David McCloskey

but then it also has this theocratic underpinning or overpinning to it.

And then it also has, I would say, sort of elements of what, it's almost like a military autocracy, right?

In the extent to which some of the coercive institutions, in particular, the IRGC,

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps have become, I guess, a power center of the government itself, this sort of enforcer of the supreme leader's autocratic will, and deeply, deeply embedded in the economic structures, both official and unofficial.

inside the Islamic Republic.

So you have these kind of a lot of different layers to this thing.

But what has happened over the past, I don't exactly know where you draw the line, but certainly, you know, over the past 10 or 15 years has been that power is much more tightly concentrated around the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, and

The IRGC, the sort of military and security apparatus that keep the regime in power.

So it's become more concentrated elites.

Like, for example, I mean, Kareem Sajjadpour and Jack Goldstone have written a great article, by the way, I would commend to our listeners to read in The Atlantic, looking at sort of the conditions.

for revolution in Iran and each of these tripwires, if they've been tripped or not.

And they make the point that every living former president of Iran has been silenced or sidelined.

That you have these kind of elites that had maybe more of the political types, right, who

have less and less power in the system and in theory could develop connections with an opposition that would undermine some of this pillar.

There does not seem to have been any certainly senior level defections, obviously from the level of violence.

The units that have been put out to suppress the protests, to kill protesters, to make arrests, seem to have performed as requested and required by the regime.

There have been instances...

I think of some security units were either unable, obviously, to suppress protests or in some cases, I think, armed resistance to the regime.

And there have been some cases, it seems, where Iranian security forces have essentially said, look, we're not going to, we're just kind of going to let this happen, right?

We're not going to actually suppress the protest, right?