt’s international obligations and the rule of law.” But as of this writing, the Obama administration has made no move to withhold aid or impose sanctions on what remains one of its most important Arab allies.

The Deep State, Unleashed

The Muslim Brotherhood, which had taken a wait-and-see approach to the Tahrir Square uprising, initially came out of the revolution a clear victor. The Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) it formed in the aftermath put forward Morsi as its presidential candidate; he won 51.7% of the vote in a run-off against Ahmed Shafiq, a former prime minister under Mubarak. The FJP also took the largest share of seats in the country’s parliament.

By most accounts, Morsi’s time in office was marked by increasing autocracy and incompetence, and Egyptian society was deeply divided by his rule. His decision to stack the constitutional assembly with Islamists and push through a new constitution, although successful in the short term, brought out legitimate fear and anger in many sectors of society. Political Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular have been portrayed as enemies of the state for most of the last 80 years, so the lack of trust many Egyptians felt is understandable.

The Brothers are not wide-eyed radicals of the Salafist school, like Al Qaeda or ISIS, although in Western media they've often been portrayed as such. In Egypt, the group renounced the use of violence to achieve political goals in the 1970s. On economics, the FJP was solidly neo-liberal, with Morsi’s government negotiating a $4.8 billion loan from the IMF and sticking with austerity policies in an attempt to reduce debt.

Similarly, on social policy the FJP promoted conservative ideas that even Tea Party Republicans might approve of. Yet, in order for Egypt to begin to build a robust democracy, shouldn't the party have been allowed to succeed, or, more likely, fail, on the merits of its ideas? It's telling that the military’s seizure of power coincided with an attack not only on the conservative Brotherhood, but more generally on progressive forces in the country.

As his rule and Egypt's economic situation deteriorated in June of 2013, Morsi noted in a speech that he had “made many mistakes” and tried until the end to take a conciliatory tone. In his last broadcast before his arrest, he called for negotiations that might have saved the country’s hard fought but fragile revolution.

Regardless, the FJP government was toppled in a textbook coup. Aside from the separate targeting of leftists, youth leaders and investigative journalists, acts of violence against women – including rape by the military and security services – have increased since the takeover and continued after the election of General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to the presidency, according to a recent report by the International Federation for Human Rights.

By law, the American government is supposed to suspend military aid to countries where an elected government is deposed in a military coup. But in the real world, this often isn’t the case. A recent example closer to home was the successful 2009 overthrow of Manuel Zelaya, president of Honduras, as the U.S. government and mainstream media went into contortions to call his ouster anything but the coup that it was.

In Egypt, President Obama seemed to give tacit support to the coup plotters, saying that the FJP government was damaging the country's economy. However, shortly after al-Sisi's takeover, the Egyptian Central Bank announced that by most indicators the economy had actually improved during Morsi’s tenure. Following the neo-liberal script, Morsi helped the country’s deficit shrink by 45% during his year in power.

Perhaps one of the main reasons for the silence of U.S. government officials concerning Egypt's coup is the $1.3 billion in annual assistance that America provides the Egyptian military, which “must be spent on U.S.goods and services and is therefore effectively a subsidy for U.S. defense contractors.”

The End of the Arab Spring?

The death sentences handed out to Morsi and his supporters were not only the last nail in the coffin of the fledgling Egyptian democracy – they were the death knell of the Arab Spring. Although there has been some notable democratic success in Tunisia, the birthplace of the protests that engulfed the region from Bahrain to Libya, the hope that shined so brightly in 2011 has largely been extinguished, replaced by greater repression in some countries and chaos in others.

Much of the unrest in the region in 2011 was related to food insecurity, as droughts and elite landowners (including the Egyptian military) made the lives of already desperately poor people more difficult. These problems weren't going to disappear in Egypt after one election, regardless of who won.

Representative democracy is messy and doesn’t always produce the results we might hope for. It's a system designed for compromise. It cannot be denied that the election of the FJP under Morsi muffled the voices of progressive forces in Egypt, in particular the young people who came to the forefront during the revolution. Unfortunately, as a result of the military coup that deposed him, many of those voices have been silenced – and now it's impossible to hold either Morsi, or the Muslim Brotherhood, responsible.

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