The Left’s Deafening Silence on Iran

I searched five major progressive publications for coverage of Iran's uprising. Combined results: zero.

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The homepages of four left-wing magazines on Saturday, January 10th, with a search for the keyword “Iran” on each of them.

An awe-inspiring protest movement is shaking the foundations of power in Iran. Millions of people have taken to the streets to protest the corruption which has impoverished them, and the theocratic restrictions which have taken away their liberties. Men and especially women are standing up for their dignity and their livelihoods in the face of the deadly threat of state-sanctioned violence.

There are many reasons to fear that this protest movement could end badly. The regime could once again decide to crack down on its own citizens, killing dozens or hundreds or perhaps thousands of them in the process. (Indeed, according to eyewitness reports, it has already started doing so.) Power might shift from the ailing Ayatollah Khamenei to the Revolutionary Guards, perhaps lifting some restrictions on the country’s women but frustrating the broader political and economic aspirations of the population. Even a transition to democracy need not bring lasting results, as the failed experiments with democratic rule from Egypt to Tunisia prove.

But the sympathies of every single person who believes in freedom and equality and the basic rights of women should be with those courageous millions in Iran. And yet, across the West, there has in the face of these historic protests been a deafening silence.

This silence has been evident in mainstream media outlets, from the British Broadcasting Corporation to National Public Radio, that have been oddly slow to grasp the importance of this moment. Worse, when those outlets did deign to cover the events, they often downplayed the significance of the protests; in a few especially egregious cases, reporters even seemed to harbor sympathies for the country’s brutal regime. (At the outset of the protests, The Guardian even published an op-ed by Abbas Aragchi, Iran’s foreign minister.)

The silence has been even more deafening in the left-wing newspapers and magazines of the anglophone world. On Saturday morning, I searched the principal publications of the American left for any mention of Iran. There was nothing on the websites of The Nation or The New Republic or Jacobin or Slate or even Dissent.¹

There are some straightforward explanations for why a lot of attention is currently elsewhere. There is good reason for American media outlets to focus on what is happening in Venezuela, and in Minnesota, and more broadly on the various outrages daily perpetrated by the White House. And it is genuinely hard to report on a country that tightly controls foreign journalists and currently has a nationwide internet blackout. At Persuasion, we have been lucky to publish a moving essay by an anonymous Iranian who has written for us before. On the podcast, I have been fortunate to have a deep conversation with Scott Anderson about the country’s revolutions, past and present. But is it really so difficult to have some staff writer type up a report about what is happening in the country, or to source an op-ed by some Iranian in exile about their hopes for their country?

The silence is far from random; it is a choice. And while I suspect that this choice is not fully conscious, and that the people making that choice haven’t fully spelled out the logic which motivates it, even to themselves, it ultimately goes back to a very simple calculation that (as he pointed out more eloquently than anybody else) has plagued leftist intellectuals ever since the days of George Orwell.

For far too many progressives and leftists, their founding commitment is not to some principle or aspiration for the world. It is to believing that their own countries and societies are at the root of profound evil. This creates in their minds a simple demonology: Anybody who is on “our side” must be bad and anybody who is on the “other side” is presumptively good. As Orwell said about some of the intellectuals of his day, their “real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism.”

It has in the past week not been difficult to find especially harebrained leftists who follow this logic to its bitter end: ones who malign Iranian protesters as hapless agents of imperialism, or for that matter are unwilling to acknowledge that Nicolás Maduro was a terrible dictator. But most are a little more subtle than that. They don’t go all the way toward celebrating Khamenei or Maduro; but nor can they quite bring themselves to hope for the downfall of the regimes they built.

I have, since I started to be politically conscious, been a man of the left. I joined the German Social Democratic Party at the age of 13² and still believe in many of the same ideals as I did then: in international solidarity; in the need for a generous welfare state; in the supreme evil of racial hatred and ethnic cleansing and war. I would love once again to feel part of a mass movement that stands up for those values in a principled manner. But with a left that finds itself unable to cheer on the brave women and men now taking to the streets of Tehran and so many other Iranian cities, I have little in common.

1. The single exception was Slate, which did initially return one hit for the search term “Iran.” It turned out to point to the “Slate Mini Crossword for Jan. 9, 2026,” composed by someone whose first name happens to be Kiran.

2. My new comrades facilitated my joining by encouraging me to back-date my birth, since the minimum age for membership was 14.