THE NATURE OF POWER & POLITICS

It seems clear that the 75-year-old is at the center of a fight for the future of the Islamic Republic. Mr. Rafsanjani’s vision of the state, and his position in his nation’s history, is being challenged by a new political elite led by Mr. Ahmadinejad and younger radicals who fought Iraq during the eight-year war.

Mr. Ahmadinejad and his allies have tried to demonize Mr. Rafsanjani as corrupt and weak, attacks that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has not strongly discouraged. On the other side, opposition leaders, especially Mr. Moussavi, have received support from Mr. Rajsanjani, political analysts said.

“It has become an extremely dangerous, zero-sum game,” said an expatriate political consultant who asked not to be identified because his family lives in Iran and he was afraid of retribution.

For Iran President at Center of Fight Between Classes of the Political Elite – NYTimes.com

(see also: Iran’s election: Demanding to be counted – The Economist’s Briefing)

This article probably does justice in highlighting that the current popular outpouring of dissent is only a symptomatic ground expression of the fissures of the Iranian political class, and not an impasse of people against the leadership. The protests in Iran should not be defined in the romantic notion of people power, but more essentially as a political proxy for the factional powerplay of the political elite.

Interestingly, this political jockeying that pervades political systems in most nations is conspicuously missing in Singapore. Ministers and MPs of the ruling party can be trusted not only to toe the party line, but to avow unabashed loyalty to the party leadership. That could be attributed to the imposing strongman figure of founding father Lee, although it remains open whether the PAP political edifice can hold up the impression of being a generally cohesive and unanimous coterie once Lee Sr. yields himself from political involvement.

And pessimistic as this may sound, the evolution of a robust opposition will only be viable with defections from the PAP ranks. Deposing an incumbent is hastened easily with the presence of another echelon of elites that have been relatively marginalized under the old regime. Democracy as Lincoln’s “government of the people, by the people, for the people” can be a romantic ideal, but most of the time it is an exercise of realpolitik couched in demagoguery: often, the masses are pawns, not power-brokers.

Does idealism – and a constant clanging of idealist rhetoric – really have a place in the body politic, where power is claimed, maintained and exercised in pragmatic Machiavellian fashion?

Even President Obama, the most notable purveyor of the feel-good rhetoric of hope in recent memory, has difficulty in delivering the idealism, however sincere. Still aware that homosexuality is a flagrant minefield for sore Republicans who are out of power from the federal branches of the executive and Congress, he has skirted around his promise to revoke Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell – a military directive that continues to be responsible for the discharge of gay service personnel, notwithstanding their contributions or utility to the war effort; a legal brief filed by his Justice Department in favour of the federal Defense of Marriage Act also underscored the futility in expecting the progressive principles espoused by an idealistic spirit to be always in ascendancy.

Politics should be about hope, a saccharine and progressive future, and the realization of human promise and national potential, but politics operates firstly on the fulcrums of power. As long as the latter remains true, idealism has to co-exist in a flimsy and awkward place with pragmatism – the true question is where do we draw the line, in the absence of a hard-and-fast principle. An excess of pragmatism is opportunistic, but falling short in favour of idealism is throwing rocks into the sea.

~ by burningrepublicstate on June 23, 2009.