Foucault, Khomeini and Trump: a strange story

Adopting a view shared by most of his voters, Donald Trump has made the fight against gender ideology a central tenet of his political project. In fact, this issue was one of the first areas of convergence with Elon Musk before their notable political split. The attack on Iran, in this sense, brings about a perplexing turn of events; this is what we will attempt to explain in this article.

Strange as it may seem, the story begins neither in Tehran nor in Washington in 2026, but in Paris in 1978. During the final years of the Shah's regime, a segment of the European left, led primarily by Michel Foucault (1926-1984), interpreted the then-nascent Iranian revolution as a kind of Iranian revolution. They viewed the opposition to the Pahlavi dynasty as a national liberation movement promoting an unprecedented revolt, with (imaginary) components of a mental revolution. Somewhere between unconscious idealization and conscious, dishonest distortion, this perspective contributed to the international legitimization of Khomeini, presented as a spiritual leader capable of articulating an alternative to Western capitalism and Soviet communism.

In his collaborations of 1978 and 1979 in Corriere della Sera Foucault described the Iranian Islamist movement in exile as an unprecedented form of –let's say– spiritual policyThe reader can find these texts online: they display an alarming lack of clarity. This fascination led some progressive sectors to downplay the obvious theocratic and totalitarian elements of Khomeini's project and (re)interpret them as mere tactical instruments. Simultaneously, some parties and organizations provided logistical and, above all, media support to the Islamist opposition in exile. It should be noted that Khomeini never engaged in any ambiguity: we are talking, then, about pure self-deception which, viewed in retrospect, is astonishing.

However, the poststructuralist dinners of hard work that Foucault wrote as a special correspondent for the Italian newspaper They disregarded the internal complexity of Iranian society and, above all, the central role of women in the revolution. Female students, workers, professionals, and activists participated massively in the demonstrations and strikes. Their presence in the streets was one of the elements that most surprised European observers. When, shortly after the revolutionary triumph, Khomeini announced the mandatory use of the veil and the strict application of Sharia law, many of these activists took to the streets again. However, the protests were downplayed, or even ignored, by the same European circles that had embraced an idealized interpretation of the new regime. The struggle of these women has continued to this day amidst brutal repression.

What fascinated Foucault was not so much the figure of Khomeini as a mass mobilization capable of challenging a modernized state supported by the United States. He wanted to see a form of politics that escaped European frameworks—neither Marxist, nor liberal, nor nationalist in the classical sense—and which he described as a confluence of spirituality and politics. This illusory perception, which was later heavily criticized, assessed religion as an emancipatory force as long as it was in a non-Western context (Christianity, for example!). One of the most negative aspects of Foucault's position was his lack of attention to the demands of Iranian women, as well as the terrible situation of homosexuals (like himself). Some intellectuals who traveled to Tehran to support the women protesters, such as the feminist writer Kate Millett, harshly criticized the position of Judith Butler's main intellectual influence—paradoxically, Butler is today one of the bêtes noires of the MAGA movement as the architect of gender ideology—Thus, Trump's attack on Iran closes a strange circle. Or perhaps not so strange...

Over time, Foucault's position has become a paradigmatic example of how European intellectuals can misinterpret non-Western political movements when they view them through their own categories and intend to present them as "empirical proof" of their convictions. The issue, however, has much deeper roots and would be very difficult to summarize in a few lines (I documented it in an essay that, of course, I won't cite).