The eruption of widespread protests in Iran in January 2018 had material causes which have been enumerated by various scholars. Unemployment, inflation, financial insecurity of the workers as a result of the privatization of state-owned factories are among the factors that have been commonly alluded to in the discussions around the grievances of the protestors. Moreover, many studies of the economic policies of the post Iran-Iraq war administrations deem these as neoliberal, and some scholars argue neoliberalism to be the source of the aforementioned grievances. Nevertheless, attention is rarely paid to how this shift towards neoliberalism has transformed the ideology of the Islamic Republic. The pseudo-leftist literature of Ayatollah Khomeini, with its emphasis on the "disinherited" and the "dispossessed" had probably an important role in popularizing his discourse and the rise of the Islamic Republic to power. The Islamic Republic retained these notions within its official discourse, and even a decade after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini the claim of representing and defending the "disenfranchised" against the "pain-alien rich" was still an important constituent of the ideology of the Islamic Republic. Such claims have faded out for a long time, however, and it seems that the American Dream has become a more important source of inspiration in the more contemporary manifestations of the ideology of the regime. While the ideal figure of the propaganda apparatus of the Islamic Republic used to be an ascetic pious person ready to sacrifice his life and belongings for his beliefs and country, the new ideal figure is a wealthy entrepreneur relying on nothing but his own hard work and entitled to his wealth as well as the praise of the society. Through content analysis of TV programs and other cultural products, this paper will offer an image of this recent version of the ideology of the Islamic Republic and discuss how it represents neoliberal ideals. Moreover, it will investigate the implications of this ideological shift for the relation between the Islamic Republic and the lower classes, and the possible role of this transformed relations in the protests of January 2018.