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Kenn's avatar

100% correct

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Stony Stevenson's avatar

(Minor correction, but the Assembly of Experts is directly elected - although voters choose from a list that is vetted by the Guardian Council, same as with elections for president.)

I agree that what you refer to as "Iranization" exists in various forms across the West, and though I don't think you provided the most killer examples of it, I think we should analogize to Iran more when diagnosing threats to global democratic health. The supreme leader casts a long shadow in Iran, and the resulting third rails and hawkish nationalism aren't unlike what we see in the West either. Despite all the problems you mentioned, the Iranian diaspora still overwhelmingly engages in lesser-evil voting (90+% of them voted for Rouhani in 2017, though I can't find the stats on how many absentee voters chose Pezeshkian). Many lessons to learn that I can't summarize here, but it affects how I see third party voters, single-issue Palestine voters, etc (I'm a liberal).

Also, there's no reason the "supreme leader effect" has to be left-aligned. In theory something like the House of Lords or the Canadian senate could be seen as lesser degrees of supreme leadership, just as supreme courts tend to be. What if the US had someone like Reagan, Bush Sr, or Clinton as supreme leader? It wouldn't be my preference, but it could still be a legitimate way of doing democracy; in small doses it could be healthy for some elder statesman to say "uhh, not so fast" whenever laws go in an excessive direction. Khamenei was president once before, so he's somebody who can claim some symbolic legitimacy among people, and it's not the craziest idea when you compare to what their neighbors have (though I'm speaking strictly academically here, as if he only had veto power, and not sprawling influence over every aspect of the Iranian deep state). Just some errant thoughts; interesting article.

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