Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Why not pay attention to both?
You accuse me of flagging the left wing cancel people and ignoring the right. It appears you're doing exactly the same thing in reverse. You assert despite Graham's essay (and he's a fuckload smarter and levelheaded than you or I will ever be) and numerous similar ones that cancel culture doesn't exist.
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Well, you do complain about the left wing and ignore the right. You always have. When you're called on it, you say, I hate both sides, and then you go back to complaining about the left.
I don't think I have said that cancel culture doesn't exist. What I think is,
1) We live at a time of polarization across different dimensions, where there is less of a sense of common ground and where different people are more likely to have fundamental disagreements about basic principles. I think what you call "cancel culture" is a manifestation of what happens in discourse when people understand that they have fundamental disagreements about basic principles and that their disagreements are unlikely to be bridged by an exchange of views.
2) Also, compounding this, we live in a time with an awful lot of bad faith in discussions of public affairs. There is a lot of racism, but no one admits to being a racist. The President lies all the time, but doesn't admit that he lies. His supporters understand that he lies and see it as an appropriate and necessary response to, well, something. Debate only works with someone who is debating in good faith.
3) Social media has changed the way the ongoing debate works, in a bunch of ways, including driving the polarization above. Also, anyone can and does publish their views.
4) What you call "cancel culture" comes from an amorphous combination of a bunch of different things, some of which are new and some of which are not new at all. But "cancel culture" as a concept is so undefined and loose that I don't see what it adds. When you talk about "cancel culture" you are generally talking about the views of unspecified people somewhere to the left of you. As above, if you're pushed you'll pay lip service to the idea that there is some sort of cancel culture on the right, but you say that begrudgingly and you pretty much drop it as soon as you're not being called out on it. You do not identify or quote anyone whose views are a part of cancel culture, instead calling them morons and crazy and making up things that they might say, which makes it all the easier to rebut them.
5) A key part of complaining about cancel culture is dismissing other people's speech in a general way instead of dealing with the specifics. This was one criticism of the Harper's letter -- for example, that it seemed to generically refer to the J.K. Rowling contretemps in a way favorable to her without really reckoning with what other people were saying in response to her. Kevin Williamson made Rapoport an example of "cancel culture" even though the widely reported facts suggest something else was going on.
6) Because of 2), 4) and 5), complaining about cancel culture is what you do if you get caught expressing views that perhaps were once non-controversial but are now problematic. Maybe Kevin Williamson thinks that it's not a problem that Bon Appetit was discriminating in favor of white staff, but he doesn't want he really thinks, so instead he turns Rapoport into a victim. You can't tell me that Williamson read the NPR article he cited and thought he was representing what it said -- there is doubtless some degree of bad faith there. But if it's not clear what "cancel culture" is, it's pretty easy to say that Rapoport (or Bari Weiss, to take another recent example) are its victims. And many of the people who complain about "cancel culture" seem more interested in making sound like a horrible problem than in making sure that the concept isn't being abused to hide what was done by people like, say, Rapoport, which detracts from their credibility.
7) The people who do 6) are the people who are acutely aware that their views are slowly losing support, which is to say: conservatives. When free speech is suppressed in the streets of Portland, or by sending Michael Cohen back to prison for meeting with a book publisher, or by the White House's use of NDAs, or by J.K. Rowling's lawyers, no one needs to pretend to be the victim of "cancel culture."
8) Related to 7), you can't get "canceled" if you aren't someone to start with, so a key part of complaining about cancel culture is protecting the prerogatives of people who have no problem being heard (J.K. Rowling, Charles Murray, Andrew Sullivan) from criticism by people who don't have the same status. "Cancel culture" is egalitarian, while complaining about cancel culture preserves old hierarchies.
9) Related to 8), many of the people who are ostensible victims of "cancel culture" do not seem to have been harmed in any cognizable way. Charles Murray and J.K. Rowling have no problem being heard. Bari Weiss chose to leave her job to do something else. Dave Chappelle is not hurting for outlets. None of them really want to answer their critics, nor to do they like be criticized. But they have in no way been "canceled."
10) Meanwhile, the people who complain the most about "cancel culture" seem to have a highly selective concern for the principle of free speech. This is exemplified by Bari Weiss and J.K. Rowling, but also by the Kevin Williamsons of the world, who never made it to Matthew 7:3-5. And you, honestly. If "cancel culture" is not really silencing people like Rowling, it's very hard to escape the conclusion that the whole thing is a way of disagreeing with what people on the left are saying without actually engaging with them on the substance. Which would be ironic if it weren't sad.
I'm not sure whether cancel culture exists, because I've never seen a compelling definition of it that could be tested. How can one tell if any single episode reveals cancel culture? But "cancel culture" definitely exists, a bogeyman to be used to defend unpopular speech from the left, a concept sufficiently malleable to be deployed in all sorts of different circumstances and sufficiently nebulous that there's no way to disprove it.
"Cancel culture" is like Keyzer Soze -- you spin up a big story using whatever facts and names you have in front of you, and if someone tries to question it -- poof, and it's gone.
