Mubarak is out. Amid the celebrations, we have to ask what comes next.

Every revolution has two sides. The first, and usually the most exciting, is the breakdown. Something happens that starts a rotten order crumbling, bringing the people into the streets. There’s no telling what — a minor bread riot in Russia in 1917, the death of a popular reformer in China in 1989, a young man burning himself to death in Tunisia in 2011. We can’t predict these events — though there may be ways we can “amplify” them.

More important, though, is the other side, the consolidation. Someone has to be ready to take power, to pick up the pieces. If there’s no one else, it will be the forces of the existing order or, more often than not, the military. (Most revolutions fail.)

So who will it be in Egypt and the rest of the Middle East? The great fear, especially outside the country is that it will be al-Ikhwan. (In my last post, I suggested that this fear is overblown.) Mubarak played this for all it was worth. There is an alternative, however — besides the army. (For the moment, the military is calling the shots in Egypt, though they’re promising real democracy — we’ll see.)

The American (corporate) media is allergic to reporting things like this, but a strong labor movement is rising in Egypt — and Tunisia, for that matter. The Federation of Egyptian Trade Unions — not to be confused with the Egyptian Trade Union Federation, which was controlled by the regime — was formed in January and is drawing support from the international labor movement.

That’s where we should be putting our — by “our” I mean the international progressive community — support. We’re going to have to create our own channels of communication and sources of information. The media certainly aren’t going to help. We can start by building on the existing labor movement channels.

Since it is conventional wisdom that the real trigger for unrest in the Middle East is high unemployment and other economic privations, it makes sense to concentrate on the movements dedicated to raising the welfare of the working class. How, exactly, the labor movement should proceed is not yet clear. (I certainly don’t have all the answers — much as I sometimes like to pretend.) But we should start by letting it be known that we are watching to make sure that the representatives of the working class are major participants in whatever comes next.

Why does an American have to put a question mark after the goal of democracy for the Egyptian people? Isn’t that what we all want? And why is it even up to us? Since when do we have to be consulted?

You wouldn’t know to listen to the American media — and especially the folks on the Right — that the Egyptians have a right to govern themselves because … they have a right to. They don’t lose that right just because a bunch of people on the other side of the world think they might not decide “responsibly.” Yes, even if that means al-Ikhwan, the Muslim Brotherhood, takes part in electoral politics.

Never mind that there’s no Khomeini figure for extremists to rally around. Never mind that there are no sex-segregated marches, with the women in full chadour, shouting for an Islamic republic, like in Iran in 1979. Never mind that the Egyptian people have seen what the Islamic Republic of Iran does to democracy advocates and know not to let that happen.

In the minds of too many Americans, Islamists, if not Muslims generally, are both totally single-minded in their pursuit of power and demonically clever. Once al-Ikhwan joins the process, it is in complete control, and things go rapidly to hell. Better to dispense with democracy altogether than let them in. (Of course, they tried that in Algeria, canceling elections because it looked like the Islamists would win, and ended up with a civil war that killed 1 to 200,000 people.)

To those of us old enough to remember the Cold War, this is all terribly familiar.

Once again, the Right-wing is trying to tell the American people that there is a diabolical enemy out there, one so dangerous that we should drop all the other goals we might be pushing for and unite — under their leadership, of course — to fight. It’s a neat trick. And we have to be sure that this time, they don’t get away with it.