Revolutionary regimes cycle from ideological domination back to pragmatist rule once passion cools.

Evidence

Each side has certain advantages. The ideologues have the better rhetoric, the stronger appeal, the greater popular support. The pragmatists are better equipped to deal with the practical problems of government, at home and abroad. Part of their pragmatism is to try to avoid an open clash with the ideologues. When they fail, and a clash occurs, they are usually defeated, since in a time of revo­ lutionary change the ideologues are better placed to mobilize support. … The ide­ ologues rule, and since the practical problems remain, in time a new group of pragmatists emerges among the victorious ideologues, and the conflict is re­ newed, usually with the same result. The process continues until the revolution­ ary passion is spent, and a group of pragmatists survives, succeeds, and remains in power. Then the ways of government return to normal, and the ideologues return to the world of theory and preaching from which the revolution had enabled them, briefly, to emerge. It would seem that this stage has not yet been reached in Iran. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1498

Categorization

• XREF: Presents a cyclical model of revolutionary consolidation that generalizes beyond Islam to any mass revolution — useful comparative mechanism for why regimes ‘return to normal’ — echoing Tocqueville-type arguments the reader likely holds in the Said cluster.
• QUESTION: Lewis asserts Iran has not yet reached the post-passion pragmatist stage (in the early 1990s). Worth checking what later Iranian history does to this prediction.
• SEED: A structural argument that ‘ideologues govern better short-term, pragmatists better long-term’ challenges flat Orientalist accounts of Islamic politics as irrational fanaticism — useful for an essay on Western misreading of Iranian politics as purely ideological.