I’ve spent the day reading on Iran and frankly taking in the moment. It is quite the moment. Mass protests on the streets on Tehran are not everyday occurrence nor are the conversations that are likely occurring among the power brokers of the Islamic Republic. Whatever happens next is still anybody’s guess. After a day and night of protests it seems clear that there will be protests lasting at least another day. The events of 12-13 June 2009, no matter the outcome, will forever be etched in our collective memory as a day where the meek were emboldened.
Coups are a rare occurrence unless you are a Bolivian of a certain age. Coups there were once commonplace. From independence in 1824 through 1981, the Andean country suffered 193 coups d’état or golpes de estado or on average one every ten months. With so many to study, a rich lexicon developed to describe the varying differences in the art of coup making. Still at their core, coups represent a breakdown in the established order, an abrupt change in the rules of the game.
It seems clear that Iran’s governing elite is a fractured one and that what we are seeing is an attempt by members of the government and the political establishment to usurp the levers of power to favor one faction over another. These events are an auto-golpe, a self-coup. Samuel Huntington, the noted political scientist recently deceased, would have termed this a “guardian coup”, that is, when someone seizes top-level power from another, usually stating that doing so is necessary because of mass disorder in the state. In this case, the seizure of power came through electoral intervention on a massive scale to preempt a loss or erosion of political power.