Morsi states that he is moving to reduce the authority and influence of those loyal to former President Hosni Mubarak -- and that first the army and then the courts have been havens for protectors of the old regime's interests.

Is Morsi the kind of leader who will aggrandize total power and then liberalize like a George Washington or Abraham Lincoln? Or is he more like a Lee Kuan Yew who can build a state and the facade of a democratic system while holding tightly to power for decades in all ways that matter?

We don't know the answer yet. But for those surprised by Morsi's moves -- as the State Department reportedly was after having just secured his pivotal support on a Gaza-Israel truce -- only naivete would lead one to believe that a healthy, balanced, checks-and-balance democracy would immediately succeed the kind of autocracy Mubarak mastered.

Despite the claims in the media today that Egypt's judiciary was fairly independent and respected, the fact is that the system -- all parts of it, including the judiciary -- were ruthlessly managed and sculpted by forces that stewarded Mubarak's interests and power.

There were no checks and balances in Egypt during Mubarak; nor during de facto head of state General Mohamed Hussein Tantawi's short reign; and for the time being, there will be no checks and balances during Mohammed Morsi's tenure -- at least not in this phase.

Given the conditions of Egypt's rotten political culture that are turbulent and unstable, it seems ridiculous to think that an Egyptian leader -- whether religious or devoutly secular, whether a man or a woman -- would automatically and successfully move the Egyptian political architecture into one based on checks and balance statecraft.

This doesn't mean that the protests against Morsi in Tahrir Square are wrong or illegitimate. They are in fact vital in the absence of other political checks on Morsi. Note this excellent survey of the scene by David Rohde.

In a political system that has not been forged over decades and centuries of constitutional battle about the rights and prerogatives of branches of government, perhaps the people must rise in such a delicate time to empower other branches of government, while communicating what they believe to be the limits of Egyptian presidential powers. In other words, this conflict was inevitable: a new President whose party had been suborned and abused by the previous political order, mistrustful of institutions derived from that preceding era, is working to sweep aside those institutions and the people in them like any powerful executive would.

In a system of checks and balances, other parts of the political order rise to challenge the executive, vigorously defending their own turf and legitimacy. The people must allow both sides, or all three or four or five, sides in the institutional square-off to ultimately win, so that institutions are balanced each other not because they want to be but because there is no choice.