Cancel Culture Is Clobbering the Left
How it can achieve this if it doesn't exist is a mystery to me.
If cancel culture weren’t real, why would so many people on the left have to keep saying so? At the moment this not-real phenomenon is being directed at a bunch of Harvard students who posted an offensive statement on the night of the Hamas massacre. It’s more difficult to pretend cancel culture is a myth when you’re getting clobbered by it. In my latest, I defend the old-fashioned liberal principle that if somebody says something you don’t like it is not OK to subject that person or that person’s institution to bullying, as various obnoxious rich people are trying to do at both Harvard and Penn. You can answer the argument, or you can ignore it; you may not suppress it.
Obviously there are limits. I don’t propose we apply this principle to somebody who shouts Sieg heil! or sings “Carry Me Back To Old Virginny” in a crowded campus cafeteria. The more appropriate response in these cases is to tell the offending Nazi or racist to shut the fuck up. But America is going through one of its cyclical epidemics of shaming and ostracism based on nothing more than somebody saying something that other people don’t agree with. The cowardly reluctance of universities and corporations to face down a mob, real or imagined, plays into this, and many people end up losing their livelihoods. That the Enlightenment principles of reason and tolerance were dreamed up by privileged white European males does not discredit them. The Puritanical impulse to condemn and expel (actually, Daniel Bell blamed the Methodists, but set that aside) was also dreamed up by privileged white European males, but that doesn’t seem to discredit it, perhaps because it’s always assuming new forms.
You can read my New Republic piece on this subject here.
It's not so much that "cancel culture" doesn't exist. It doesn't exist as defined by conservatives, which is institutions and government agencies "cancelling" right-wingers simply because they disagree with the political sentiments expressed. It DOES exist when it comes to anything conservatives don't like.
I dunno, man. It seems like you'd agree that if some law student were going around praising Hitler and shouting "sieg heil!" at queer students and students of color, that person ought to be blackballed and no firm should sign them, right? Or at least not until there was credible evidence they'd recognized the error of their ways and made some kind of restitution. So you're acknowledging yourself that the real question is just where we draw the line.
Speaking for myself, I think a statement that says, of the Hamas attack, "The apartheid regime is the only one to blame," is _pretty fucking egregious_, and making students who signed it _at minimum_ say, "Oh shit, I made a huge judgment error, I signed onto that under pressure from people to go along with groupthink, I didn't really read it, and now that I've read it closely, I realize it's wrong," is fine. Good, even.
This is not to say I think Israel's policies towards Palestinians over the past fifty years have been hunky dory. Netanyahu is a monster, and Likud broadly has done _enormous_ harm to the cause of peace and Jewish safety in Israel. I have family members who are Jewish citizens. I know Israeli Jews who have put themselves in harm's way (potentially under threat from the IDF, and from both settler extremists and Palestinian extremists), to document the crimes against humanity committed by the Likud regime and try to drag things back onto a path where a just peace is possible. Do I think Israel's policies bear _some_ responsibility for driving the success of recruiting by violent extremist groups? Of course.
But saying Israel is _solely_ responsible for Hamas' murders is insane -- and actually patronizing towards Palestinians. It ignores that they are full human beings who have motivations and make choices. You see this same kind of denial of the agency of oppressed peoples in a _lot_ of lefty thought -- the "white savior" complex is never far below the surface. There was a similar error in John Mearshimer's Westsplaining about the Ukraine crisis, in which he acted as though the US had somehow manipulated Ukraine into wanting NATO membership, rather than Ukrainians wanting it _because that's what they want_. ( https://newrepublic.com/article/165603/carlson-russia-ukraine-imperialism-nato )
I still think this Wil Wilkinson piece is the definitive take on "cancel culture".
https://modelcitizen.substack.com/p/undefined-cancel-game