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Iran today stands at a critical political and social juncture marked by deep structural crises, a dramatic erosion of social capital, and widespread public disillusionment with the ruling clerical regime. The regime’s grip on power increasingly relies on two crutches: the pursuit of a nuclear bomb and a sharp increase in domestic repression, including executions. This fragile and reactive state of governance reveals a regime struggling to survive.
No day passes without regime officials, supporters, and state-run media issuing alarmist warnings about the collapse of social trust and legitimacy. One recurring theme is their concern over the younger generation—a demographic that has effectively outgrown the regime in beliefs, culture, politics, and aspirations for the future. For over two decades, and especially in recent years, this generation has posed an existential challenge to the theocratic establishment.
The regime’s desperation has reached the point of proposing “neighborhood-based management” initiatives to rebuild social capital—efforts that involve mobilizing institutions like the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and the Basij. These are not social programs in the typical sense, but rather attempts to restore control through militarized community monitoring.
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Public hatred for the regime has become so deeply rooted that the clerics often portray this rejection as a war against “God and His saints.” This theological framing is used to demonize dissent, especially among the youth. The disdain of the younger generation is regularly acknowledged by officials, albeit in indirect or coded language.
One such instance occurred on June 4, 2025, when Mehdi Mandegari—a cleric who presents himself as a scholar of both the seminary and university—spoke on Isfahan Network Television. He lamented: “The enemies have worked hard to stop people from hearing the words of God and His saints. Today, the enemy is even trying to prevent us—those raised in mosques—from hearing divine messages. How many times a day do you check your phone’s messages? A hundred times? But how often do you open God’s message box, the Quran? Not once.”
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What Mandegari inadvertently reveals is a profound crisis: the regime’s own base is increasingly disengaged from the ideological foundations that once sustained the clerical regime.
Nowhere is this disintegration more visible than in cyberspace. Ironically, while the regime boasts of a vast cyber army—estimated to be in the millions—it is Iranian citizens who dominate virtual platforms with defiant and revelatory content. These online activities consistently unsettle the regime’s ideologues, despite their unimpeded access to digital tools and censorship mechanisms that are denied to ordinary people.
Repeated statements from political and religious officials testify to this failure of the regime’s digital propaganda apparatus. Despite relentless efforts to portray dissident online voices as tools of foreign enemies, these narratives are increasingly falling flat. Mandegari warned: “The greatest threat today comes from cyberspace, which is backed by the enemies of religion—the U.S., Europe, England, and the Zionists. Their goal is to stop the younger generation from hearing the words of God, the Prophet, and the Leader [Ali Khamenei].”
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Such declarations expose the regime’s growing inability to enforce ideological conformity. After more than four decades, the regime is witnessing the collapse of its once-powerful religious rhetoric. Attempts to link the Supreme Leader to divine authority are now seen by many Iranians as cynical and manipulative. The market for religious demagoguery is not just shrinking—it’s being actively boycotted by the public.
This sentiment was reflected in another comment from Mandegari: “Who is the enemy of God’s guardian today? Certainly, if prophets and saints were alive today, their enemy would be America, Israel, and England. But now, even people in mosques are afraid to chant ‘Death to America!’”
Such remarks, widespread across regime-affiliated media, illustrate a deep and widening rift between the state and society. What we are witnessing is not just a crisis of legitimacy—it is the slow but steady unraveling of the regime’s social contract. The confrontation between the people and the regime is approaching a decisive phase. The future of Iran may well be determined by which of these two poles ultimately prevails.