The optimism of Egypt's January 2011 Tahrir Square uprising, which began three years today, persists in Washington, where it infuses the idealistic pronouncements of columnists, policymakers, and pundits alike. Their analysis often goes something like this: Egypt was on a democratic path, albeit a bumpy one, until the military removed Mohamed Morsi from power on July 3, but it’s now off that path completely, so the U.S. should use its leverage—including its $1.3 billion in annual military aid—to get Egypt back on it.

Never mind that military aid is as useful for promoting democracy as a screwdriver is for hammering a nail. Washington’s hand wringing regarding Egypt’s autocratic trajectory overlooks an even more substantial challenge: that within Egypt itself, “Arab Spring” romanticism is practically—and very sadly–dead. The revolutionary groups that coordinated the uprising’s initial demonstrations are now widely reviled; the most prominent revolutionary activists now sit unjustly in prison, with minimal popular outcry demanding their release; and a critical mass of Egyptians appear willing to move forward with a transition that will ironically move the country backwards, as approximately 20 million Egyptians voted “yes” on a constitution that will effectively restore the entrenched, military-backed authoritarianism of the Mubarak era.

Within the Beltway, Egypt’s autocratic recidivism is often blamed on Egypt’s poisonous media and draconian military-backed government, thereby casting ordinary Egyptians as passive actors in their own country’s story. But they aren’t. Time and again, critical masses of Egyptians have cast and recast their lot: first with the 2011 anti-Mubarak uprising, then with the military junta that succeeded Mubarak, then with the Muslim Brotherhood during the 2011-2012 parliamentary and presidential elections, and then with the military once again during the July 2013 uprising-cum-coup that ousted Mohamed Morsi.

In all likelihood, these critical masses of Egyptians will change their minds again, because even as the rules of Egypt’s political game have been written and rewritten repeatedly, one hard law has emerged: nothing is permanent. Egyptians can vote for a constitution today that will be revoked—with their blessing—tomorrow, and they can elect a president tomorrow whose toppling they will demand the next day. No political actor in Egypt is immune from this cycle of recycling: not the youth activists who were feted on the very Egyptian television stations that now decry them as foreign agents; not the Brotherhood, which scored a string of electoral victories and is now widely viewed as a “terrorist” organization; and not even General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, whose neck is likely strained from looking over his shoulder at the lower-ranked generals who might one day respond to mass protests by removing him, particularly if he runs for president, as is widely expected.

Within Egypt, the defining feature of the past three years has been fear, not democratization. And those who are most powerful on paper have typically been the most fearful. The military junta that succeeded Mubarak in February 2011 feared becoming the target of another mass uprising, so it mostly avoided its policing duties and thus permitted crime, sectarian violence, and Sinai-based jihadi terrorism to rise under its watch. The Muslim Brotherhood, seeing itself part of a centuries-long struggle to implement Egypt’s supposedly innate Islamist character, was so fearful of its “secular” enemies that it sloppily rushed to consolidate total power for itself and, in the process, catalyzed a massive resistance that destroyed its ability to govern. And despite its rhetorical bravado in confronting the Brotherhood since ousting Morsi in July, the current military-backed government similarly knows it’s just one mass-uprising away from Tora Prison or worse, which is why its supposedly technocratic ministers are hesitant to introduce much-needed economic reforms, let alone enfranchise Muslim Brothers who very openly demand death to the “putschists.”