The easy irony today is that those folks who bitched and moaned about “leftist” cancel culture are the ones who, without thought of a blush, cancel anyone who does not take their point of view as gospel truth. The obvious case is Liz Cheyney, but there are so many many others that the MAGAverse has taken to heart the old 1990s invention—RINO, Republican In Name Only—and used it to smear anyone from their own party who deviates from the Trump line. Ask Chris Christie, Mitt Romney, Dubya . . . “so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.”
Let me take a step backwards, though. What exactly is cancel culture? How does cancel culture function? Who enforces cancel culture?
In a low-stakes kind of way, we all know that cancel culture is the silencing of voices and perspectives that disagree in some way from an accepted, received, standard idea of what is true or what should and should not be done. There’s a group of some sort, identifiable because its members see themselves as different from others and so unique. But while the group sees itself as different, it rejects being identified as different with terminology imposes an outsider’s denigratory perspective on the difference. Members of the group then express their outrage at the terms and the perspectives that they find offensive, and seek to silence those outsiders regardless of their wishes. What makes the phenomenon expressly cancel culture rather than merely good manners is the involuntary silencing.
I’d give examples from the culturally “leftist” perspective—“leftist” in this context means something like “sympathetic to the voices of those who see themselves as marginalized”—but to do so is to invite opprobrium because I’d be obliged to use the offensive terms in order to make the example concrete. So let me invent an example. There is a group of people who are ambidextrous. They call themselves the “even-handed.” But outsiders mock them as the “namby-pambies,” implying by that term that the ambidextrous are so indecisive that they can’t even tie their own shoelaces. Not surprisingly, the ambidextrous among us take umbrage at the term and inveigh against it at every opportunity.
Once upon a time, in the long-ago days when there was no social media, such inveighing would almost necessarily be self-limiting. There might be a local campaign against the users of “namby-pamby,” which might become public enough to reach the letters to the editor of the local newspaper. But it would be unlikely that the effort to cancel “namby-pamby” would grow much beyond the borders of the group of ambidextrous folks who resent the term.
To be sure, if there were enough force behind the campaign, the local might grow to be national and develop a life of its own—think of how the terms by which minorities were designated changed in the US from the 1950s to the 1960s to the 1970s and beyond. I have in mind here what Michel Foucault says about the development of culturally significant discourses. The more a given discourse intersects with other, culturally significant discourses, then the more powerful will the given discourse become. I have no doubt that such development could happen to the terms “even-handed” vs. “namby-pamby,” but again, for that to happen the phenomenon of ambidexterity would have to intersect a great many other weighty, culturally central concerns. In short, the effort would require a great deal of social capital, social force, and social power.
Social media bypasses the need for such force and power. Even the least significant of concerns could grow to be tremendously powerful simply because the members of such a socially marginal group can multiply its voice almost infinitely via social media. Without social media, I think, there could be no such thing as cancel culture. To rewrite the first sentence of this paragraph, then: social media is now the mechanism by which social force and power is elaborated.
Social media do not just elaborate a particular cancelation. They also enforce the dictates of cancel culture. Multiply the voice of even the smallest of groups sufficiently—multiple accounts sourced to a small cadre of posters, for instance—and the persons who use the offensive term might easily find themselves subject to constant attack, which if it becomes vitriolic enough can lead to the persons being fired from their jobs, harassed in their neighborhoods, ultimately forced to withdraw from the world as much as possible.
I know that right-wing attackers of cancel culture assert that such a result is incompatible with the principle of free speech guaranteed to us Americans in the First Amendment to the Constitution. But I think that such a take on things is just wrong. In the first place, the First Amendment forbids Congress, which is to say the Federal Government, from infringing on the right of free speech. Individuals and groups are free to tell others to shut up, or to use whatever language they wish, short of libeling or calling for violence, of course. The general flow of cancel culture to which the right wingers object does not impose governmental sanctions on speech.
In the second place, free speech works both ways. If I use “namby-pamby” to mock the ambidextrous, then I must be willing to face a vociferous response to my usage from those who would rather speak of the “even-handed.” Again, short of calling for violence against me, the “even-handed” have as much right to inveigh against me as I have to use the objectionable term. If I don’t like the response and feel myself oppressed by it, then I have three options: fight back against the response; stop using “namby-pamby”; withdraw from the verbal field of battle. That’s the way that free speech works.
Up until Mr. Trump was elected president for the second time, cancel culture was a matter of person vs. person, of social group vs. social group, the free-for-all that free speech engenders and expects. Free speech produces “the wars of Truth,” as John Milton calls it in his essay of 1644, “Areopagitica.” Mr. Trump has introduced an unfortunate imbalance in those wars. Specifically, he has thrown the weight, power, majesty, threat of state authority behind the side of the wars that he favors. Quite literally, it turns out, not to agree with Mr. Trump can get you not just fired, not just mocked and vilified, but killed. Under Mr. Trump’s leadership, the wars of Truth have become the war of state power over the individual.
With every post, every statement, every threat that Mr. Trump makes, he violates the First Amendment.
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