Iran's Conservative Revolution: The Future and Classic Opposition

This article highlights a deep rift between the people currently carrying the revolution and the actors of the Islamic People's Revolution. It further elaborates on the nature of this separation and its impact on Iran's political future. The article concludes that ultimately, the discursive gap between the current change bearers and the classic 1957 mindset is inevitable but not unproductive. Which one? The intellectual's understanding of the past or the underprivileged's understanding of the past? What is the relationship between recent protests and 'the people' and 'the Shah's era'? Recent protests have provided lessons about the heavy weight of 'relativity' in our belief in the values of the new world, the boundaries of ethics, and the principles of political conduct. For example, populism is populism when the people's slogans do not align with our political taste, and fascism becomes fascism when the people's slogans deny our 60-year political history. However, one thing remains unanswered, especially by the left opposition and the proponents of a community-centered perspective: why is an Iranian intellectual's perception of the Pahlavis so different from a working-class Iranian's understanding of the same dynasty? Does this rift mean that Iranian workers have not yet reached political consciousness, and that intellectuals must engage in more cultural work to bring them to such an understanding of themselves and contemporary history? Does such a gap in understanding the past imply that intellectuals stand for democracy while the underprivileged lean towards tyranny? A reasonable and justified explanation is still lacking from the Iranian left, and the contradiction between recent protests and their claims, along with the pro-Pahlavi slogans from a class that the left intellectuals have always claimed to support, has made it more challenging to develop a coherent theory about the recent uprising; that is, a theory that equates justice with opposition to the Shah. Two aspects of the rift between elites and protesters: The first issue is that, from the perspective of optimal living indicators, the protesters view the Pahlavi era as a time of relative prosperity, social freedoms, international respect, and a peace-seeking and stability-oriented regional policy, all of which have been lost during the Islamic Republic's era. The lack of these aspects has never been seen as catastrophic by the Iranian left, which has often justified it; thinkers have repeatedly claimed that any government replacing the clerical regime would face the same problems with the international order and the global dominance system. This is, in essence, nothing but a projection of political aspirations onto political reality, and thus, a reconfiguration of it, considering the recent root causes, would be: any government replacing the Islamic Republic must pursue such a struggle (of course, in its true form; that is, the losing foundation of the February revolution) against American imperialism and global capitalism. For this reason, the first association of 'sanctions' in this mindset is the bullying of America, which bears no difference from the mindset of the ruling clergy and their guardians. It is precisely for this reason that the Iranian left prefers not to make even the slightest distinction in the sanctions regime and generously accounts for the closure of dozens of institutions under the financial empire of Ayatollah Khamenei and the IRGC as the suffering of the Iranian people. In this view, the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Syrians by a local-dictatorial regime, in collaboration with the Islamic system, is tolerated, but if an American bullet lands on an airbase of that same dictator, then the Ashura of the oppressed peoples arrives, and cries of foreign criminal intervention rise from all sides. The second and more important issue is that leftist intellectuals have completely detached from their origin, which was to support the underprivileged in achieving a prosperous life, and have become a puritanical and ivory-tower class, increasingly distanced from the reality of their slogans. Most of them live in developed Western capitalist countries but want to remain forever the symbol of the revolutionary anti-capitalist individual and introduce the 'dollar cult' as the main problem of the Islamic Republic. This epistemological rift is now more pronounced than ever in response to the recent protests. Precisely because of this distance, the support of the privileged classes for Hassan Rouhani's security government in recent years has never elicited such a radical reaction from the left as the recent uprising against the Islamic Republic did. Thinkers who did not even want to acknowledge that the slogan 'We will take back Iran' was voiced by those distanced from social benefits and smelled blood from it, had previously advised against using terms like 'election show' or 'electoral deception' regarding the two elections that led to the victory of the rent-seeking and corrupt 'Hope and Prudence' government, suggesting that phenomenologically, one should focus solely on understanding the political phenomenon (without any labels). The conservative values in the protesters' view of the Shah's era ask how it was that during the comprador bourgeoisie era of Pahlavi, in the ideological interpretation of the left, my rights as a worker were respected, and I had insurance and welfare that has been denied to me in the name of the oligarchy emerging from the Islamic revolution for the past forty years? The leftist intellectual's response is a repetitive abstraction detached from the reality of terms like oppression and discrimination, which are equally and without the slightest distinction applied to both the previous and current regimes, falling under the homogenizing and entirely populist label of 'tyranny of the Shah and the Sheikh.' The main rift lies in the fact that the understanding of protesting workers regarding how the term discrimination manifests in contemporary Iranian history does not align with the leftist intellectual's understanding, and this misalignment and confrontation trace back to the revolutionary origins that these intellectuals destroyed in the name of the very underprivileged, leading to the destruction of their lives and the misery of the middle class, and thus to the nationalization of deprivation throughout the social structure of Iran. The emerging political phenomenon that must be understood without labels is that the downtrodden and the marginalized in Iranian society seek a return and rethinking of an order that the leftist intellectual still prides itself on disrupting, and is willing to stand behind the Khomeini tribe for the second time in order to fight against the Pahlavis, just as it stood behind Khomeini forty years ago, realizing the precise meaning of secularism, democracy, freedom, and equality in accepting the leadership of the late Ruhollah. The main problem is that the resentment and anti-aristocracy of the leftist intellectual in reaction to the Pahlavis no longer relates to the perspective of the underprivileged towards that dynasty; thus, in a surprising event, leftist activists still speak of the wealth of the royal family and the necessity of confiscating it and holding trials, while the Iranian worker thinks that all that wealth is now insufficient to cover one instance of the numerous embezzlements by the Islamic revolution family, with the difference that equating this worker's situation in that era with the past forty years is like comparing a dream with a nightmare. It seems that he sees neither an exploiting bourgeoisie nor the exploitation of the underprivileged in the governance style before the revolution. In a reverse twist, the deprived worker's view of 'wealth' and 'inheritance' when part of a long-standing political tradition and overall effective contrasts with that of the privileged intellectual, and we face two alien and confrontational perspectives; in this shift, the underprivileged are the bearers of conservative political discourse from the intellectuals' viewpoint and presumably, instead of striving for their liberation, they are calling upon their former chain-makers. However, the understanding of the underprivileged and the oppressed regarding the political sphere of Iran is entirely different; they actually seek a return to political rationality and collective wisdom, as they see the relative existence of these two features in the so-called 'tyranny era' and their absolute absence in the aftermath of the February revolution. This is something the leftist intellectual ignores. The underprivileged who have created the recent uprisings have better understood than the intellectual reactions that the nation essentially has a moral essence, and one cannot suddenly set aside the past, civilization, and the long-standing character of a nation under titles like 'the unheard wailing of the oppressed of history.' In this sense, the Pahlavis, even in exile, remain a part of Iran's political body. If we return from exile to the interior and wish to summarize the nation solely within geographical borders, indeed, for the past forty years, the country has lived without a nation and without a state, and Iran has become more a symbol of a political corpse than a political body, having fallen from an authoritarian nation-monarchy focused on development to a totalitarian community-guardianship against development. This does not mean ignoring the history of resistance but rather pointing to the forty-year failure in becoming a nation under the banner of the Islamic Republic. Maintaining the most fundamental ideals and overall structure of constitutionalism by the Pahlavi monarchy is fundamentally different from its seemingly democratic destruction by the Islamic Republic. Whether that system had the capacity to rid itself of political tyranny and political wrongdoing from its opposition over half a century of Iranian history remains an open, thought-provoking discussion that requires a comprehensive and unbiased perspective. From the perspective of the deprived, the Pahlavi era symbolized what Edmund Burke called natural aristocracy, and thus the feature of political inheritance was seen not in contradiction with meritocracy but rather in conjunction with it when governance is realized within a framework of social justice, property rights, lawful freedom, and citizenship rights. The underprivileged in society do not have the same perception of the constructed duality of 'tyranny of the Sheikh and the Shah' that the builders desire. Moreover, according to that community-centered perspective, it should always be reminded that the Pahlavi tyranny, in the face of groups seeking its succession, translates without exaggeration into political moderation or tolerance in the Middle East. This is not a justification of tyranny but an explanation that the opposition to that tyranny was frightening and created hell. The leftists and nationalists have yet to explain to the people why during the entire era of that father and son, the meritocrats were often in charge, while for the past forty years, the unworthy have often been at the forefront. The fundamental rift from the ideology of the 1979 revolution: The 1957 mindset labeled the Shah of Iran as a foreign puppet, and today it casts the same accusation at the opposition that seeks to warn against the significance of the political capital of the pre-Islamic revolution era in overthrowing their forty-year handiwork. This mentality, under the slogans of independence and nationalism and trust in the people, effectively denies and condemns the Iranian people's seeking assistance from the global community to overthrow the Islamic regime, a regime that has repeatedly proven that it recognizes no boundaries for survival. This mentality equates assistance from the global community with dependency and ultimately seeks to leave the Iranian people alone, defenseless, and without allies against such a regime. Ironically, this very mentality did not reject seeking help from notorious Middle Eastern governments like Gaddafi and Assad's father to overthrow a developmental system forty years ago, but also reached out to the then-American government for assistance. The creation of a dichotomy between help from the global community and national will is constructed by this mentality and has no other goal than the survival of the Islamic Republic as its illegitimate offspring. The Islamic Republic holds the status of a deformed offspring that emerged from a shared womb, and fortunately, the Iranian nation did not experience this offspring in its complete and entirely popular form. Seventeen years before the Islamic revolution, Israeli environmental experts hired by the Pahlavi monarchy to prevent potential future droughts in the country testified during their travels across Iran and many villages and towns that they did not witness a single anti-Israeli or anti-Jewish incident except for one case involving a young communist. This does not deny the social base of the February revolution but rather highlights the process of sublimation and intensification of public superstitions and prejudices in the form of a populist-local ideology, which was far more dangerous in those years. Now, the deprived and the marginalized, in contrast to classical intellectualism, have a healthier and more realistic perception of concepts like national interests, international order, and something called the United States of America, and the slogans of the past year testify to their progressive understanding, such as 'Our enemy is right here; they lie that it's America,' 'Forget Khashoggi; think of us,' 'Not Gaza, not Lebanon; my life is for Iran,' and 'Back to the enemy, forward to the homeland,' none of which could ever be derived from the ideological framework of the Pahlavi opposition, as the relevant mentality recently declared its opposition to labeling the ruling regime in Iran as an enemy, foreign, anti-national, and anti-Iranian; that is, a regime that has turned Iran and Iranians into mere tools for advancing an entirely aggressive ideology for forty years. From such a mentality, no clear line or boundary can be expected for liberation from the Islamic Republic, and thus we are now witnessing a significant rift, alienation, and unfamiliarity between this claiming mentality of supporting the underprivileged and a fundamental transformation that is being shaped by the very marginalized from the social scene of Iran. The author two years ago spoke of the necessity for convergence between the Pahlavi opposition and the Pahlavi of the opposition to achieve liberation from the Islamic Republic. The past year has shown that this convergence seems impossible with the Pahlavi opposition's return to political orthodoxy and the repetition of the dogmas of forty years ago. Based on the assumptions of that article, the Pahlavi opposition has not only failed to regain its lost dignity in the 57 revolution but has increasingly lost it with its recent stances. In contrast, the Pahlavi of the opposition or the Pahlavi in exile, which had lost its political efficacy and impact after the anti-monarchical revolution, has undeniably regained its life and is trying to adjust its political function according to the demands of a democratic Iran.