Is Iran a Totalitarian State?

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Is Iran a Totalitarian State?

By Peter Beinart
Ask Iran hawks to describe the regime in Tehran, and youll likely hear the word totalitarian. I do
not trust inspections with totalitarian regimes, Benjamin Netanyahu told CBS in March. In a speech
last year to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Marco Rubio called Iranalong with
North Korea, China, Venezuela, Cuba, and Russiatotalitarian governments. A few weeks ago,
Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton declared that there are nothing but hardliners in Tehran. President
Obama, likes [sic] liberals throughout the Cold War, keeps looking for the vaunted moderates in
totalitarian regimes that never seem to emerge.
The above statements are factually false. Irans government, while brutal and tyrannical, is not
totalitarian. And the fact that Iran hawks think it is helps explain why their strategy for stopping
Irans nuclear program makes no sense.
Totalitarian regimes seek total control over how their people act, and even think. Thats not true of all
dictatorships. All dictators suppress political opposition. But many allow their subjects a sphere of
personal freedom so long as that sphere remains apolitical. In a run-of-the-mill dictatorship, the state
need not control bowling leagues and gardening clubs so long as those bowling leagues and gardening
clubs dont become vehicles for organizing against the regime. In an ordinary dictatorship, if youre not
against the regime, you can maintain some autonomy from it.
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In a totalitarian regime, by contrast, not opposing the regime isnt good enough. You must actively
support it. Your bowling league and gardening club cant be apolitical. They must serve the state. If
totalitarianism takes its own claim seriously, wrote Hannah Arendt, it must come to the point where
it has to finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess, that is, with the autonomous existence of
any activity whatsoever. Jeane Kirkpatrick, who would later become Ronald Reagans UN
ambassador, made a similar distinction when she contrasted traditional autocrats who do not
disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of

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family and personal relations and revolutionary communist regimes that claim jurisdiction over the
whole life of the society. (Conveniently, Kirkpatrick classified third-world dictators who backed the
U.S. as authoritarian and those who backed the U.S.S.R. as totalitarian.)
Which brings us to Iran. The regime in Tehran does make some effort to control peoples personal,
non-political affairs. Women must dress modestly in public, for instance, and its illegal to sell liquor.
But these efforts, while ugly and repressive, are nowhere near as intrusive as the behavior of more
genuinely totalitarian regimes like the Taliban, which banned flying kites, playing cards, keeping
pigeons as pets, listening to music, hanging paintings even in private homes and yes, chess.
Even more importantly, Iran allows competitive elections, something a truly totalitarian regime never
can. In totalitarian regimes, the state must speak with one voice, thus maintaining the pretense that
because they are agents of History or agents of God, its leaders have access to absolute truth. Political
disagreements can only occur behind closed doors.
By holding elections, by contrast, Iran allows public political argument. Of course, those elections take
place within narrow ideological limits, among candidates vetted by Irans ruling clerics. Still, the
outcomes are not preordained. Thus, Iran concedes what a totalitarian state cannot: That when it
comes to government policy, there is no single correct path to which everyone must pledge fealty.
Why is this relevant to the nuclear negotiations? Because when Netanyahu, Rubio, and Cotton call Iran
totalitarian, they conjure a homogenous, uniform regime. That regime, they claim, entered nuclear
negotiations because of the pain of sanctions. Thus, if America imposes more sanctions, the regime will
make greater concessions.
But because Iran is not totalitarian, different factions inside the ruling elite disagree, even publicly,
about the wisdom of a nuclear deal. In 2005, when he served as President Mohammad Khatamis
nuclear negotiator, current President Hassan Rouhani favored a deal that capped uranium enrichment
at 5 percent, prevented the reprocessing of plutonium, and allowed for intrusive international
inspections of Irans nuclear facilities. When Rouhani won the presidency in 2013, he initiated
negotiations along these lines.
Yes, sanctions mattered. They caused popular discontent, which Iranian voters took out on Rouhanis
hardline opponents. But the sanctions only mattered because they brought Rouhani and his
pro-nuclear deal faction to power. In the words of Harvard Iran expert Payam Mohseni, The victory of
another candidate, such as [hardline] former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, would not have produced
such a change in foreign policy despite the presence of the same sanctions regime.
If Iran really were a totalitarian regime, its possible more sanctions might bring more concessions. But
because its actually an authoritarian regime in which different factions jostle, privately and publicly,
for power, more sanctions will likely have the opposite effect. Just as prior sanctions sparked popular
anger against Rouhanis hardline predecessors, new sanctions will likely spark popular anger against
him. They will make the agenda on which he won the presidencyimproving Irans ravaged
economya failure. And thus, they will strengthen his opponents who want no accommodation with
the West at all.
Words matter. And so long as Iran hawks keep mischaracterizing what Iran is, theyll keep offering bad
advice about what America should do.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/global/archive/2015/04/is-iran-a-totalitarian-state/389393/
Copyright 2015 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

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