Anchorage Daily News

The troubles in Iran remind us of the elusive nature of truly democratic institutions, our own checkered history in their defense and the prospects for renewal at home.

How strange it is that we now take up the cause of an apparent winning faction in an election as if it were a revolutionary effort.

The reality is that it would do no more than replace one candidate with another, each handpicked by a council of clerical, constitutional guardians. Not withstanding the excitement, neither candidate would disturb theocratic rule or reorder the constitutional structure. This structure has been the choice of the Iranian people since the shah, a more secular absolute ruler, was thrown out in a real revolution. One is reminded of the French Revolution, but we will come back to that.

Though Iran is on the other side of the world, America, enthralled by oil power, has played a major role in its constitutional history, leaving a well-earned legacy of anger and distrust. It was our country, through the manipulations of the CIA, pursuing Cold War strategy, that destroyed a democratically elected, secular government of Iran, believing that the new president would be too cozy with the Russians. We replaced this government with a shah.

Iran's leading cleric fled the shah's regime to successfully plot his overthrow under the protective wing of France. Opponents of the shah, rallying behind the charismatic leadership of the ayatollah, installed an equally autocratic, fully theocratic government.

France is consciously the home of modern revolutionary traditions. Above the entry to public buildings, the motto "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite" is chiseled in stone. Yet France's Glorious Revolution, violently rejecting monarchy and theocracy, was soon followed by a reign of terror, succeeded successively by an imperial military dictatorship under Napoleon Boneparte, a return to republicanism, an autocratic monarchy under Napoleon's nephew, and multiple stumbles through forms of republicanism until finding a more or less stable system after the Second World War. France is now ruled by a president with powers superior to those of a U.S. president, elected to a five year term, while continuing its dedication to liberty, equality and fraternity.

French liberty is expressed in many ways, including a stronger measure of employee rights than is recognized in the U.S.

Equality includes free access to higher education for those possessed of determination and talent. California once emulated this example but today access to higher education is heavily tilted in favor of economic elites. French fraternity includes a more comprehensive and successful system of universal public health and other attributes of responsibility to our brothers and sisters that Americans tend to reject as "socialism."

The American motto, "E Pluribus Unum," is a giveaway that our American revolution was less revolution and more war of colonial liberation. Our first value was to stick together so that England, France and Spain did not recolonize our states one by one.

Fortunately, the spirit, if not the fact, of the French Revolution was abroad when we had our revolution or we might have ended up a constitutional kingdom.

We had our revolution, now described in history books as the Civil War, but Southern elites soon reaffirmed their power and our "Council of Constitutional Guardians" (the Supreme Court), which also decides close elections, soon turned the constitutional amendments designed to consolidate the revolution into bastions of protection for corporate property rights.

It was not until Brown v. Board of Education, the unrest of the '60s and the Civil Rights Acts of the Johnson administration that the revolution, with some cost in martyrs' blood, was realized.

Still, America has progressed toward France's revolutionary goals through a series of soft revolutions. The First Amendment and the Establishment Clause barred theocratic tendencies from the beginning.

Pity the poor Iranians. One fears that before a truly modern state emerges, it will repeat steps similar to those that mark French history.

The American Dream, newly articulated by President Obama, is far from finished. Be grateful for the flavors added by the revolutionary fervor of the French, with their commitment to liberty, equality and fraternity, even today, a beacon of hope for the future.

John Havelock served as a White House Fellow during the Johnson administration.

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