Three very good pieces on the self-interested backlash to accountability culture. Adam Gurri for Liberal Currents untangles the distinctions between censorship, social sanctioning, and the openness of media (via MeFi); Osita Nwanevu for The New Republic unwinds the ways in which the critics of progressive identity politics are, in fact, the real illiberals (via Mark Isero); and Emily Pothast for OneZero undoes the ignorance of the power dynamics at the hidden heart of this debate.
Gurri:
The primary focus of the current “free speech” debate are not threats of this sort at all, but the threat of social sanction. I do not think we can make a principled case for a generalized freedom from social sanction. Freedom of association necessarily means freedom of disassociation, and the combination with freedom of speech means that people are able to argue for casting out particular members of an association. To come together to express shared values or pursue a goal can only work if one is able to cast out those whose participation is at odds with those values or that goal. But this is not a brief for unbridled freedom of association; any American should be familiar with what the right to refuse service, for example, has historically meant in practice. Yet the typical limitations on freedom of association, used to soften the hard edges of disassociation, are rarely raised in the context of the “free speech” debate.
Two notes here. In discussing association, Gurri talks about the power imbalances in employment, observing, “To my knowledge, Zaid Jilani is the only one who has brought up at-will employment in the context of the ‘cancel culture’ debate.” For the record, Helen Lewis and Jill Filipovic also have discussed this. Less importantly, I’m here for Gurri’s Serenity shoutout.
Nwanevu:
Ultimately, it’s the realities of our collective past that make the notion that progressives are dragging the country toward illiberalism especially ridiculous. Over the course of two and a half centuries in this country, millions of human beings held as property toiled for the comfort and profit of already wealthy people who tortured and raped them. Just over 150 years ago, the last generation of slaves was released into systems of subjugation from which its descendants have not recovered. August will mark just 100 years since women were granted the right to vote; Black Americans, nominally awarded that right during Reconstruction, couldn’t take full advantage of it until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The litany of other inequities and crimes our country has perpetrated and continues to perpetrate against Native Americans, immigrants, religious and sexual minorities, political dissidents, and the poor is endless. All told, liberal society in the U.S. is, at best, just over half a century old: If it were a person, it would be too young to qualify for Medicare.
Bonus note: in deconstructing a David Brooks column in which he acknowledges that many Black Americans perhaps are not, in fact, making it here and so not, in fact, feeling at home here, Nwanevu offers this amazing line: “It isn’t happening because the ladder of American meritocracy is, in fact, a busted drainpipe.”
Pothast:
At best, discussions of “cancel culture” which are not grounded in an analysis of power structures are disingenuous distractions. At worst, they are a silencing cudgel wielded by those who are actually doing the very thing they accuse others of doing. It’s worth mentioning that JK Rowling, one of the signatories of the Harper’s letter, recently threatened a transgender activist with legal action over a tweet. How can someone advocate “open debate” while also aiming to silence dissent? How, indeed. As Jessica Valenti writes, “cancel culture is how the powerful play victim.” The Harper’s letter is expertly crafted to make its signatories appear to be the victims in the fights they themselves have picked.