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Notes -
Fiery but mostly peaceful protests in Iran.
I don't quite want to take the position that the current unrest in Iran is bad, but I do want to consider it. There is a lot of discussion downthread about the insidious effects of pervasive and assertive civil disobedience on the legitimate exersize of state power, and I wonder why that same logic doesn't apply here. It's common in the American conciousness to assume that Iran = bad, but I get the impression that a lot of Iran's badness is exaggerated by Western media. Is the current government of Iran illegitimate? If so, why? Is it because Iran isn't a full democracy? The United States props up lots of countries that are less democratic than Iran. Is democracy in Middle Eastern countries even desirable? It doesn't quite feel right to categorically rule-out theocracy as a legitimate form of governance, even if most of us would find living under one alienating.
The elephant in the room is geopolitics. Iran is aligned with Russia and opposed to many US allies. It would be good for US geopolitical intrests for the current regime to fall. Does this somehow make angry mobs torching government buildings okay, another form of spooky moral action at a distance?
I am not an expert on Iran, so feel free to tell me if the Khamenei Regime is actually the second coming of the Khmer Rouge or Third Reich.
From what I understand, Iran has democracy, and has in fact had a very long-running democracy, it's just that it has a theocracy stapled on top of it – sort of like how the Constitution restrains US democracy, the Ayatollahs restrain Iranian democracy.
In my mind, this makes me more optimistic about regime change if it is genuinely a popular uprising, simply because (at least in theory) Iran would not need to reinvent the wheel from the ground up. They could (in theory, as I understand it) simply remove the Ayatollah and theocratic laws and keep the regular government in place. But real life is often messier than in theory.
I think this is correct, although I would suggest the tightness of their relationship is sometimes overblown. People sometimes suggest that Russia and Iran are joined at the hip, but Russia actually has pretty good relations with Israel and (from what I understand) has refrained from top-end weapons deliveries to Iran out of deference to Israel, and worked to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. (At this rate the Iranians are never going to be able to replace their F-14s...)
However, Russia and Iran definitely share an interest in containing US power. It's going to be tremendously interesting if Iran and Venezuela both switch to US-friendly or at least US-neutral within a month of each other. It is tempting to say that neutralizing Iran as a foe would wrap up US concerns in the Middle East, particularly if a lack of Iranian support crippled the Houthis. I think that's likely an overstatement, but if Iran and Yemen went down that would basically be the end of Middle Eastern governments that were really hostile to the United States.
That is a bit of a vacuous definition of democracy. It is alike to asking a prisoner to pick between the noose and the firing squad, then reporting that the government granted his request to get hanged, as if it was MAID instead of an execution. A lot of countries are democratic on paper and have elections, but are effectively dictatorships. Take the former German Democratic (!) Republic (!), for example. Sure, they had elections. Perhaps sometimes the vote even decided which SED candidate would get elected. But without broad freedoms of speech and the freedom of running for office, their system was very far away from what anyone would consider a functioning liberal democracy.
I also disagree with you on basing an Iranian democracy on a continuation of the institutions of the Ayatollah regime. There is always the danger of backsliding. The theocrats had 45 years to entrench themselves. If you simply remove the Ayatollah from their parliament, it seems likely that during the next depression, people will vote for the fundamentalists and they will install him again.
Offtopic:
“Elections” in the GDR are very strange as they weren’t even sham elections. We imagine the failure mode of a democratic banana republic were a tyrant/regime keeps power through election fraud or controlled opposition, but in communist countries there was/is no opposition.
Instead communist Germany had a “unity list” as an election ballot which looked like this:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Stimmzettel_Volkskammerwahl_1950_%28M_143%29.jpg
You notice the fundamental element missing: any kind of choice. There is not even a field for yes/no!
You could technically disagree, but for that you had to strike out the whole list with a pen. You could do that in secret by going into the polling booth, but of course using the booth makes you suspicious as everyone else just folded the ballot and put it directly into the ballot box. That is how you get 99% election results.
Nominally only a quarter of the “parliament” were candidates from the ruling SED, the other pre-selected members were from “democratic parties” and mass organizations to fake a multiparty system. But parliaments role was simply to confirm unanimously the decisions of the SED central committee.
My understanding is that this was the usual role of parliament in socialist/communist countries, though I don’t know how this worked in practice with speeches and committee work. Surely there were some contrarians slipping through the system? In communist China there are wisely no elections (I think it disillusioned Eastern Germans more that their elections were visibly pointless busy work), but the Chinese People Congress is similarly staffed with two thirds CCP members and one third by members of “eight allowed minor democratic parties“.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_parties_(China)
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