Two executives who made their traditionally weak political offices into power centers faced hostile audiences this past week: Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at the UN, and Rick Perry, Texas’s governor, at the Republican party’s debates. But behind both bombastic men loom far more dangerous self-serving idealogues, and Americans should carefully consider how the lessons they’ve learned from one politician might apply to the other.
Rick Perry (L) and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (R): birds of a feather? Photos: Ed Schipul (Perry), Daniella Zalcman (Ahmadinejad)
I have to begin this article with a plea for calm, regrettably. In our toxic political environment, a headline like this tends to make readers skip the actual content and zoom down to the comments to decry, I don’t know, “knee-jerk liberals” or something. Even a cursory glance over this article or my past history would tell you that I’m far from knee-jerk or a liberal (hell, Ross Douthat, the New York Times‘s token conservative, even “borrowed“ one of my articles). If you came in expecting “because they are both BAD FOR AMERICA and EVIL DUDES, hurr,” sorry, you’re gonna go away disappointed. You can feel free to pillory me in the comments, but read the damn article first.
The superficial similarities between Rick Perry and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad make for easy pickings. Ho ho, both of them don’t like gay people! They love revolutionary rhetoric! They’re often photographed wearing earth tones rather than the usual business gray-and/or-navy! But there’s a fundamental way the two men operate in their political offices that makes them very strange soul-mates.
Both Perry and Ahmadinejad were elected to what were regarded as weak political positions. Being Governor of Texas was generally thought of as a powerless job: when George W. Bush, Perry’s predecessor, was in office, it was fifth on the list of actual authority in the state. Even getting on the ballot to run for President of Iran required the approval of the country’s ultra-conservative clerical judiciary, and, effectively, the blessings of the actual Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Attempts by occupiers of either office to gain more power for themselves usually resulted in people further up the totem pole kicking them down a notch.
That changed with Perry and Ahmadinejad, though. Perry quietly and effectively used what authority he had to replace people who might otherwise check his power with “compliant” political allies, even in purportedly non-partisan positions. In Iran, where murky political threats and backroom treachery form a way of life, Ahmadinejad got himself elected in 2001, fed off of George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” speech, got re-elected for the first time in 2005, and then proceeded to openly discredit and remove threats to his authority, like other former presidents and reform-minded ministers, professing loyalty to Khamenei all the while.
But once they consolidated power, both Perry and Ahmadinejad bucked the expectations set by some of their voters. Ahmadinejad moved power away from the clergy and into the Revolutionary Guards, giving them control of oil revenues and feeding a military-industrial complex that looks suspiciously more like Saddam Hussein’s in the 1980s than Ayatollah Khomenei’s 1979 vision of Iran. Perry has long been good at saying all “the right things” to a predominantly Republican audience about the ills of big government, but Texas snaps up a huge amount of federal subsidies: even Perry himself got agricultural money for a while. Both men’s bases encompass sometimes conflicting ideologues, but the people who voted for them and kept them in power look surprisingly similar: the rural poor, under-educated, suspicious of outsiders, and disaffected (who would later be bused into Tehran as the thuggish Basiji shock troops during the 2009 Iranian protests in Ahmadinejad’s case); the religious conservatives; and the large business owners eager to maintain their status quo at the top of the food chain with the government either helping or staying out of their way.
It’s not easy to juggle these sometimes-competing constituent bases, and both Perry and Ahmadinejad have struggled against them at times. But what keeps both men in positions of strength is their genuine love of power. Their own ideologies, to the extent they have them, are about doing whatever they want, even if it’s what you might think of as a “liberal autocratic” move. They want to do what they think is right, regardless of ideological concerns, because, like Robert Moses, they can. This results in fairly major flare-ups: Perry’s sudden decision to mandate the HPV vaccine, for example, or his stubborn refusal to back down this week over granting the children of undocumented immigrants an in-state college tuition rate. In Ahmadinejad’s case, his decision to rig an election he probably would have won anyway in 2009 even provoked the head of the Revolutionary Guards to slap him for daring to suggest, after the “mess” he had created, that maybe more press freedoms wouldn’t be so bad.
But in both men’s cases, those non-party-line-but-still-autocratic decisions revealed the limitations of their authority. Perry’s decision on the HPV vaccine was quickly reversed by the more orthodox-conservative Texas legislature. Ahmadinejad’s attempt to behave like he still runs Iran “behind the scenes” after the 2009 elections resulted in a series of power clashes with Khamenei’s people and embarrassing episodes like the “they’re released, just kidding, no, not just kidding” saga of the captured American hikers.
More insidiously, though, both men’s penchant for bluster and pageantry hides the dark secret about politicians who value their own power above a particular ideological end: they’re easily-controlled by the people who keep them there. Ahmadinejad loves to wind up the UN with his usual walkout-inducing tirades that play so well back home, while Rick Perry can hold a “prayer rally” for the ills that plague Texas and revel as the “mainstream media’s” politely perplexed responses fire up the indignation in his religious base even further. But neither man will seriously risk upsetting the people that keep them in power. They’re comfortable in their demands for more, and that can cause friction, but they’re ultimately only as viable as politicians as they are valuable to the interested parties that back them.
For Ahmedinejad, his minders are men like the Revolutionary Guard that slapped him: people who hope to eventually rule like the Burmese junta, letting the flow of the country’s resources finance a brutally repressive army to keep its young citizens down and its generals in the lap of luxury. For Perry, it’s a faction of very wealthy investors in the “Buffett zone,” those among the 8,274 Americans that make over $10,000,000 a year but don’t have Warren Buffett’s sense that maybe they should pay a little more to the government. Both groups can easily hide themselves behind their bombastic political front-men who revel in the attention and distract from their true agendas.
The press on all sides of the political spectrum that oppose either Perry or Ahmadinejad tend to display them either as existential menaces or clownish buffoons. Neither is true, and reducing them to those stereotypes gives a pass to the far more sinister interests that ride in their coattails. Neither Perry nor Ahmadinejad really want to change much of the status quo, but neither are they toothless jokes. They’re power-hungry politicians that serve as excellent vehicles for an entrenched group of politically-powerful individuals in their respective countries who want to keep themselves comfortable, even if it means turning Iran into the next Myanmar or America into the newest banana republic. Rather than focusing on Perry and Ahmadinejad’s larger-than-life personalities, we should be carefully investigating who feeds their desires for power, and delve into the reasons why.
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Chas Carey
Chas Carey was born between Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns and raised in a loving New England Republican household that took a brief California detour. He’s written about politics off and on since 2006. His other work has shown up in places like NANO Fiction, ...
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