To many leftists, "democracy" is a government where there are limits on the powers of the president, but most other officials are totally unbounded by law. This is also the preferred system in Iran.
(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.
Thanks for that information - I clearly don't have as much first-hand knowledge of conditions in Iran as you do.
I think that you make a mistake, though, with the concept of "small doses" of a "supreme leader effect." It's one thing to have a constitutional system where there are limits on the powers of majorities, and some officials have veto powers. (This is, for instance, how the Roman Republic worked, or the British system of constitutional monarchy before the kings were finally neutered in the early 20th century.) The problem is that Iran (or Romania, or America under the Warren and Burger courts) doesn't actually have a democratic system with "brakes" and veto powers - it has one where the nonelected arm of government (Supreme Leader or Supreme Court or whatever) can make unlimited changes in the laws and constitution, or (in Romania's case) cancel an election without any basis in written law, and it can do this without having to get even bare majority approval in the actual elected bodies. So what you're actually looking at is the OPPOSITE of checks and balance - you don't have a "separation of powers" system or a "mixed constitution," but just a system in which the elected portion of the government is wholly subordinate to the unelected, unaccountable portion.
Similar story in Britain. Left wingers getting all misty eyed and outraged when any elected politician suggests bypassing our own supreme court, which has only been around since 2005.
Frankly, I was baffled when I found out that Britain decided to create a Supreme Court in 2005 - as if they hadn't been paying any attention to what its American counterpart had been doing for the last forty years! (For what it's worth, I think the previous system - where the House of Lords was in theory tje highest judicial body but very rarely did anything - worked just fine.)
But nowadays you are having people getting jailed for their social media posts while actual rapists get let off with community service, and your highest judicial body is presumably OK with this. Maybe if y'all had studied a bit more 🇺🇸 history before making big decisions, it wouldn't have come to this.
The late New Labour government had a weird fetish for 'consitutionalism', which actually meant just copying either the US or further integration within the EU regardless if there was any merit to the idea.
Yes, the old system with the Law Lords was rather neat.
So the obvious question is, given that the Left will not control the elected national government for the next four years, and does not control the Supreme Court, what can be done to pry their hands from the levers of power they now have?
We are not going to repeat the 1950s, and demand a loyalty oath from teachers and professors.
We are not going to nationalize the press and other media.
So ... what should we do? This requires thinking about.
I'm not confident that Republicans can "do" much in a second Trump term - after all Trump's House majority is really thin, and there are a lot of existential issues on which R's are as weak as D's (about a week ago Rand Paul proposed a Senate amendment to raise the Social Security age to 70... it failed 93-3... right as Congress was passing a bipartisan bill to make the whole program more expensive... and SS & Medicare & interest on debt are what's actually eating about 70% of our ballooning budget - not anything DOGE is going to fix.
The main good thing about Trump is that he put so much of the judiciary under originalist control, which will make it easier for state and local governments to step up to the plate and exercise more autonomy as the country gets poorer and the central government keeps imploding. For me an "optimistic" future is one where the US comes to resemble the Holy Roman Empire (i.e. a single empire on paper but dozens of sovereignties of various sizes and shapes in practice) and a bad future is one where it resembles Eastern Rome/Byzantium (i.e. a single, highly-centralized, autocratic state occupying the shell of the much greater Republic that it once was.)
The other good thing about Trump (which I've touched on in other essays) is that he's likely to shock the democracies of Europe and Asia into taking more responsibility for their own defense, so they're more likely to survive their eventual abandonment by the US (which will happen no matter which party wins in America - just witness what happened to Ukraine under the presidencies of Obama and Biden.)
100% correct
(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.
Thanks for that information - I clearly don't have as much first-hand knowledge of conditions in Iran as you do.
I think that you make a mistake, though, with the concept of "small doses" of a "supreme leader effect." It's one thing to have a constitutional system where there are limits on the powers of majorities, and some officials have veto powers. (This is, for instance, how the Roman Republic worked, or the British system of constitutional monarchy before the kings were finally neutered in the early 20th century.) The problem is that Iran (or Romania, or America under the Warren and Burger courts) doesn't actually have a democratic system with "brakes" and veto powers - it has one where the nonelected arm of government (Supreme Leader or Supreme Court or whatever) can make unlimited changes in the laws and constitution, or (in Romania's case) cancel an election without any basis in written law, and it can do this without having to get even bare majority approval in the actual elected bodies. So what you're actually looking at is the OPPOSITE of checks and balance - you don't have a "separation of powers" system or a "mixed constitution," but just a system in which the elected portion of the government is wholly subordinate to the unelected, unaccountable portion.
Similar story in Britain. Left wingers getting all misty eyed and outraged when any elected politician suggests bypassing our own supreme court, which has only been around since 2005.
Frankly, I was baffled when I found out that Britain decided to create a Supreme Court in 2005 - as if they hadn't been paying any attention to what its American counterpart had been doing for the last forty years! (For what it's worth, I think the previous system - where the House of Lords was in theory tje highest judicial body but very rarely did anything - worked just fine.)
But nowadays you are having people getting jailed for their social media posts while actual rapists get let off with community service, and your highest judicial body is presumably OK with this. Maybe if y'all had studied a bit more 🇺🇸 history before making big decisions, it wouldn't have come to this.
The late New Labour government had a weird fetish for 'consitutionalism', which actually meant just copying either the US or further integration within the EU regardless if there was any merit to the idea.
Yes, the old system with the Law Lords was rather neat.
Another bulls-eye!
So the obvious question is, given that the Left will not control the elected national government for the next four years, and does not control the Supreme Court, what can be done to pry their hands from the levers of power they now have?
We are not going to repeat the 1950s, and demand a loyalty oath from teachers and professors.
We are not going to nationalize the press and other media.
So ... what should we do? This requires thinking about.
I'm not confident that Republicans can "do" much in a second Trump term - after all Trump's House majority is really thin, and there are a lot of existential issues on which R's are as weak as D's (about a week ago Rand Paul proposed a Senate amendment to raise the Social Security age to 70... it failed 93-3... right as Congress was passing a bipartisan bill to make the whole program more expensive... and SS & Medicare & interest on debt are what's actually eating about 70% of our ballooning budget - not anything DOGE is going to fix.
The main good thing about Trump is that he put so much of the judiciary under originalist control, which will make it easier for state and local governments to step up to the plate and exercise more autonomy as the country gets poorer and the central government keeps imploding. For me an "optimistic" future is one where the US comes to resemble the Holy Roman Empire (i.e. a single empire on paper but dozens of sovereignties of various sizes and shapes in practice) and a bad future is one where it resembles Eastern Rome/Byzantium (i.e. a single, highly-centralized, autocratic state occupying the shell of the much greater Republic that it once was.)
The other good thing about Trump (which I've touched on in other essays) is that he's likely to shock the democracies of Europe and Asia into taking more responsibility for their own defense, so they're more likely to survive their eventual abandonment by the US (which will happen no matter which party wins in America - just witness what happened to Ukraine under the presidencies of Obama and Biden.)
Well, DOGE is probably the right idea. Dismantle the administrative state.