The Islamic Republic has at its disposal a sophisticated and finely calibrated system of authoritarian control that its opponents have often underestimated. The components of this system include a combination of blatant coercion and lingering terror; multiple and increasingly powerful intelligence agencies, particularly within the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC); a monopoly on radio and television broadcasting; overt censorship; extensive self-censorship by writers and publishers; and the public’s religious fears and beliefs. The regime also employs a form of mass bribery to control the population. The authorities spend an estimated $70 billion to $100 billion annually on all manner of subsidies, from bread and sugar to gasoline and electricity. However, this is offset in part by the petty bribery of officials, which has become an endemic fact of life. The postman will not deliver mail without extra compensation, while it is widely believed that ministers and IRGC commanders take kickbacks on nearly all public contracts. The state’s manipulation of public funds is designed to punish political opposition, reward loyalty, and generally neglect those who remain passive or neutral.

Society is effectively divided into insiders (khodis), the minority who defend and depend upon the regime, and outsiders, the majority who have no chance at meaningful leadership in the system. The insiders occupy all political posts and are supported by stipends, salaries, and lucrative no-bid contracts. They also engage in serious factional feuds that often play out in what might be called an apartheid democracy: members of the ruling group compete with one another in Iran’s tightly restricted elections, seeking a bigger piece of the economic and political pie. These feuds propel insular, undemocratic politics, as they enable Supreme Leader Khamenei to use his role as referee to reinforce his overarching power. At the same time, they offer a potential catalyst for democratic openings.

In keeping with its pseudo-totalitarian nature, the regime has sought to forge a new Islamic man or woman—pious, loyal, and xenophobic, particularly with respect to the United States and Israel. It simultaneously tries to foster a discourse of democracy that borrows structural elements from the Soviet side of the Cold War ideological debate. It offers what it calls genuine Islamic democracy, arguing that this form of governance protects the true interests of the underclass (mostazafan). As with Plato’s philosopher kings and the visionary leaders of Soviet communism, Iran’s benevolent rulers are said to have access to higher truths that enable them to govern more successfully than the common man. The most important of these leaders, of course, is the Valiye-Fagih (Guardian Jurist or Supreme Leader), whose wisdom and legitimacy are both of divine origin. This ideal “democracy” is set up in opposition to what the regime dismisses as the bogus, bourgeois democracy of the West, where a liberal veneer covers the despotic nature of a system that caters to the rich (the mostakbarin, or arrogant ones). The Islamic Republic has deftly used pictures and reports from the war in Iraq to argue that liberal democracy begets chaos. Similarly, officially controlled media have celebrated the recent financial crisis as the death knell of liberal democracy, and Russia’s invasion of Georgia has been touted as the last nail in the coffin of America’s insidious democracy-promotion scheme.

Iranian democrats, from the women’s movement to the student and labor union movements, have worked hard to expose and fight the regime’s authoritarianism. In order to shape a genuine democratic discourse that is at once local and global, they hearken to the realities of Iranian society while remaining fully cognizant of the most recent developments in democratic theory around the world. The recent focus of the women’s movement on the idea of gathering a million signatures to demand gender equality in Iran, and the incredibly prolific writings of activists like Noushin Ahmadi—who has translated and published dozens of books on the theoretical foundations of feminism—are promising examples of this pattern. Ironically, this democratic discourse is now being confronted with the resurgence of a kind of Marxist-Stalinist orthodoxy among a small but vocal and organized minority of Iran’s youth.

There are many signs that the regime has failed in its grand social engineering project. Indeed, according to both empirical and anecdotal evidence, the government is deeply isolated from the vast majority of the people. Iranian youth, who comprise about 70 percent of the population, are surprisingly global in their disposition, savvy in their use of the internet, and secular in their values and ideals. A kind of craven consumerism, a hunger for the latest European and American fads, is rampant among some sectors of the youth and middle class. Society’s dismay with the status quo is registered by the secular, melancholic, and defiant music of Mohsen Namjoo; dozens of other underground rock, jazz, and hip-hop groups; and the many films, novels, and short stories that are published despite the regime’s draconian censorship. Double-digit unemployment and inflation have heightened the economic aspect of Iranians’ despair.

A recent poll conducted for the parliament by the Ministry of Intelligence found that only 13 percent of the population would vote for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2009 election. The regime’s unpopularity has forced it to exercise its many mechanisms for vetting candidates, including the intelligence agencies, local committees and Basij militia offices, and the Guardian Council, which must approve all would-be contenders. Even after narrowing the field in this way, the leadership has been obliged to use other resources to control the electoral results. A recent article in the daily Keyhan, widely considered a semioffi cial mouthpiece for Ayatollah Khamenei, indicated that Ahmadinejad won the last election only through the active support of the IRGC and the Basij.⁴

Faced with these troubling social and political signs, and increasingly aware of the country’s extreme economic fragility, the regime recently restructured its most powerful means of survival and repression, the Revolutionary Guards. The IRGC, long focused on defending the country against foreign enemies, is now fighting “domestic foes” and eliminating threats to the regime. In line with its new priorities, the IRGC has a new configuration, with 31 sections corresponding to geographical districts. The IRGC district commanders now directly oversee the two to five million members of the Basij, the regime’s gang-like militia. These steps suggest that the state has been retooling its oppressive apparatus in anticipation of growing turbulence.

Oil is a critical regime tool for influence and control. Most social and political scientists have come to agree that oil wealth is poisonous for democratic development, particularly in economically developing countries. In Iran, the state’s monopoly on oil revenues allows it to reward its most reliable allies. Commanders of the IRGC have become increasingly involved in the economic field, amassing often fantastic and invariably illicit fortunes. To further ensure the allegiance of these commanders, Khamenei recently decreed that one of the foundations linked to the IRGC, the Mostazafan Foundation, would henceforth be allowed to directly sell a portion of Iran’s oil on the international market.

But even windfall oil revenues in recent years have been unable to mask the regime’s failed economic policies. Ahmadinejad has repeatedly dipped into the foreign currency reserve—initially set up to allow Iran to weather sudden drops in the price of oil—and used the money to implement his favored economic ideas or simply to saturate the markets with imported commodities. Infrastructural investments have been sadly wanting.

The regime has also used Iranian nationalism to advance its interests. Although it initially tried to dismiss nationalism and love of the nation (mellat) as a “colonial project” created by the West to undermine the unity of the broader Islamic community (umma), the war with Iraq in the 1980s taught the regime the value of nationalism. In recent years, it has scored arguably its most important propaganda coup by convincing many in the country that its nuclear program is the embodiment of Iranian nationalism. Another facet of this achievement has been the government’s ability to tell the world that there is a national consensus on the nuclear issue. No such consensus exists, and there are powerful pockets of resistance to the idea that love of Iran dictates support for the reckless nuclear program. From Shirin Ebadi and Akbar Ganji to the Freedom Movement and the Organization of the Islamic Revolution, many have voiced their doubts about the wisdom of the project.

Exploiting Iranians’ sense of pride and competition in another way, the regime cleverly uses sports—particularly soccer—to redirect the disgruntled population’s attention toward nonpolitical issues. Many have argued that the state takes this technique of distraction to a darker extreme by willfully ignoring the growing epidemic of addiction to opium, heroin, methamphetamine, and other drugs. A population of addicts worries more about its next fix than the “fixed” nature of elections or the government’s ongoing failure to address looming systemic problems.