The Empire Problem
Who Inherits Power When a Political Order Falls?
Throughout political history, a scene seems to play out time and time again. We seldom recognize it as it unfolds.
A regime falls. The tyrant is assassinated, exiled, or arrested. The statues come down, and someone gives a speech about freedom. But quickly the world discovers that the tyrant wasn’t, in fact, the system itself. The system was everything built around him.
That is what makes the current situation in Iran so interesting. The Economist recently reports that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is consolidating power and increasingly filling the political vacuum. The Guards are hardly new to Iranian politics. For decades they have accumulated military, economic, political, and security power.
But if the current trajectory continues, something rather remarkable may be happening: the Islamic Republic may be changing from one kind of concentrated political order into another. That raises a question much bigger than Iran alone. What happens when the people at the top change, but the machinery of power still runs?
I am going to make what may be an unforgivably nerdy comparison. Imagine that the Galactic Empire—from the Star Wars universe—is finally defeated. The Emperor is dead (and I am totally going to go ahead and ignore the sequels here). The Death Star is destroyed, again, and the Rebels have won. But, now what?
Because it’s not like you can simply unplug the Empire, take out the Old Republic console, and plug it back in. The political environment that produced the Old Republic no longer exists. The Empire spent decades , destroying competing institutions, militarizing politics, eliminating alternative centers of power, and teaching an entire generation that political order comes from the barrel of a blaster. It has created an entirely different political world.
The Rebels have therefore inherited a fundamentally different environment from the one that existed before the Empire. Ideas, like organizations, don’t develop in a vacuum. They evolve in response to the environments in which they exist. That environment helps determine what kinds of ideas thrive, which organizations survive, what kinds of people rise within them, what kinds of behavior become rational, and ultimately what kinds of political arrangements become possible. This is one reason revolutions so often produce governments that look surprisingly familiar. Not because the revolutionaries secretly wanted the old system, but because power has its own logic.
Revolutionary Russia, Iran, and America
Consider the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks overthrew the Tsar, but they did not overthrow the idea that Russia required a highly centralized state. They inherited a country accustomed to autocratic government, centralized administration, political repression, enormous bureaucracy, and mobilization through coercion.
The Bolsheviks brought a radically different ideology and promised an entirely different social order. But then they built one of the most centralized political systems in modern history. Tsarist Russia and Soviet Russia were obviously not the same thing. But while the revolution changed who possessed power and why they claimed to possess it, it didn’t eliminate the advantages of possessing that concentrated power. The Bolsheviks discovered that the machinery they had inherited was useful. They simply put a different driver in the driver’s seat, and the machinery once again began to shape the people operating it.
Iran offers an even more striking example. The Shah’s regime was authoritarian, centralized and explicitly monarchical. Political legitimacy flowed upward toward the Shah, and the state maintained itself through bureaucracy, patronage, ideology, economic power and coercion.
Then came the Iranian Revolution. The monarchy was overthrown, and the Shah fled. The revolutionaries rejected the ideological foundation of the monarchy. But concentrated authority did not disappear. Instead, it was reorganized around an entirely different conception of legitimacy. The Shah’s Imperial State became Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Republic. Divine right was replaced by velayat-e faqih, the guardianship of the Islamic jurist. The people at the top changed, but concentrated political authority did not disappear.
Over the following decades, the IRGC became something considerably larger than an ordinary military organization, accumulating military, economic, political and security power until it became one of the central pillars of the state. We may now be watching that institution become more powerful still. There is a profound lesson here. Revolutions can destroy one justification for concentrated power without destroying the capacity for concentrated power. Sometimes they merely change the justification.
And this is where the American Revolution becomes particularly noteworthy. Revolutions often involve a change in the people who wield power. The old ruling class is overthrown, and some new group—revolutionaries, military officers, party cadres—moves into the space that has been created. The American Revolution was revolutionary in an enormous sense: thirteen colonies broke from the British Empire and created a new sovereign political order.
But socially, it was remarkably conservative. The men who led the Revolution were not outsiders storming into government. They were already the political class of the colonies: legislators, lawyers, merchants, landowners, planters, judges, militia officers and political leaders. They already knew how to govern because they had been governing.
The Revolution removed the imperial layer, but many of the same networks became the governing elite of the new republic. This isn’t to say nothing changed. A great deal changed. The Revolution transformed political legitimacy, destroyed monarchy and created republican institutions. But there was also substantial continuity. The Americans didn’t have to invent a governing class, for they already had one. That may be one reason their transition was so different.
This suggests that perhaps the most important question about a revolution isn’t simply whether the old regime falls, but who can take its place. The French Revolution destroyed the Ancien Régime but eventually produced Emperor Napoleon I. The Russian Revolution destroyed the Tsar but eventually produced Stalin. The Iranian Revolution destroyed the Shah but produced Khomeini’s Islamic Republic—and ultimately an enormously powerful IRGC. The American Revolution destroyed the imperial yoke of Britain, but the people who had already been governing the colonies were largely still there.
Different revolutions, different outcomes. Arguably, the difference then had less to do with how angry the revolutionaries were than with what political machinery existed when the old order broke. Because power is not merely a prize, but a capability. Someone still has to administer the government, collect taxes, control the military, and make decisions. A revolution can destroy the people doing those things, but can’t destroy the need for somebody to do them.
The Problem with Killing the Emperor
There is another paradox here. The most effective way to change a large institution is often to understand it well enough to operate from inside it. But once you become good at operating inside the institution, the institution begins changing you.
The old revolutionary becomes the new administrator. The dissident becomes the department chair. The maverick who raged against the machine discovers that the machine is remarkably useful when you’re the one sitting at the controls. By the time the underdog becomes the top dog, he often looks suspiciously like the old boss. Not necessarily because he was evil all along, but because he inherited the same machine.
This is where the Iranian story becomes relevant to Americans. Not because the United States is secretly Iran; it isn’t. But because the same underlying mechanics apply. Our political arguments tend to focus on who controls institutions, but the more pressing questions are: What does the institution reward? What behavior does it select for? What dependencies does it create? What alternatives does it eliminate? And what happens to the people who successfully take control of it?
A political movement can replace the people at the top without changing the underlying system. The faces change, but typically the bureaucracy and concentrations of political and economic power remain. This is why simply identifying the “bad guys” isn’t enough. You must understand the structure that made them powerful.
Which brings me back to Star Wars, because I think the analogy really does work. The problem with the Empire isn’t simply that there’s one evil man at the top. The problem is that the Empire has reorganized the galaxy around centralized power. Kill the Emperor, and you haven’t necessarily destroyed the Empire. You’ve destroyed the person currently sitting at its center.
The root problem isn’t always who’s in power, sometimes it’s power itself. Every system of power creates incentives for self-preservation and expansion. Every bureaucracy wants resources, every institution wants authority, and every person who acquires power has reasons to retain it.
Before his death, much of the discussion of political change in Iran understandably centered on Khamenei himself. He was, after all, the extraordinarily powerful figure sitting atop the system and one of the principal obstacles to its transformation. But that is precisely the danger of confusing the person who controls the machinery with the machinery itself. Removing Khamenei did not remove the institutions, security forces, patronage networks, or concentrations of power that had accumulated beneath him.
That doesn’t make all political systems morally equivalent. It means something simpler: The people operating a system aren’t the only thing that matters. The system operates on the people operating it. That is why I’m suspicious of that identify one villain and assume that eliminating the villain will make everything better.
This may ultimately be the most useful lesson of the American example. Political change is easier when you have something capable of replacing what you destroy. The American revolutionaries already possessed institutions, political traditions, local governments and—crucially—people who knew how to operate them.
That didn’t make the Revolution bloodless or egalitarian. It certainly didn’t mean everyone benefited from the new order. But they didn’t have to build political society from scratch. They had something to inherit, and that may be the real question for Iran. Not just who rules, but instead what kind of political system has been created that makes those people capable of ruling it?
That question applies to all of us. The object of political change is not merely to put the right people on the throne. It’s to build a world in which the wrong people can’t do nearly as much damage when they inevitably find their way there. You can’t merely seize power; you have to be ready to wield it. And, more importantly, you have to build a system capable of surviving whoever eventually does.
The implication for policymakers is that regime change—even with ethics and international law aside— should never be understood simply as the removal of a regime. The important question is what institutions, networks, bureaucracies, security organizations, and political classes are positioned to inherit the state if the old order actually breaks.
