Progressives are right to be up in arms about the right’s efforts to have people fired for speech they deem inappropriate. But they’d have a whole lot more credibility if they had spoken up any time over the past decade when folks on the left kept plenty busy employing the very same tactics.
Center-left columnist Noah Smith has a smart essay up on how progressives “got addicted” to the once “invincible weapon” that had the leadership of “every organization in the country” fearing that “disgruntled or opportunistic subordinates would take their grievances online and summon the dreaded cancel-mob against their superiors.“
Smith contends that the “threat of progressive cancel culture in America has been defused,” but only because the right, which currently holds the balance of political power, has adopted the strategy for itself.
He argues that “cancel culture” has harmed the country by substituting “nastiness for persuasion” and “robbed America of the incisive commentary of which intelligent progressives would otherwise be capable.” But I’d add that it has also hurt the country in additional, more profound ways. In an effort to protect their own hides from the mob, countless numbers of Americans—particularly those in the world of ideas—allowed themselves to be cowed into silent complicity. And there is no intellectual integrity in cowardice.
If liberals don’t come clean about their own complicity in the culture of cancel, then we’re probably looking at a future of alternating cycles of crackdowns, with each side justifying firings and the suppression of speech as a legitimate means to protect their party’s preferred groups and favored minorities.
So, yes, the Trump/Vance administration does pose a threat to free speech in America. And I hope that liberals in the business of thinking and writing can figure out effective means of combatting that threat. But their arguments won’t fix anything if they don’t first acknowledge that they, too, sat by silently while the left-wing fringe ran around punishing apostates like a secular version of the Taliban Morality Police. No matter which side is doing the flogging, cancel culture is bad for America.
