The Drumbeat of Revolution: A Short History of a Label

I’ve spent most of my career studying revolutions yet every time people are out in the streets in Iran and the Western media activates the Iran revolution cottage industry, I chafe. A colleague recently asked: Why does it matter what it’s called? It’s just a label. At the end of the day, we’re in a situation of bloodshed and violence with no good path ahead.

My colleague’s question has stayed with me. Why indeed does it matter what it’s called? Why does my blood boil when Karim Sadjadpour and Jack Goldstone publish a piece in the Atlantic declaring that Iran has met the 5 conditions for revolution? Why do I roll my eyes when commentators hold forth about this being a revolution, sometimes hedging their bets by saying perhaps not a classic one but a revolution nonetheless.

Why does the label matter?

“America’s role in the world is to support democratic freedom fighters against nasty tyrants…Iran is now in a revolutionary condition. It fulfills every requirement: social, economic, political and existential. Damned if I understand how, when thousands of Iranian demonstrators are rounded up, tortured and killed, nobody says ‘boo.’” These words sound familiar but they’re not from last week. They were uttered in 2003, mere months after the US invasion of Iraq, by Michael Ledeen of Iran-Contra fame and a vocal neocon with a focus on Iran.

Much has changed since then. In Iran we have had the Green Movement in 2009, the demonstrations in 2017-18, 2019, 2021, “Women, Life, Freedom” in 2022, the June war in 2025. Michael Ledeen himself died in May 2025. But his comments back when Iranians still seemed hopeful for some kind of internal reform point to the fact that parallel to what is happening inside the country, parts of the US policy world have been invested in and worked hard to label internal unrest in Iran as revolution in order to “say boo.”

Ideas and labels have a history and that history matters. In this case, to quote Gary Sick from the same article, in US corridors of power, revolution was a way to get the regime change the US has wanted in Iran since 1979 “on the cheap.” The word revolution, far more than any other word—revolt, protest, demonstration—legitimizes intervention. The fact that the Trump administration is examining options for attacking Iran in response to the regime’s brutal suppression of protests was not born in December of 2025 when the current protests began. It’s the culmination of decades of a label being used so often that its history finally has disappeared, and its roots hidden inside the pain and anger Iranians are feeling today.

To be very clear: I am not talking about the facts on the ground in Iran, its protests, its ongoing demonstrations, scores of people killed for the simple fact that they are asking for a chance to live. To me, that reality exists and evolves through its own history and its own logic. That reality indeed does not need or care for a label. And as of this moment, we who are sitting behind our phones and computers on the outside, barely know what is going on. There are trickles of videos showing people in the streets shouting freedom, death to the dictator, and yes, some even calling for the return of the son of the king who was deposed in 1979. The little that has come out in the form of phone calls here and there or a stray text message tell of a country and a people in full lock-down. Even communication within the country seems to be limited to word of mouth. Yet still people are pushing against it all with their bodies.

What I am trying to understand is what the drumbeat of revolution in Western media is doing and how it ties into a particular discourse of regime change that has been chugging along for decades, sometimes intersecting with the reality on the ground and sometimes not.

The following three things can be true simultaneously:

Labels, words, concepts, ideas have a history. And it behooves us to know that history.

Revolutions are unpredictable. Their overwhelming power tied to that unpredictability.

What is going on today in Iran might be a revolution. It might not. But regardless, it does not make the dire conditions that people found and continue to find themselves in any less—or more—in need of our attention.