Firstly, no other totalitarian system has incorporated such a high degree constitutionally codified democratic competition in the ruling order and in its ideology. Political competition is systematised in the form of regularly held elections in which rivals espouse different platforms within the framework of the agreed upon rules of the game, just as do political parties within capitalist frameworks. The difference between Democrats and Republicans in the US is not much greater than that between reformists and conservatives in Iran. Of course, these trends in Iran are not actual political parties, but then neither are the Republicans and Democrats, at least not in the conventional European sense. They are more in the nature of electoral leagues.
