gracchusdixit

During Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, it quickly became clear that his lazy-minded lawyers realized that the “fix was in”.  Lazy or not, they were not altogether stupid, so they didn’t bother to mount a serious defense. Instead, they moaned and groaned that the charges against their boss were a form of “constitutional cancel culture”.  

This cynical whining would have been as comical as the rest of their clown act, were it not for the fact that “cancel culture” has become the latest ideological rallying cry for perpetually angry and aggrieved conservatives who, lacking any substantive justifications for their grievances, always need existential enemies to blame.  In the 1950s, it was “communists” in the State Department; in the 1960s, it was drugged-up “hippies” protesting in the streets; in the 1980s, it was “welfare queens” and “big government”.  Now, it’s the evils of “cancel culture”.  One might even say that it was right-wing whinging about “cancel culture” that got Donald Trump elected in the first place, since he spent a good deal of his campaign in 2015 railing against the Procrustean shackles of “political correctness,” which is merely “cancel culture” by another name.  

The narrative fueling such nonsense goes like this:  

The citadels of American culture—the media, the academy, the financial and social establishment—have been hijacked by “woke” left-wingers who use their lofty perch to intimidate, censor, and silence “authentic” Americans, which is to say, the conservative Christians who inhabit the “heartland,” as opposed to the godless cosmopolitans who populate the “coasts”.  

Why a Bible-thumping hog farmer from Iowa is more authentically American than a software engineer from California is never explained.  On the contrary, anyone who dares even to broach the question is dismissed, ipso facto, as a member of the cancel culture cabal.  Opposing this cabal, the saga continues, is a phalanx of conservative heroes who, like Leonidas and his brave but doomed band of Spartans, stand in the breech and risk their all to speak politically incorrect truths. 

This truth-telling includes but is not limited to:  America is a white, Christian country, and those who thinks otherwise should pack their bags and catch the first plane back to wherever their dusky ancestors came from; the Black Lives Matter movement is a communist plot and a cover for ANTIFA, which is itself a communist plot; the Me Too movement is an hysterical hoax cooked up by man-hating, baby-killing feminists; every sexual choice embodied in the acronym LGBTQ is either sick or sinful, and if not stamped out soon, will mean the end of Western Civilization.

If such fantastic falsehoods, as well as the fairytale of persecution and martyrdom that is invoked to justify them, were limited to the libertarian loons who inhabit the murky recesses of modern-day conservatism, the situation would be bad enough.  Unfortunately, more than a few supposedly enlightened liberals have been caught up in the same sticky rhetorical web.  

Some months ago, for example, a list of prominent “public intellectuals” published an open letter in Harper’s magazine, in which they castigated “cancel culture” without using that name.  A few were fixtures of the conservative firmament.  Most, however, were luminaries of the left.  Their cri de coeur was rather pretentiously entitled “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” and it went like this:

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture… it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought…We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus…We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.

There are several problems with this argument, if one can even call it that.  

First of all, it conflates the repressive “censoriousness” of authoritarian conservatives with liberal calls for a more truthful representation of both history and social reality.  Conservatives would happily shut down speech and thought that doesn’t toe the ideological line, and would no less happily do so at the point of a gun.  Liberals prefer to challenge and, yes, sometimes shun ideas which have outlived their usefulness or fail to reflect the world as it actually is.  The two impulses are not even remotely the same.

What’s more, this letter condemns “calls for swift and severe retribution” against “perceived transgressions of speech and thought,” but never bothers to specify those transgressions, leaving the reader to conclude that they are innocent missteps or harmless prevarications rather than outright lies.  This is a sophist’s trick.

One of the unspecified transgressions, which has sparked controversy on university campuses across the country, is the continuing pretense that the “founding fathers” of the United States were men of unsullied virtue, like noble Romans of old, rather than the self-interested capitalists and slave-owners they actually were.  Perhaps little George Washington “couldn’t tell a lie” when he admitted to cutting down his father’s cherry tree, but it is beyond dispute that Washington the fully grown man acquired his fortune by speculating in land stolen from Native Americans.  Thomas Jefferson may have believed, at least on paper, that “all men are created equal,” but that didn’t stop him from beating his slaves or bedding Sally Hemings.  When students turn their backs on teachers who insist on peddling fairy tales instead of facts, that isn’t “cancel culture”.  It’s a call for truth telling.

The liberal luminaries who signed their names to the Harper’s letter would have us believe that they are defending freedom of speech and the “free exchange of information and ideas”.  And perhaps, in their own minds, that is what they imagine they are doing.  But that does not make it so.

When they rail that writers, artists, and journalists “fear for their livelihoods” or face “dire professional consequences” because of what they say or write, one can only ask:  have they forgotten the lessons of the last two thousand years?  Next to the fates endured by Socrates, Galileo, or Giordano Bruno, losing a job at Yale or the New York Times is a trifle. 

No freedom comes without commensurate consequences, responsibilities, and risks.  The Constitution of the United States guarantees the right to speak.  It does not (nor could it ever) guarantee that anyone will listen.  And it certainly doesn’t guarantee a livelihood.  Just as you and I have the right to say whatever we wish, others have the right to ignore, rebuke, shame, or shun us.  That is not censorship; it is not “cancel culture;” it is the price we must sometimes pay when we exercise the right to speak unpleasant truths.

The unpleasant truth in this case is that the crusade against “cancel culture” is a con, and those who have joined it are either conning themselves or conning us.