Baathism is a curious political movement, although right now, its one regime standing: the Assad regime of Bashar al Assad.

Baathism has some bad features and some good features.

The bad feature is that so far while in power in Iraq and Syria, it has mutated into a Leninist-style party dictatorship, if there were reasons in both cases why that was so as to local conditions almost asking for a highly centralized state in order to preserve any state at all.

Clearly the modern world has made such centralized systems of governance more brittle, if they are because of national security concerns never completely going to go away either, raising the question of does Baathism have any future at all?

Saddam's gone, and the de-Baathification process went rather far there, leaving only the Syrian Party left in power, or almost even openly professing to be Baathist, which if it totally went away might not be for the best.

The reason it might not be totally for the best is that Baathism did have some good features at one point in time, as it stood for religious tolerance relative to its main alternatives, which throughout the Arab world have been the Islamists, whether they were Brotherhood, Salafists, or Deobandists.

But,  if that part of Baathism, and related ideas of Nasserism, are to have any future as a counterweight, Bashar al Assad isn't going to be a part of that, as there's too much blood on his hands now.

finis