Western pundits love to call the Islamic Republic of Iran “conservative.” This label is lazy, misleading, and fundamentally wrong. The regime in Tehran is not conserving anything. It is a revolutionary project, born in blood and ideology, that shares far more DNA with 20th-century progressive radicalism than with any genuine conservative tradition.
Real conservatism, as Edmund Burke defined it, is pragmatic, rooted in inherited institutions, and sceptical of grand utopian schemes. It values continuity, social order, and the slow accumulation of wisdom across generations.
The Iranian regime is the opposite: Revolutionary, millenarian, and obsessed with ideological purity. Its founders overthrew a monarchy not to restore ancient Persian traditions but to impose a new order based on Khomeini’s velayat-e faqih – a novel theocratic doctrine that had zero precedent in Shia history.
From the very beginning, the regime relied on terror: Mass executions, purges of “counter-revolutionaries,” and the export of violence through proxies. This is not the caution of a conservative ruling class. It echoes the 19th-century anarchists and the Bolsheviks, who believed that cleansing society through violence was a necessary step toward their imagined paradise, requiring anyone and anything standing in their way to be crushed.
The morality police enforcing hijab rules and policing sexuality are not preserving organic social norms; they are imposing a rigid, top-down code of purity that allows no deviation. It is the same impulse that drives modern progressive cancel culture and wokery, only with different sacred texts and fatwas.
The economic record tells the same story. Like every progressive experiment from Soviet Russia to contemporary Venezuela, the Iranian economy is a disaster: Chronic shortages, hyperinflation, capital flight, and a powerful insider elite – the Revolutionary Guards and their cronies – enriching themselves while the people suffer.
Conservatism does not produce such grotesque concentrations of unaccountable power; ideology does.
When the state claims to embody divine justice or historical determinism, corruption and inefficiency are inevitable, inherent traits.
Then there are the friends. Tehran’s warmest international partners have always been on the left-leaning anti-western alliance: Cuba, Venezuela (until its recent convulsions), Russia and China.
In the 1970s, the revolution was actively celebrated by French elite intellectuals. Michel Foucault, that high priest of postmodernism, travelled to Iran and wrote gushing reports about the “political spirituality” of the upheaval, seeing in Khomeini’s crowds a liberation from Western modernity. Other Parisian salon radicals followed suit.
Khomeini himself found a remarkably sympathetic haven among the French elite during his final months of exile. After being expelled from Iraq in 1978, he settled in the quiet village of Neauphle-le-Château, a country house with a garden where he sat cross-legged under an apple tree, recording fiery speeches on cassette tapes that were smuggled into Iran to fuel the revolution. The property, once owned by acquaintances and briefly home to figures like Hollywood actress Deanna Durbin in earlier years, became his command centre.
The man who would soon declare war on Western decadence plotted his triumph from a bourgeois French suburb, welcomed by a liberal democracy he despised. He was not the first, nor was he the last to pull this trick.
The pattern is clear: Whenever the Iranian regime needs intellectual cover or diplomatic oxygen, it turns not to traditional institutions or conservative governments, but to the international left.
Even now, after slaughtering tens of thousands of people protesting dire poverty and a lack of freedom, the thuggish regime got vocal support from the far-left, that suddenly rediscovered international law after ignoring the decades long abuses by the Ayatollahs. Feminists remained silent and the crowds that recently got out in numbers to trash European cities over Palestine never showed up to express solidarity with the Iranian people, au contraire.
Its defining foreign-policy stance – visceral anti-Westernism – seals the diagnosis.
True conservatives cherish what is valuable in their own civilisation and respect the achievements of others. Iran’s rulers define themselves by rejection: rejection of the West, rejection of modernity (except when it comes to missiles and drones), rejection of any compromise with the “Great Satan.” This is not prudent realism. It is the revolutionary mindset in clerical robes.
Contrast this with a genuine conservative society: Japan. Despite decades of economic challenges and demographic headwinds, Japan maintains extraordinary social order, low crime, and a deep respect for tradition, hierarchy, and consideration for others. Public spaces are clean, elderly people are treated with dignity, and the culture still cherishes what has proven valuable over centuries. Politicians may argue over policy, but the underlying social fabric – rooted in continuity, not rupture – remains intact. Thàt is conservatism in practice.
The persistent mislabelling of Iran matters. It serves as a tool to discredit conservatism, unjustly connecting it to the repression of women and reactionary policies. This is a partisan smear.
It confuses Western audiences about what they are actually facing.
If we want to understand the world clearly, we must call things by their proper names. The Iranian regime is not conservative. It is progressive: Revolutionary, puritanical, economically ruinous, and instinctively allied with the global left against the West.
Recognising that truth is the first step toward a serious understanding of reality. Anything less is self-deception dressed up as analysis.
