Note from Doug Parker. Ivan R. Dee was the founder of the distinguished publishing house that bore his name. When his firm published my biography of Ogden Nash in 2005, I was honored to take a place among a legion of far more distinguished authors. Ivan and I also share a deep loyalty to the Chicago Cubs and I have long envied his season tickets to Wrigley Field.
The Alarming Rise of the Cancel Culture
“All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.”
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four
In some reaches of American society these days, if you’re not a victim you’re nothing. This is not to make light of longstanding offenses against women and minorities; but the feeling of oppression has caught on remarkably well. We’re not talking about police brutality, rape, or other odious abuse, but rather about garden variety annoyances. There are now supremely sensitive individuals in many walks of life who feel not only aggrieved but damn angry. Armed with the moral certainties of woke culture and the swift justice of social media, these “victims” consider themselves licensed to exact punishment.
People in the public eye, especially in politics, journalism, entertainment, and education, and especially men, have become favored targets of a so-called cancel culture. Although it embraces a range of political leanings, the instigators of this culture are predominantly of the liberal and progressive left. A straight line may be traced from identity politics, developed largely by Democrats beginning in the 1960s, to political correctness in all its various forms, and to the present-day surge that seeks to overturn accomplishment or reputation by revealing or reinterpreting details of personal and public history that are, to say the least, out of fashion. And so, it seems, the good are sacrificed in a quest for the perfect.
There are two facets to this activity. One is the denouncing of present-day public figures and, often, teachers. If you haven’t been squeaky clean in your attitudes or actions—ever in your life—you may be subject to exposure and dismissal. The other facet is the revisiting and deleting of historical figures. It has gone far beyond statues of Robert E. Lee and the military bases named after other Confederate Generals.
Thus the San Francisco school board votes to rename forty-four of the city’s schools, including those now named for Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson. According to the board’s resolution, these and other schools are named after men linked to “the subjugation and enslavement of human beings; or who oppressed women, inhibiting societal progress; or whose actions led to genocide; or who otherwise significantly diminished the opportunities of those amongst us to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
In Chicago, where I live, a mayor’s commission is reviewing the status of forty-one statues located around the city. In the state that bills itself as the Land of Lincoln, even Lincoln statues are now suspect. But the list also includes Columbus, Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, Leif Ericson, and Benjamin Franklin. This is, according to Mayor Lori Lightfoot, “a racial healing and historical reckoning project.” The monuments commission wants to avoid creating “tension between people who see value in these artworks and those who do not.” A tricky mission indeed.
Meanwhile the Washington Redskins are no longer on the warpath, having been replaced by the Washington Football Team. But the Indians continue to play baseball in Cleveland and the Braves in Atlanta, and the Blackhawks skate in Chicago, to consternation among Native Americans. While such names are clearly offensive to some of our citizens, it points up the difficult sorting that must be done when we embark on a national cleansing. Someone must decide; perhaps it should be local voters.
It doesn’t take a prophet to consider how far back into the past we might look to fulfill this Orwellian enterprise of making history conform to current norms. If history is still a way of learning, it should make sense to leave in place what we can learn from, even if it no longer fully reflects our values.
In explaining the more questionable activities of the moment, the key word is intolerance. And the consequences for freedom of speech (in which I do not include hate speech, sedition, terrorism, or yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater) and a free exchange of ideas are dire. The Wall Street Journal notes “an alarming contraction in political tolerance, not least on campus. . . . It’s not a sign of health in American higher education that organizations devoted to defending academic freedom are proliferating.” On innumerable campuses, George Will writes, “students are being harmed by speech-restriction regimes that chill the free flowing of intellectual differences.”
In July last year, 152 writers and educators of all political persuasions published an open letter in Harper’s on “Justice and Open Debate.” Lamenting the rise of the forces of illiberalism in the world, they declared that “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. . . . [C]ensoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. . . . [I]t is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. . . . Whatever the arguments around [particular incidents], the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal.”
The aggrieved, rather than confronting their assailant, often go right to their institution or company for redress. And they will generally get a quick response. A recent notorious case involves Smith College, where a black woman student accused a campus policeman, a cafeteria worker, and a janitor of racism. Smith’s president at once disciplined and suspended these staff members–before an investigation found them innocent.
In the New York Times, Bret Stephens writes of California’s “model curriculum” for high school students, in which they are expected to “challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, imperialist/colonial beliefs” and to “connect ourselves to past and contemporary social movements that struggle for social justice.” This sounds less like education, Stephens argues, and more like “the recruiting arm of a radical ideological movement masquerading as mainstream pedagogy.”
The right, which has its own problems of free speech, predictably pushes back against the cancel culture. But it is a fact, as Matt Bai of the Washington Post points out, that an illiberal left in the Democratic party is most responsible for “trying to impose on the country an acceptable code of language and imagery.”
I consider myself a Roosevelt Democrat. But when I published books, I was not wedded to an ideology. That seemed to me the wrong stance for an independent publisher. I chose to publish both “liberal” and “conservative” authors so long as they had interesting things to say and said them well and responsibly. It was in the mid-nineties that I began to notice that when I published a “liberal” book, my conservative friends were untroubled; but when I published a “conservative” book, my liberal friends complained loudly. André Schiffrin, who ran Pantheon and later the New Press, houses with decidedly leftist lists, once took me to task for straying from the liberal fold. These days I think expectations in the publishing business would be far more rigid, as when Simon & Schuster recently canceled a book contract with Senator Josh Hawley. I find nothing admirable in Hawley, but in a genuinely liberal society he has a right to express himself.
Bari Weiss used to be an opinion writer and editor at the New York Times. In the summer of 2020 she became a casualty of the cancel culture after the Times published an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton in which he argued for the use of the National Guard to put down Black Lives Matter “rioting.” In a long article (worth your time) that appeared in Salt Lake City’s Deseret News, Weiss recounts how eight hundred staffers at the Times complained that Cotton’s piece put them in “danger.” Management agreed, publicly shamed the guilty editors, and then pushed them out of the paper. Weiss resigned a few weeks later, “convinced that it wasn’t possible to take intellectual risks at a newspaper that folded like a tent in the face of a mob.”
Weiss claims that “we are in the grip of an epidemic of self-silencing.” She quotes a young journalist who worries that “banishment and rejection await if you attempt to depart, even in minor ways, from the sacred ideology of wokeness.” A Cato Institute study has found that 62 percent of Americans say they self-censor. The more conservative they are, the more likely they are to hide their views.
A new illiberal orthodoxy, Weiss says, “uses cancellation the way ancient societies used witch burnings: to strike fear into the heart of everyone watching.” The old consensus worldview, the commitment to a shared set of ideas, “has been run over by the new illiberal orthodoxy.” It may promise revolutionary justice, but it threatens to drag us back into a tribal past.
In this ideology, Weiss continues, “you are guilty for the sins of your father. In other words, you are not you. You are only a mere avatar of your race or your religion. And racism is no longer about discrimination based on the color of someone’s skin. Racism is any system that allows for disparate outcomes between racial groups.” Thus Seattle and San Francisco have recast the study of mathematics as racist. And the Smithsonian African American History Museum last summer declared that hard work, individualism, and the nuclear family are “white” characteristics.
It’s hard to say when and how this wave of accusation will end. If we recognize the cancel culture as a further extension of identity politics and political correctness, the trend is not promising. And it’s now exacerbated by social media, which make public shaming and the destruction of reputations easy, draconian, and swift.
Today there is no forum for rational discussion of the issues. We need courage to confront those who would constrict a free exchange of ideas in our society, but we also need more than courage. We need attention to civics education in the schools and a reaffirmation of our shared American experience. We need a discussion about how to achieve a fair regulation of social media, and legislation directed toward that end. We need to study history with all its warts, rather than rejecting it because of character flaws. And we need to stop canceling public figures and educators and onetime heroes because of perceived blemishes. The slights are too often slight. Under the prevailing rules, who isn’t fallible?
I first became aware of the unintended consequences of this type of monitoring for political correctness when our book club read The Language Police, which illustrated the process and end result of both liberal and conservative groups’ input on textbook content. In trying to please both sides, textbook publishers ended up distributing books that were more restrictive, less imaginative, and less interesting as reading material, and far less realistic, creating false impressions and expectations for impressionable kids. Kind of a “shoot yourself in the foot” with the correctness intention crippling the educational benefit! Written well before the term “woke” became mainstream, it is still a good read on the subject.
Thanks for this important opinion, one so needed to be more widely expressed in the media. The negative effects that the excesses of “cancel culture” and political correctness can, and are, having on our society, need to be underscored. I see it as one of the factors adding to the divisiveness that’s disrupting our nation and destroying the likelihood of political cooperation in solving essential issues. We deplore the divisiveness, but often overlook dealing with the factors causing it. History I value as something to learn from, an indication of the culture of the time, the leaders then, however great in many ways, a victim of the cultural faults of their era, and certainly not to be dismissed from view. When the name of the Junior High School I went to was changed years ago from Mount Vernon Jr. High to Johnnie Cochran Jr High, I accepted it as reflecting a change in its neighborhood, but had no idea it would be followed by such a vast epidemic of similar changes. Too bad!
A valuable message. Thanks.
Totally agree!
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