It seems, from a distance, to be true that the Iranian protestors are motivated not by revolutionary ardor but by a demand for normalcy. But that was also precisely the case with the crowds, young and old, who tore down the Berlin Wall and swept away the Soviet Bloc regimes in 89, and later with the nonviolent revolutions in Serbia and Ukraine. They, too, were post-ideological; what they wanted was to live in a “normal” country, where normalcy was defined as a liberal democracy with a mixed economy and guarantees of individual rights.
The problem was that the states they lived in, as they were then structured, could not accommodate the demand for normalcy. It was the abnormality of the state that made them into revolutionaries. The question is whether the Iranian state can find a way to reform itself to accommodate its people’s needs, or whether it will continue to make revolutionaries of anyone who desires a normal society.
2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan