In Praise of "Cancel Culture"
When your opponent controls all the real world wealth and influence, virtual exile is the best way to fight back
A recent article attributed to the New York Times Editorial Board complains that “America Has a Free Speech Problem”—that Americans’ “right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned” is being eroded by a “social silencing” that results in the de-pluralization of ideas and a problematic restriction in publicly acceptable philosophical positions. It notes that a significant percentage of Americans feel hesitant to voice their full opinions on the issues due to fear of consequences, and cites mostly platitudes about decorum and respectfulness to make the argument that a once-vibrant salon of ideas in the US has been invalidated by political correctness.
First, exactly what is meant by “freedom of speech” must be defined. What does it mean to call speech “free,” beyond only minimally restricting what can and cannot be said to another? Simply levelling the playing field by claiming to foster an environment in which anyone can speak as loudly as anyone else is insufficient. This would be equivalent to a neoliberal “opening up” of the economy which makes no equal access concessions to those least able to earn the resources they need to survive—this will always result in a deepening of inequalities and to starvation, destitution, and lack of life saving medical care for society’s most vulnerable as the lucky few hoard more and more of the “freely available” resources. Some wealth redistribution is necessary to achieve fairness and equality of opportunity, even under idealistic free market systems. The freedom to speak in more than name only requires meaningful equality of access for the voiceless, most commonly found in the form of expanded voting rights, anti-gerrymandering laws, open local government, and a right to economic security (one cannot vote or express their ideas if they are dead of starvation or disease). Tellingly, the so-called victims of cancel culture on the right are often vocally opposed to pro-democratic policies such as these. To them, and to the writers of this editorial, the only threats to freedom of speech worth decrying are found in the harsh judgments of the mob, not in, for example, redrawing a district in such a way that effectively renders its inhabitants voiceless or preventing convicted felons from voting.
A completely open, “cancel-free” playing field presumes the existence an unfettered meritocracy of ideas that does not and cannot thrive in a capitalist system fraught with wealth inequality. The ultra-right controls the money and therefore the media, a phenomenon which for example had disastrous consequences in the lead up to the Iraq War, during which journalists at the Times and elsewhere famously marched lockstep behind the jingoist Bush administration by parroting its propaganda and significantly minimizing the size and intensity of anti-war demonstrations. This journalistic collusion is still alive and well, amplifying the government’s line on the ongoing relaxation of Covid protocols, which were never better than middling and insufficient to begin with. The cost of this rightist media capture can be measured in the million+ Americans who were killed by the disease, the many more hundreds of thousands who are debilitated for life, or the 25% of children who will eventually develop long Covid complications after infection (source). There is no “cancel culture” mechanism that is anywhere near as powerful as corporate media’s decisions to run certain stories or pursue certain angles or slants, and these inevitable biases always work out in the favor of those who claim to have been cancelled, never the voiceless.
The Times piece almost gets the distinction between the two main forms of speech restrictions right: “Many on the right, for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms.” Whereas the left’s brand of censorship occurs organically and by popular demand (private), the right leverages its power in local governments to outlaw free expression and hinder education in the very ideas that are necessary for engaged citizens to make decisions about their welfare or the rights of others (public). Conflating the two is as irresponsible as it is inaccurate, and the article even proceeds to deny that the latter is happening in the US, contradicting itself directly:
It is worth noting here the important distinction between what the First Amendment protects (freedom from government restrictions on expression) and the popular conception of free speech (the affirmative right to speak your mind in public, on which the law is silent). The world is witnessing, in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the strangling of free speech through government censorship and imprisonment. That is not the kind of threat to freedom of expression that Americans face.
It soon continues the false equivalence:
In passing laws that restrict speech, conservatives have adopted the language of harm that some liberals used in the past to restrict speech — the idea that speech itself can cause an unacceptable harm, which has led to a proliferation of campus speech codes and the use of trigger warnings in college classrooms.
The only argument it offers that the two are remotely comparable comes in the form of a loss income one might suffer as a result of being cancelled, a rare enough phenomenon that it need not even be considered alongside more real, commonly found forms of censorship (against pro-Palestinian activists like BDS for example) and prejudice in hiring processes that cost many more livelihoods every day in the US. Due to the existence of the vast rightwing media network, even those who have been deplatformed in a publicly visible way can usually find employment and inclusion elsewhere, trading on their notoriety and infamy to make a quick profit, even in exile. Their suffering, such as it is, is incomparable to that of the real victims of uneven access. Even these typically-cited examples of cancel culture run amok are minor, harmless, and arguably token concessions to issues of social rather than economic justice. In other words, the media is “bullied” into accepting only the issues which cost them a small bit of the right’s admiration for “caving” and not anything monetary. This is no accident; the media is a business first and a truth-teller a distant second.
Is cancel culture also dangerous to those who seek to wield it? Setting aside the fact that freedom of speech as a concept strictly applies to governmental or legal restrictions (public) and not the mass opprobrium of a group or loss of one’s platform access (private), nowhere is it guaranteed that everyone’s ideas have equal merit and must be duly considered in any kind of efficient deliberative process, nor should they be. There are many theories (flat Earth, for example) which are roundly rejected by virtually everyone, and for good reason. In order to have a meaningful dialogue, certain common ground concepts must be agreed upon beforehand, from which reasonable people can draw different conclusions and arguments about the topic at hand. Without this ability to outright eliminate nonsensical or self-evidently false premises, no deliberation or even conversation can occur. Every law-making process would be bogged down in argumentative minutia as bad actors realize that they can introduce an infinite series of red herrings that must be considered with equal measure to all others. No real world decisions are made in this way—if they were, we’d be unable to even consider how to properly feed ourselves. A piece of toast in the morning would be delicious, but perhaps the toaster itself, a pillow, or a pencil would be as well. To begin any kind of worthwhile deliberation, some political ideas, like Nazism, must likewise be immediately rejected as unpalatable—not necessarily outlawed entirely, but effectively “cancelled” by the masses.
It would seem inherently dangerous for someone who holds what many have been propagandized to view as one of those nonsensical ideas (communism, in the US at least) to champion what amounts to mob rule censorship, so argues the Times: “When speech is stifled or when dissenters are shut out of public discourse, a society also loses its ability to resolve conflict, and it faces the risk of political violence.” Such a warning may sound compelling, but it forgets the underlying issue: this political violence is not the product of mass movements of the oppressed rising up to throw off their shackles, but of the oppressors brutally stamping out dissent. It isn’t directionless, and portraying political violence as equally likely from either side of a disagreement only further muddies the water. In the right hands, the process of deplatforming a publicly visible individual for nonsensical or offensive statements is a tool that gives power back to the masses, a voice back to the voiceless. The fear of its indiscriminate use is unwarranted by even the most cynical reading of recent history, another way in which the Times article obfuscates its own point:
Many know they shouldn’t utter racist things, but they don’t understand what they can say about race or can say to a person of a different race from theirs. Attacking people in the workplace, on campus, on social media and elsewhere who express unpopular views from a place of good faith is the practice of a closed society.
The Times does not allow hate speech in our pages, even though it is broadly protected by the Constitution, and we support that principle. But there is a difference between hate speech and speech that challenges us in ways that we might find difficult or even offensive.
No one is cancelled for the occasional good faith slip up alluded to in the first paragraph; that they recognize the different levels of offensiveness here and then proceed to use them interchangeably shows that the editorial board’s intent is to reduce all forms of censorship to the same phenomenon. Either everything is acceptable to say, or nothing is. The Times, alongside racists, conspiracy theorists, genocide deniers, creationists, and many other lunatics, want everything to be acceptable because then no progress can be made on any issue, no cash cow can ever be disturbed.
What is the end goal of any system of deliberation? If we are going to reside in a community and enjoy the benefits that separate civilization from a state of nature, we before all else must be able to communicate with one another, to set boundaries, responsibilities, and freedoms. With the proper education and a system of deliberation free of bad actors, anyone would conclude that communism is the most efficient and fair system, the only form of government worth maintaining and the only true guarantor of everyone’s right to life and autonomy. This is why the right, which has a vested interest in stopping this mass realization, has spent many decades defunding public schooling and turning American education into a process of propagandization, often from private schools with regressive aims or parents who seek to do the indoctrinating themselves via homeschooling. This is all an attempt at obfuscation. By complaining loudly about the fabricated issue of “cancel culture” the right devalues censorship and manufactured consent as a real conceptual threat and attempts to corrupt its very valid use as a tool for the otherwise powerless to have their opinions heard and considered. “Cancel culture” as the right frames it is purely astroturf, an attempt to invalidate its use by bringing it down to their tarnished, cynical level. Shameful then that the newspaper of record has been so poisoned by its mundane financial concerns and fear of rightist backlash that it has published this opinion piece which would have been better off cancelled.