How the West Misunderstands Iran’s Middle Class - Part 1
The Iranian middle class is often discussed as a political force within Iran—conveniently imagined as highly aligned with Western values—but, in my opinion, seldom understood on its own terms. Whilst I intend to write separately about why Western definitions of social class do not map cleanly onto Iranian society, for the purpose of this series I will work within those already well-established Western frameworks—economic or political—as the core critique still stands, even if your definition of Iran’s middle class is not quite right.
Rather than posing yet another rhetorical question about how the West misunderstands Iranians, I will take a different route—by examining one example article, written by a respected Iranian-American scholar with experience on both sides of the divide. The piece was published by a prominent think tank housed in one of America’s most influential universities, and thus represents more than the author’s personal view. It reflects a broader pattern—one in which Western policy and academic circles tend to project their own ideals onto Iranian society. In this first instalment, I will focus on just a single paragraph—yes, just one paragraph of the entire article—a choice made deliberately to avoid turning this into a 400-page essay.
Priming the Reader
The offending paragraph in question starts with a perhaps benign, less contentious statement that reads: “The clash of civilizations jargon misses a very crucial sociohistorical fact about many of the societies in the Muslim Middle East. Iran is a prime example. Over the last 50 years, the lure of modernity, fueled by the power of petrodollars, has led to the creation of a rapidly burgeoning, increasingly ‘wired,’ surprisingly cosmopolitan Iranian middle class.”
This is the second paragraph in the article. What precedes it is largely irrelevant to our analysis and adds little meaningful context. In fact, for our purposes, you can ignore the opening clause—“The clash of civilizations...” and “Iran is a prime example.” What we are interested in begins with the sentence: “Over the last 50 years...”
The claims in this latter portion are neither particularly new nor especially controversial—and that is precisely the point. The author, whether deliberately or not, is buying your agreement upfront. This is a classic rhetorical move: the reader is gently nudged into consensus through familiar, agreeable framing, only to be guided—sentence by sentence—toward a more assertive, far less grounded conclusion.
Whilst I will not expand further on this technique here, it is important to acknowledge how often misleading ideas are introduced this way—subtly and with strategic pacing—including in spaces where ideas gain institutional weight: policymaking, media, academic publishing. And from there, they travel further, often unquestioned.
False Claims; Dubious Assumptions
The next two sentences in that paragraph are more revealing. In one telling line, the author asserts that “This middle class has much more in common with its Western counterparts than with its Muslim brethren.” The statement, despite its confidence, collapses under even basic scrutiny.
The problem here is twofold. First, Iran’s middle class is not some small, easily defined elite. And second, the term “Muslim brethren” is so vague as to be meaningless. Who, exactly, are these “Muslim brethren” they supposedly differ from? Are we assuming they are not supporters of ISIS—or that they are somehow ready to morally or financially support Israel as soon as the regime falls? Is the comparison about refusing the mandatory hijab, or opening gay bars in every major city in Iran? The sentence offers no direct insight, but lets the reader fill in the blanks—and those blanks, more often than not, are sketched with Western liberal fantasies. It is vague enough to evade critique, yet pointed enough to elicit ideological comfort.
To make sense of the scale involved, consider rough historical estimates: in the early 1970s, Iran’s middle class made up about 25% of the population. This grew to nearly half around the time of the 1979 revolution, declined to about 30% in the early 2000s, climbed back to 40% by 2005, peaked near 60% around 2011, and then fell again—to roughly 50% by 2019 and further down to 30% by 2023.
These numbers, of course, are approximate. Definitions vary, methodologies are inconsistent, and none of these figures are immune to challenge. That is precisely why I am not citing any one study here—not because the numbers are meaningless, but because the trend is what matters. Even a conservative estimate reveals this: Iran’s middle class is not a fringe. Even 25% of Iran’s population represents millions—far larger than the entire population of many countries. So if someone claims to know what this entire class believes, or what it resembles, the burden of proof is immense.
The next line builds on that: “Members of this middle class have often been trained and educated in Western—and, increasingly, American—universities.” Even within a Western framework—education, income, urban residence—the number of Iranians who have studied in the United States or Europe is minuscule relative to the size of the social class they are purported to represent.
Studying abroad remains a privilege available to only a few Iranians. It is not just a matter of money—it is also restricted by visa regimes and many other obstacles. And of those who do study abroad, many never return. In fact, university enrolment is often used as the first step toward securing permanent residency in a foreign country. After graduation, most stay and integrate into diaspora communities as professionals, researchers, or exiles—navigating a completely different set of cultural and economic realities.
And the few who do return? They often come back for a reason and also with less illusion about the West, not more ideological affinity. They may appreciate the systems—the sense of order, the infrastructure, the relative safety—but they are not campaigning to turn their own culture upside down and inside out simply to make it look more like the West. In many cases, exposure to the West deepens their ambivalence. They begin to see the cracks: the loneliness, the hyper-individualism, the loss of cultural anchoring. They may admire, even adopt, some of what they encountered abroad—but that does not make them evangelists of Western modernity.
Imagined Agents of Change
The author continues with the statement: “They constitute a veritable Trojan horse within the Islamic Republic, supporting liberal values, democratic tolerance, and civic responsibility.” A seemingly hard-to-dispute line.
It sounds plausible—even familiar—because many political theorists and subject matter experts will tell you that revolutions are often led by the middle class. And there is little doubt about many Iranians’ desire for a form of governance that fosters prosperity and imposes fewer religious restrictions. But what the author is implying here goes further: that the Iranian middle class already embodies the cultural blueprint of a liberal democracy—ready to reform or replace the current system.
This is not an observation. It is a rhetorical projection—part of a broader narrative in which a Western-compatible class quietly waits for the right conditions to facilitate democratic transformation. I am not going to tell you whether you should believe that premise or not. But the part I would suggest you pay attention to is the metaphor itself: the Trojan horse.
By calling the Iranian middle class a “veritable Trojan horse within the Islamic Republic,” the author makes the implication unmistakable. This class does not simply resemble Western citizens in taste or education—it serves as a concealed threat to the regime, influenced—if not directed—by Western ideals or powers.
This framing is seductive—particularly to policymakers who see the Islamic Republic not as a complex system to be understood, but as a problem to be solved. But it is far less flattering to many middle-class Iranians. In the original myth, the Trojan horse was not built by the Trojans themselves. It was constructed by the Greeks—an external force—as a trick to infiltrate the city and dismantle it from within.
Iran’s middle class—even in its most educated and globally connected layers—does not see itself as the fifth column in a Western project. It sees itself as a class under strain, constantly negotiating between inflation and identity, between a desire for reform and a fear of collapse. Some oppose the regime, yes. Others resent it but remain entangled in its economic structures. Many are politically disengaged—sceptical of both the state and the West, uncertain whom to trust.
To reduce this class to a covert agent of external transformation is, in my view, not only analytically weak. It is a moral error—to collapse a living, thinking population into an instrument of someone else’s vision.
The Illusion of Enlightenment
In the next move, the author essentially wraps the Iranian middle class in the soft glow of implicit intellectual elitism, claiming: “In an age when knowledge is power, they are their society’s most knowledge-savvy strata and can play a formative role in shaping Iran’s political culture and disposition.”
At first glance, this is not entirely wrong. Urban middle-income Iranians—particularly younger professionals—tend to have higher digital literacy, broader exposure to foreign media, and some degree of access to transnational educational currents. But "knowledge" is not a neutral good, nor is it a unifying force. It is filtered, fragmented, often contradictory—and deeply political in its emotional charge.
For example, in today’s Iran, tech-savvy individuals do not converge around a shared liberal ethos. They diverge. Some fall into hyper-nationalist Telegram channels. Some become weary organisers and thinkers. Others end up defending positions that seem incoherent from a Western point of view—anti-abortion, pro-socialised medicine, pro-climate change and against taxing the wealthy, all at the same time. These are not anomalies. They are symptoms of an informational environment in which ideological boundaries are not inherited, but assembled.
And more importantly, even those with high information literacy often do not trust what they read. Every source is suspect. Western media is seen as agenda-driven, local outlets as compromised, opposition media as click-thirsty. The very act of consuming knowledge becomes tactical. People do not ask, is this true? They ask, who benefits if I believe this?
In such a landscape, "knowledge" is not enlightenment. It is survival. And to suggest that Iran’s digitally literate class will organically steer the country toward liberal democracy is to confuse the availability of information with its usefulness, or even its legibility.
This is another layer of oversimplification, this time wrapped in the flattering language of "knowledge" and perhaps "tech literacy." It is a classic technocratic fallacy: assuming that access to information, or even fluency in digital tools, equates to liberal rationality or progressive activism. In Iran—as in many non-Western societies—this simply does not hold. Not because people are less informed, but because the informational ecosystem itself is fragmented, contested, and heavily shaped by geopolitical suspicion and cultural memory.
Strategic Fantasies
The last two sentences of the paragraph read: “Whoever succeeds in forging an alliance with this emerging middle class will shape the future of Iran. Fortunately, American foreign policy in the past was well cognizant of this important point.”
On the surface, this may sound pragmatic—even visionary. The idea that Western powers should pay attention to Iran’s middle class is not wrong. Engagement matters. Listening matters more. But the problem is that the “middle class” being imagined here is not a class at all. It is a construct—a polished, ideologically sympathetic version of Iranian society, stripped of its contradictions, its internal frictions, and its lived ambiguity.
Even more troubling is the historical context: this piece was actually written in April 2003. And although you may find some similarities between what has been said and Iran today, twenty-two years ago, it was a very different society. I was living in Tehran at the time. The Iranian middle class I lived and worked with in the early 2000s is not what is being pictured here at all. Just to give you an example: many of the 30–40% of middle-class Iranians back then had never left the country, let alone been trained in Western universities. And even now, all these years later, that remains indisputably true.
If anything, the past two decades have shown that Iran’s middle class cannot be simply courted or co-opted by foreign policy overtures. If that were the case, the ruling regime would have been gone by now. For anyone who has not lived in Iran in the past few years, it would be almost impossible to understand the pressures that all Iranians are under—including its middle class—yet no major change has been achieved in terms of the structure of the governance in Iran, despite the quality of life reducing day-by-day, if not hour-by-hour.
This is not to say that all hope is lost and Iran and Iranians are stuck with what they have. Certainly not. In fact, I do believe there is a lot of hope for a brighter future for Iran. What I do not find useful is political wishful thinking—which, mind you, is extremely common between Iranians.
By framing a highly curated, ideologically aligned image of Iran’s middle class as a strategic partner—and implying that American policy once wisely recognised this—the author is not just offering analysis; he is advocating alignment. The idea of alignment is not inherently problematic. It is both rational and often necessary for states to seek common ground with actors in other societies who appear to share compatible aspirations—whether in governance, economic policy, or cultural outlook. The issue emerges when that alignment is pursued on the basis of a misrepresented counterpart—when the image of the “other side” is less an observation than a projection.
The middle class presented here is not a reflective portrait of Iranian society—it is a projection. A version of Iran’s middle class that is conveniently Westernised, politically liberal, and ideologically available. This fantasy allows policymakers and analysts to imagine a latent ally within Iran, ready to activate as soon as conditions allow. But that vision is deeply misleading. It encourages engagement not with a real social group, but with a symbolic construct—one that aligns more with Western aspirations than with the lived reality of middle-class Iranians.
This is seductive diplomacy-by-fantasy: foreign policy not grounded in social reality, but in the reassurance of familiar ideals. And when that fantasy collapses—as it often does—the result is disillusionment, miscalculation, and further erosion of mutual trust.
To engage meaningfully with this segment of Iranian society, Western powers must first deconstruct their own illusions about it. They must learn to see not a “Trojan horse”—but a contested, evolving, internally diverse population whose political imagination does not align neatly with imported categories.
Understanding Iran’s middle class begins not with identifying allies—but with relinquishing fantasies.
And here is the paragraph in its entirety—written by the well-known Iranian-American academic Abbas Milani, in an article titled “Can Iran Become a Democracy?”, published by the Hoover Institution in April 2003.
“The clash of civilizations jargon misses a very crucial sociohistorical fact about many of the societies in the Muslim Middle East. Iran is a prime example. Over the last 50 years, the lure of modernity, fueled by the power of petrodollars, has led to the creation of a rapidly burgeoning, increasingly “wired,” surprisingly cosmopolitan Iranian middle class. This middle class has much more in common with its Western counterparts than with its Muslim brethren. Members of this middle class have often been trained and educated in Western—and, increasingly, American—universities. They constitute a veritable Trojan horse within the Islamic republic, supporting liberal values, democratic tolerance, and civic responsibility. In an age when knowledge is power, they are their society’s most knowledge-savvy strata and can play a formative role in shaping Iran’s political culture and disposition. Whoever succeeds in forging an alliance with this emerging middle class will shape the future of Iran. Fortunately, American foreign policy in the past was well cognizant of this important point.”