The Grave Failure of the American Left
How did we miss the greatest injustice of all?
Imagine the following: President Trump, angry at Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters, pays for Russian mercenaries to be trained and armed to attack the protesters. Over the course of several years, thousands of Americans, most of them children, are killed in these attacks. The president does not try to deny it, and in fact, openly brags that by selling weapons to the mercenaries he is creating jobs for Americans.
The media covers the story, especially one notable attack where the mercenaries blow up a bus full of black school children, but the public by and large finds the matter to be of little interest. There is no public outrage, no protests, and aside from the people being killed, the rest of the country simply does not care. The left turns to issues it considers more important, like protesting Confederate statues, raising the minimum wage, or trying to get Biden to embrace universal healthcare. Twitter and social media breathlessly discuss the latest cases of cultural appropriation in young adult literature but remain conspicuously silent about the mass killings.
This is, obviously, a deeply implausible scenario. It is nearly impossible that anything like this could occur in the US and be met with a collective shrug of indifference. But what if it did? What would we think about the Americans who simply did not care that they and their government were helping to kill tens of thousands of their fellow countrymen? More to the point, what would we think about the American left, which prides itself on its commitment to social justice? How could it have nothing to say about this?
But while nothing like this is happening in the US, something comparable has been going on in Yemen for the past five years. It is not Russian mercenaries that we have been arming and training, but the Saudi Air Force, and it is not American protesters and children who have been getting killed, but Yemeni civilians and children.
How much of a moral difference does that make, though? If you think that every innocent person has an equally strong right to life, then killing an innocent Yemeni is as bad as killing an innocent American.
And yes, Yemen is fighting a civil war. But, obviously, killing civilians in war can be as wrong as killing them in peacetime. Indeed, there is little doubt that the US-Saudi coalition has, in their reckless bombing of civilian areas and health infrastructure, wrongfully killed many thousands of innocent people. Moreover, was Portland or some other major city to descend into anarchy and violence akin to a civil war, would we shrug at the Russian mercenaries indiscriminately killing Americans then? Somehow, I doubt it.
But the war in Yemen is complex, you might say. How can we know what to think about it?
Almost everything is extremely complex — just take the issue of reducing police violence or of universal healthcare. Those issues are as complex as Yemen’s civil war, with no simple solution in sight. Yet progressives usually do not let the complexity of these issues distract from emphasizing their moral importance. More relevantly, it is not necessary to know much at all about the war to know that bombing civilians and children should be presumed to be serious wrongs, unless a very compelling justification is given.
So what justifications have been given for helping to kill civilians?
I have seen three distinct ones:
- First, Obama supposedly got us involved to help get Saudi cooperation on the Iran nuclear deal. Since Trump has long since pulled out of that deal, that justification is moot.
- Second, Trump has said that selling bombs to the Saudis creates jobs for Americans. I don’t think I even need to bother refuting this as a good justification.
- Third, and with a little more sophistication, Mike Pompeo and others have claimed that by selling bombs to the Saudis we can help push them to avoid targeting civilians. This is deeply implausible for many reasons: civilian deaths have continued at an alarming pace, the US has not only failed to criticize Saudi Arabia’s conduct, it has actually helped to shield Saudi Arabia from international condemnation, and no Saudi pilots have ever been prosecuted or brought up on war crimes charges.
So the prominent justifications offered by our government are moot or laughably bad. There is enough out there about the atrocities of the war that you can read up on how horrific it is if you so choose: an estimated 80,000 children starved to death, 233,000 (mostly children) dead from the effects of the bombing, the largest cholera outbreak ever recorded… It does not take long to see that the war is a horrific thing and that our involvement in it has likely caused tens, if not hundreds of thousands of deaths, especially those of children under five. Instead of talking about the war itself, however, I want to focus on how and why those of us on the left have failed so utterly to do anything about it or even to care at all.
Causes
How have we gotten to this point where the people most committed to social justice in the world’s most powerful country have nothing to say about our complicity in what is quite probably the worst injustice in the world today?
I could be wrong, but I think there are several reasons for the left’s silence on Yemen. (To be clear, moderates and the right are at least equally to blame. I am focusing on the left because I am on the left and because our failure to take notice and speak out is especially glaring, given our supposed commitment to social justice.)
Lack of social cues.
We usually use emotions, not abstract reason, to reach moral judgments. Our emotional reactions, moreover, primarily come from those we identify with or who are in our ingroup. Yes, we can acknowledge in the abstract that children in Yemen have a right to life. But when it comes o our daily concerns, that is simply too far removed from our lived experience to mean much to us.
When the journalists you read, the people you follow on social media, and your friends are all acting outraged or horrified by something, that is a strong cue to you that it is wrong, and you will usually feel horrified and judge it to be wrong as well. The same goes in the other direction — with nobody outraged, nobody gets the cues to feel outraged. News articles about Yemen and the US’s involvement get shrugged off if they are noticed at all. There are deep evolutionary reasons why we are like this, and it helps to explain why some groups of people are indifferent to injustices that seem obvious to outsiders.
Since the vast majority of Americans (and activists and progressives) are not talking about Yemen, those emotional cues are absent. It is a circular and self-reinforcing problem.
Relative complexity.
Yemen’s civil war is complex, with many groups and outside agents involved. There is no side which is simply “the good guys,” and trying to untangle the whole thing takes an investment of time and energy, not something that many people are likely going to want to do for something that they do not have any emotional attachment to. But this complexity is not a justification for not learning more and demanding that our involvement in killing civilians be stopped unless better justifications are provided — see above.
Indirect involvement.
Our involvement in Yemen is (mostly) indirect. While American drones have long been uninvited guests to Yemeni wedding celebrations, the vast majority of the unjust bombing has been conducted by Saudi planes, flown by American-trained crews, using (until recently) American-supplied fuel, and dropping American-made bombs.
The public is usually only roused to oppose a war when Americans are dying or the war seems to be failing. With no Americans dying in Yemen and no consequences to us if Saudi Arabia loses, we simply don’t care, even those of us on the left.
Academia.
In many ways, much of the modern left has grown out of trends in academia. Activists are often college graduates and quite probably majored in sociology, critical race theory, or other humanities disciplines where they would have gotten a heavy dose of social justice theory and practice. Even if they had a different major, they likely had friends who had such majors. Moreover, college-educated people put out a large amount of the content on social justice — even if you haven’t gone to college yourself, if you are reading the news or blogs, you are probably exposed to the social justice work of the humanities.
As someone who has both taken and taught such courses, however, I can tell you a glaring shortcoming of them is that they almost never discuss foreign policy or international politics. The war in Yemen will almost certainly never be taught in a critical race theory class nor will Iranian sanctions be discussed in a philosophy course.
Of course, such topics might appear in international relations courses, but the approach there is almost always empirical. The end result is that the students and faculty who get taught to think about justice and oppression are exposed to little about the world outside the US, and those who study international relations are trained to think empirically rather than spend their time making moral evaluations.
Ideology.
A few years back, I had the pleasure to be a TA for a course on race, class, and gender. The class was, as you might have guessed, focused on the oppression and injustice of racism, classism, and the various forms of oppression that intersect with sex and gender.
But what is going on in Yemen does not neatly track these “isms”. It is not simply racism or Islamophobia — back when Trump enacted his “Muslim” travel ban, Yemen was one of the countries targeted. In a stirring show of solidarity, Americans around the country rushed to airports to protest the ban. It is hard to imagine them doing this if they held racist or xenophobic prejudices against Yemenis.
It is not imperialism, either, because the US has no interest in making Yemen into a colony. In any case, imperialism is a policy, not a psychological prejudice.
What we are left with, then, is an injustice which, while blindingly obvious to anyone who looks at it, does not neatly fit with the ideological framework the left has worked out over the past decades. Someone who does not care if she helps to kill Yemeni civilians cannot simply be called a racist or a xenophobe or an Islamophobe or an imperialist.
And our indifference is a form of prejudice rather than mere ignorance. If people simply did not know about Yemen, then, once told, they would be horrified, the way many Americans these days are when there is news of an unjustified police shooting. Yet when I have talked about Yemen to progressives, I get a range of reactions, none of which include horror and a pledge to take action or start protesting.
Progressive ways of talking also create problems when we talk about “privilege.” Unlike the unnamed prejudice that leads us to be horribly indifferent to the lives of Yemenis, it is possible to label “American privilege” or “first-world privilege,” but doing so, I have found, engenders a noticeably cool reaction. I am encouraged to talk about how I am privileged as a cis, straight, white, middle-class man (and I certainly am the beneficiary of unearned privilege in these regards), but any talk about how I (and usually my audience as well) am unfairly privileged by being born into a rich or powerful country shuts the discussion down rather quickly.
It is no mystery why talking about “American privilege” is anathema to progressives. The right has abused such language over the years to deny the evils of racism in American society. Talking about “American privilege” is, for some on the left, tantamount to denying white or other types of privilege.
But simply because the right has abused such language does not mean that there is no such thing as American privilege. There obviously is, and one obvious manifestation of it being the outrage and shock that many Americans have had about state violence directed against black Americans compared to the complete lack of concern when even more severe violence is directed against non-Americans, like Yemenis.
Threat inflation.
A casual perusal of blogs on Medium has informed me that crossing walk signals are racist, forms labeled “Caucasian” are racist, that identifying as “white” is racist, and, quite possibly, all white people are inevitably racist. These claims may or may not be true, but they are certainly commonplace in progressive circles.
Also increasingly common are claims that various acts that seem non-violent are “violence.” The most well-known one is that not protesting against racism or police violence is itself violence against black people. A very similar kind of language is talking about “not feeling safe” and its cognates. In a famous recent example, a trans writer published a letter about how having one of her colleagues sign a letter in support of free speech made her feel “unsafe” at work (presumably because JK Rowling had signed the same letter).
Perhaps it is a good thing that we are increasingly hyper-attuned to any hint of prejudice or oppression in our own society. The big problem with this, however, is that such attunement is not costless. Time and attention are, in the terms of economics, scarce resources. A front page only has so much space and individuals only have so much time to spend reading or watching videos. Time that we spend mustering outrage about things like white Americans wearing Chinese dresses or debating whether all white people are racist is time that we don’t have to talk about Yemen or what we are doing there.
Intensifying the language we use to talk about injustice also leads to a linguistic arms race. It is understandable why activists want to call various acts “violence” — it gets attention and makes an otherwise abstract injustice concrete and visceral. But it also means that other activists on different issues will have to use more visceral language in their own work to compete for scarce public attention.
The end result, I fear, is that it makes it harder to break through when talking about horrific wrongs on the scale of Yemen. If crosswalk signals are a manifestation of white supremacy, what the hell is the KKK? Or, more to the point, if signing a letter is violence, what is the war in Yemen? Using the term violence to describe both implies that in some way they are similar or equivalent, which is morally outrageous.
The form of violence we don’t talk about? Actually helping to bomb thousands of people.
Identity politics.
Part of the difficulty I face when talking about American privilege or Yemen comes undoubtedly from the simple fact that I am not a Yemeni myself, and, for some progressives, this matters quite a bit.
A key idea held by some on the left is that the position you (or your group) occupy in society determines how appropriate it is for you to talk about certain things and what criticisms you may raise. People in dominant groups are supposed to listen to people in subordinate groups and certainly not talk about things like American privilege.
The problem, however, is that Yemeni victims of the war are usually kept safely away from Americans. The reversal of the “Muslim ban” permitted green-card-carrying Yemenis to enter the US — usually doctors and scientists that the US wants for their skills. For the vast majority of Yemenis, the door to the US is firmly barred and virtually none are allowed to enter. Yes, if we wanted to, we could find their videos and testimony online or invite them to speak to us virtually, but we never have much interest in that.
Paradoxically, I think, while this tendency in identity politics helps foster inclusion and empower the voices of oppressed groups domestically, it helps to ensure that grave injustices against people in other countries cannot be discussed, at least not without a certain amount of difficulty. If people can only talk about their lived experiences, the experiences of those we bar from entering will not be heard by those of us in the US who have the power over their lives.
Now, I think there are many encouraging things about identity politics. I also suspect, however, that it does make it harder to talk to progressives about Yemen. Claims about American privilege and our shared complicity in the war in Yemen get interpreted differently because they come from me and not a Yemeni.
Much of the language and ideology of the woke left appears to be progressive and liberating. Against the background of our complicity in the horror in Yemen, however, the stream of academic and popular work analyzing pop culture and microaggressions in our own society are a form of severe negligence. Imagine if white academics and writers only ever spent time analyzing in detail the injustices done to white women and poor white people and completely ignored state violence against black people. We would, I think, not only view them as being complicit in the violence against black people but much of their work as morally negligent.
Other ideologies on the left seem to do even more to obscure culpability for the atrocities in Yemen. Take the view that dominant groups exercise all of the power in American society, and that subordinate groups have none. This gets most clearly articulated in the view that black people in the US have no power at all because the US system is a form of white supremacy.
What is the effect of thinking that large segments of the left have no power? With no power comes no responsibility. So who has a responsibility to speak out against the killing of Yemenis? Only white people? Only white men? Only straight white men? Only those who are middle class and up? Playing such games makes it less likely that a critical mass of protesters or awareness could ever be reached. The problem is that we all — rich and poor, black and white, male and female, are vastly richer, more privileged, and, yes, more powerful than the Yemenis we have been helping to kill. Denying this only makes it harder to stop the killings and obscures how we are all complicit.
Maybe you think that it is not my place to say these things, or that it is wrong of me to say that all Americans have some degree of power and are, like myself, complicit in what is going on in Yemen. Perhaps you even think that this is all just some elaborate manifestation of white fragility and that I am in denial about white privilege or one thing or another (I have gotten such responses). Such reactions, I think, prove my point — it is damned hard to break through the tight ideological bubble with some on the left. There is a tendency to want to switch away from talking about Yemen and back to the comfortable, familiar ground of analyzing how my privilege allows me to care about foreign policy and the lives of people in faraway places. This tendency is not admirable — it is deeply conservative and ensures that the focus stays where it always does: on how Americans are always, in some way or shape, the only victims worth talking about.
Implications
I might be wrong about some or all of the above causes of the left’s failure. These are new thoughts. What I have written is rough and I am still grappling with it. But I do not think that I am wrong about my overall thesis:
something has gone horrifically wrong when so many people who mean well and are passionate about social justice have ignored the worst injustice of our times.
Progressives might argue that it is not our fault for doing nothing. It is the corporate media who are hiding the truth from us (despite the fact that nearly everything I learned about Yemen, I learned from the corporate media). There is a large degree of truth to the claim that the media ought to have given Yemen more coverage. Most journalists, including most progressive journalists, failed miserably. Nonetheless, this does not excuse us. There has been enough out there in the mainstream media for the past five years that anybody who cared to pay attention should have known.
The implications of our failure are staggering. We on the left have long prided ourselves on recognizing and standing up against injustice. We like to think that if and when some grave injustice was to emerge, we would be the first to speak out. We would be the abolitionists or the Haitian revolutionaries. We would be the French resistance to the Nazis. We would march arm-in-arm in the Civil Rights movement. But as the worst injustice of our day unfolded over the past five years, we were nowhere to be found. We were busy tweeting about cultural appropriation, calling out microaggressions, and examining our privilege. When we could be bothered to think about Yemen at all, the most we could muster was a shrug and a mumble about how terrible the world is.
I am including myself in this. Despite being aware of Yemen for the past five years, I have done nothing and said little. I tried to write and publish on the war, but the efforts were weak and went nowhere. I had other things to read and other things to write. I have injecting talk about Yemen when talking to other progressives, with the result I described above. Not having tried harder is by far my most serious moral failing, I think.
I would like to say that history will judge us, but I do not believe it will. How harshly do Americans today judge General Jacob Smith, the American organizer of the brutal and possibly genocidal 1901 campaign that massacred thousands of Filipinos on the island of Samar in the Philippine-American War? No — American historians will not write of Yemen and future Americans will have even less awareness of our serious failing than we ourselves do.
But even if nobody else ever learns of our failure, it was still a moral failing of epic proportions. Yemen is not some minor issue. Its importance and urgency dwarf everything else the American left has worked on over the past five years. Even police violence, a very important matter, kills many orders of magnitude fewer innocent people than our role in Yemen. Of course, Yemen need not be the only issue we work on, but it should have been a major one.
Are those of us on the left truly concerned about social justice, carefully exposing glaring injustices and bravely taking stands against the worst forms of oppression? Or are we blinded by the biases of our times, bouncing around from one symbolic but often minor issue to another, checking our privilege and tweeting and taking pride in our righteous stances while being completely blind to our complicity in far greater crimes?
Our silence on Yemen has, I think, decisively answered this question, and the answer is not flattering.
