This started off very interesting and seemed to put things into a nice context and then devolved... It seems to me that he simplifies things and minimizes what the Turkish PM has done to offend the urban elites. As post on The Monkey Cage took a deeper look at what has happened and how the PM has gone from being praised to being attacked: And at the end: Also, I don't think he has a strong grasp of American political history and why those "hicks" voted for Bush and I find it annoying that he starts by saying you shouldn't compare this to Egypt and then compares it to Egypt (in talking about conservatives being voted in instead of moderates/liberals).He started with art. He did not like the “friendship” sculpture at the Turkey-Armenia border and had it demolished. Then he started to pry into show business. One immensely popular TV series “Magnificent Century” about the life and times of the Ottoman Emperor Sultan Soleiman the Lawmaker was his first target. Erdogan did not like the fact that the series showed Soleiman as a love maker in the Harem more than a war maker on the battlefield. He publicly said the producers of that show “should be taught a lesson.” In another popular TV show Behzat C, the producers had to marry two characters just because the government did not like them living together unmarried. Erdogan did not stop there. He pried into women’s private lives. He declared “abortion is murder.” It has to be noted that in a heavily Muslim country like Turkey, abortion had never been a political issue before. He also said he wanted to raise “religious generations.” In a much more dangerous twist, he started to have journalists fired from their jobs when they wrote something he did not like, including ones that had supported him during the normalization of civil-military relations in Turkey. The number of journalists in jail is now at a record high. Media freedom is under a very high risk.
He and his party collected votes not only from the party’s main base of religious conservatives, but also from the very people that he calls “looters” and “alcoholics” today, thanks to growing economy and civilianization of the regime.