The protests in Turkey, which now involve an extraordinarily diverse group of people, illuminate an altered political landscape. Yet much coverage of the demonstrations betrays an intellectual lag — worse than the one that plagued many journalists and pundits when anti-Mubarak protesters filled Tahrir Square in 2011.
Hasty proclamations of a "Turkish Spring" have given way to sophisticated-sounding but shallow dualisms, which seem to come straight from Flaubert's "Dictionary of Received Ideas." The conflict is now cast as a battle between secularists and Islamists, between authoritarianism and democracy.
The presence of Turkish neo-nationalists at the demonstrations even prompted the liberal-left Guardian to go soft on Kemalism. "At issue," the newspaper claimed, "is whether Turkey should be the progressive, secular European nation-state that Ataturk originally envisaged and shaped from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, or a more explicitly religious country."