Last weekend, Egypt held its first round of post-Mubarak elections, and, while only about one third of districts have voted, the results have been clear and disturbing so far: The Muslim Brotherhood, a somewhat moderate Islamist organization, has won about 40 percent of the vote, while the even more extreme Salafist party has won somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of the vote. While they may not form a coalition, Egypt’s parliament nonetheless looks likely to have a wide Islamist majority (the remaining districts are more rural and therefore presumably even more conservative).

This week’s issue of The New Yorker begins with a commentary on the elections, and manages to bury the lede so deep that Howard Carter may have had a hard time finding out what actually happened in the election — you’ll find a discussion of the electoral results only in the fifth paragraph (the fourth paragraph covers the “huge” turnout).

The story begins with a meandering discussion of how the interim military government has been reluctant to give up power to elected civilians, and hopes to retain significant power even once they must hand over control.

Liberal sectors of the media essentially refuse to admit that Egypt appears to have elected an extremely conservative, Islamist government, which will be no friend of the United States or even reluctant partner of Israel – that’s the story here, and liberals are loath to admit it. As Nina Shea covered on the Corner last week, the results of this week’s elections have shattered fantasies about what a democratic Egypt might look like. Turkey has proven that a mildly Islamist political party can govern effectively and be a working partner to the West (witness the AKP’s strong stance against Syria), but their government has campaigned on a platform of success in economic development and security issues, not the explicitly Islamist platforms which carried al Nour (the Salafi party) and the Freedom and Justice Party (the MB party) to victory.

The secular liberals who filled the pages of The New Yorker et al. since the uprising in Tahrir began, such as Wael Ghonim and Mohammed ElBaradei, have turned out to be electorally impotent. Now the best hope for Egypt, as The New Yorker seems to suggest, may be that the military will retain enough power to restrain the Islamist expansion.