From a temporarily secure and undisclosed location (when not in the streets), a former student of mine who's freelancing in Tehran for a European newspaper and two online publications is telling the untold story behind the opposition demonstrations.

I won't light up his name by linking him right now, but here's his find: Many Iranians who voted for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad voluntarily and with a clear conscience are deciding that he used them to consolidate power in ways they don't like. Yes, Ahmadinejad had legitimate electoral support. But where is it now?

The answer, almost literally, is blowin' in the wind: The next 24 hours should tell whether the regime can suppress the rising anger. The clerks and teachers my former student describes aren't all taking to the streets; they're asking neighbors with friends in the thuggish militia,"Don't the Basij have parents, don't they have children?" Such appeals to decency from Ahmadenijad voters matter in nationalistic, "revolutionary" Iran.

Yes, the opposition is more classically liberal, or civic-republican, than it is revolutionary, let alone "progressive" as many Americans use that term. It says it wants to redeem the Islamic revolution that overthrew the Shah. The American Revolution was conservative in some of the ways the current Iranian opposition is: It was a civic-republican revolution, not as radically democratic as the French Revolution (or as President Sarkozy's rhetoric about Tehran). It sought to confirm as many things as it overthrew.

Never mind that the usual infestation of neocon revolver journalists and provocateurs, such as Elliott Abrams, Daniele Pletka, and Robert "Boom Boom" Kagan, are touting the opposition because they want it to lose. Partly that's because it's in their nature: Every cause they attach themselves to loses, in ways and for reasons the writer Walter Benjamin described in the 1930s, but I'll save that for another time. The main reason the neocons are jumping up and down in unison this time is that they want the opposition to have a glorious defeat (which their support helps to ensure) that will darken the current Iranian regime as a foil for their latest, most stupid war-mongering. Ignore them.

The current regime is odious, but who was defending it? Anyone in America with power, and not just a big mouth, should back the opposition without the scorching rhetoric of "Boom Boom" and John McCain as a prelude to war -- and without searching for an Iranian Ahmed Chalabi to present to what we laughingly call "the intelligence community." Anyone with power has to behave moderately, as Obama is doing. At this stage, change really will have to come from within the Iranian people, in ways my source is describing and in ways neocons, creatures that they are of the national-security state, viscerally can't understand.

The regime behind the Iranian elections was anticipated by Edward Gibbon, who wrote that when Augustus, the Roman emperor who posed as a savior of the republic, "framed the artful system of Imperial authority, his moderation was inspired by his fears. He wished to deceive the people by an image of civil liberty, and the armies by an image of civil government... In the election of the magistrates, the people, during the reign of Augustus, were permitted to expose all the inconveniences of a wild democracy. That artful prince, instead of [showing] the least symptom of impatience, humbly solicited their [votes] for himself, for his friends and scrupulously practiced all the duties of an ordinary candidate..."

Beneath the smiles, of course, was the iron fist. I don't know whether the Iranian Augustus who tried to play the "wild democracy" card in Tehran is the smiling Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or the smiling Ahmadinejad, or both, as the latter moves to try to "share" power with the former. But while the crackdown may silence opposition's voices, millions of Iranians have made irreversibly clear they aren't settling for a grinning Augustus.

The courage, pride and discipline of these crowds - and, I must add, their sheer civility -- is palpable partly because most Iranians are "conservative" and wise in the sense that, far from challenging religion, they are drawing on it and claiming to purify it, as the American civil-rights movement did.

The operative principle here, as in the American South, Gandhi's India, and even in Poland in 1989, is that although religion is dangerous and odious whenever it tries to rule in states, it is indispensable as an inspiration to the body politic, especially in an insurgency against great odds. Without it, republics often falter, but when it oversteps its bounds, they are lost.

In economics, most demonstrators in Tehran aren't Marxists any more than they're atheists. Nor, really, are they ardent capitalists. Right now, the economic crisis has been overshadowed by something more basic. While before the election Iranians spent a lot of time and energy debating the country's rate of inflation and alternative names for the Persian Gulf, my student notes, "That's forgotten now. The fight for more elemental aspects of political life has superseded the issues of the election; in the streets there is a desire to name simple facts and to call them such and treat them such: facts like election ballots, facts like gun shots fired at innocent bystanders. The demonstrators are bound together by their desire for truth."

Call it God's truth, or natural law, or human rights: This movement of its ordinary bearers may be asphyxiated tonight or tomorrow by the crackdown that keeps me from mentioning my former student's name. Or it could be perverted and derailed, as it was in Iraq, by its would-be neocon champions. But something irreversible and, I think, more constructive, has happened, and it will be vindicated, even if not tonight or tomorrow.