Iran plays a pivotal part in my personal political awareness. Back in the early 1980s, when I was taking up space at the University of Illinois, I met an Iranian student at (of course) a bar. I can’t remember his name, it was something that didn’t translate to my native hillbilly. Over a couple of hours and a few pitchers of beer, he very patiently gave a more than slightly drunk, overly proud and angry, Reagan-loving young bumpkin a brief history lesson on his native country. He began with what is considered to be the CIA’s “first covert operation against a foreign government,” the 1953 coup orchestrated for the express purpose of protecting oil industry profits. Our CIA and Britain’s MI6 overthrew the democratically-elected prime minister of Iran and installed a dictator in his place.
Through the eyes of that young Iranian student, I got my first sobering glimpse of my country as foreigners see us. That conversation (argument) exposed for me the gaping holes in my insular midwestern public education. From the vantage point of today’s wired world, where I can learn pretty much anything about pretty much anything simply by typing the question into a box on my desk, it’s appalling to think how woefully uninformed I was back then. I had never heard any of the things he told me, high school history class certainly hadn’t covered them, and I hadn’t yet discovered Chomsky. In fact, to that point in my life, I had never read anything seriously critical of US foreign policy. It was my first notion of the difference between information and knowledge, my first perception of ignorant American arrogance, both my country’s and my own. It’s a lesson I’ve never forgotten.
Over the years, whenever the subject of Iran comes up, as it has so much in recent weeks, I think of that soft-spoken, young man and wonder who and what he is now. I thought of him when John McCain sang “Bomb, bomb, bomb… bomb, bomb Iran.” I thought of him a lot back when dubya was declaring Iran to be part of the “axis of evil” for his War on Terra and going around spouting idiotic platitudes like “They hate us for our freedoms.”
As protests and demonstrations over the disputed election in Iran dwindle, I have coincidentally just finished reading The Spirit Of Democracy by Larry Diamond. It’s a good read, chronicling how modern democracies throughout the world come and go, how they fail, and what it takes to sustain them. The book was published in 2008, but a lot of what Diamond has to say about Iran seems remarkably prescient. Check it:
In contrast to the Arab world, where secular ruling establishments have lost political legitimacy and Islamist forces constitute the main alternative, it is the reactionary Islamists who constitute the corrupt and brutally oppressive ruling establishment, illegitimate and even despised in the hearts of most Iranians. And it is the disaffected majority … that is liberal, prodemocratic, and thus even pro-American. In this respect, Iran has a unique advantage in establishing democracy in the short term: the necessary transition from Islamic utopianism … to liberal realism and skepticism has already been made by the bulk of intellectual and civil society. When the works being read in a country are authored by classic liberals like Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, and Hannah Arendt, the philosophical seeds of a democratic revolution are planted.
The Spirit of Democracy invoked in me a vague feeling of inevitability about democracy. Diamond’s delineation of what exactly constitutes democracy, how it is established, where and how it flourishes left me feeling much more optimistic about it’s chances, not just in Iran, but around the world. The fact that Iranians took to the streets protesting the loss of what they certainly know to be merely an illusion of democracy leads me to believe recent events there are just the beginning of something momentous. Diamond’s final thoughts on Iran make me wonder if Michelle’s husband might also have read this book:
The regime, in short, is brutal but fragile. If the United States avoids a military confrontation that would give the failing Islamic leadership a new political life, the profound contradictions are bound to catch up with it sooner or later.
Oddly enough, the optimism induced by The Spirit of Democracy for democracy’s chances word-wide is damped by concern for it’s chances here at home. Throughout the book, Diamond makes clear that he sees corruption as the chief obstacle to democracy. Rampant corruption leads to what Diamond calls a “predatory society:”
The predatory society is the inverse of the civic community. First, there is no real community, no shared commitment to any common vision of the public good, and no respect for law. Behavior is cynical and opportunistic. Those who capture political power seek to monopolize it and the rents that flow from it … officials feed on the state and the powerful prey on the weak. The rich extract wealth from the poor and deprive them of public goods. Corruption is widely regarded as the norm, political participation is mobilized from above, civic engagement is meager, compromise is scarce, and nearly everyone feels powerless, exploited, and unhappy.
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The predatory society cannot sustain democracy, for sustainable democracy requires constitutionalism, compromise, and respect for the law. Neither can it generate sustainable economic growth, for that requires actors with financial capital to invest in productive activity. In the predatory society, people do not get rich through productive activity and honest risk taking; they get rich by manipulating power and privilege, by stealing from the state, by extracting from the weak, and by shirking the law.
While, In the US, we haven’t reached the level of “predatory” yet, there’s simply no denying the societal drift of the last few decades. Corruption is fueled by greed and access to easy money. As the richest country on the planet, we have the potential to become the most corrupt. In my lifetime we have certainly moved in that direction. It is a worrisome trend, worsened by the fact that most of the genuine reforms needed — increased government transparency, limiting earmarks and lobbyist influence, reducing campaign spending, tightening campaign finance regulations and curtailing executive overreach, to name a few — would require decisive and coordinated action by the people who currently benefit the most from the status quo.
The single biggest problem with American democracy, though, is the lack of citizen engagement. Americans don’t vote. Fully half of the populace is too busy watching reality teevee to get off their asses and do their civic duty. Democracy doesn’t have to be stolen when it’s already being ignored.
