Cancel Culture, Left and Right

I’m old enough to remember a time when the American right was up in arms about “cancel culture.” Then conservatives worried that good people were being harshly denounced by legions of strangers because of minor (or in some cases imaginary) transgressions and indiscretions. Being hounded by activist mobs was at best an extremely unpleasant experience. At worst, the victims would lose their jobs or face other real-life consequences. Conservatives were particularly concerned that dubious accusations of bigotry, coupled with exaggerated claims about harm caused to members of marginalized minorities, were being weaponized in order to undermine free speech on college campuses.

To be sure, this bundle of concerns was often exaggerated to the point of absurdity in right-wing rhetoric. But the phenomenon itself was all too real. Part of the issue had to do with the society-wide trends that the journalist and filmmaker Jon Ronson discussed in his excellent book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.

The internet gives everyone an uncomfortable amount of access to what everyone else is doing, and the algorithms of profit-seeking social media companies incentivize petty conflict and hair-trigger denunciation. These larger trends have, myself and others argued at the time, intersected with the culture of recrimination and divisiveness already common on the Left.

This behavior was a product of a political powerlessness that made the Left inward-looking and paranoid, producing counterproductive moralism rather than real politics. If you can’t defeat exploitative bosses and landlords or the military-industrial complex, you can at least have the dubious emotional satisfaction of successfully taking down someone on your side (who you suspect of not being quite enough on your side). As the musician Conan Neutron once put it to me, “If you can’t have justice, you’ll settle for catharsis.”

The Right, of course, had a field day with all of this. In 2021, the official theme of the popular Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was “America Uncanceled.” Sensing that popular disgust with progressive witch hunts might be a winning issue for them, conservatives started to frame everything they disliked as a form of “cancellation.”

Calls by liberals and leftists to reevaluate the legacy of some previously lionized historical figure were recast as cancellations. It was not uncommon to hear that everyone from Thomas Jefferson to Winston Churchill had been canceled. If some corporation angered the public by polluting water, selling weapons used to kill children, or driving up the cost of pharmaceuticals, right-wingers would talk about how the inanimate brand was being “canceled.” Eventually the whole rhetorical gambit ran out of steam, and the Right moved on to talking nonstop about “wokeness.”

Now the American right increasingly looks like a caricature of a mob of ultra-woke cancelers. It was congressional Republicans who took the lead in hearings about “campus antisemitism” that had nothing to do with actual antisemitism and everything to do with students protesting US foreign policy.

It was conservatives who cheered when college president after college president resigned in the face of this witch hunt. It was the Trump administration that wielded the threat of withholding federal funds from universities, on the grounds that Jewish students felt “unsafe,” to force those universities to adopt ever more sweeping and absurd definitions of “antisemitism” and to implement ever more draconian enforcement mechanisms. (This isn’t even to speak of real horrors like the detention and threatened deportation of legal permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil for exercising his constitutionally protected right to speak out on the issue.)

Of course, Jewish students, like their non-Jewish peers, are deeply divided on the issue of Palestine, and anyone with the slightest acquaintance with the Palestine solidarity movement knows this movement has always been disproportionately Jewish. But this hardly matters to the new woke conservative right. Identity politics of any kind tends to ignore the inconvenient fact that marginalized groups aren’t hive minds.

A standard conservative complaint during the culture war over “wokeness” was that “woke” progressives pushed an absurdly sweeping narrative according to which everything they disliked was attributable to America’s foundational racial sins. Here too, conservative complaints were often overstated, but they contained a germ of truth.

The New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project” originally claimed that the “real” founding of the United States was not 1776 but the importation of the first group of African slaves to Virginia in 1619. This claim was later deleted without explanation from the digital edition, but the remaining text still said, “Out of slavery — and the anti-Black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional.”

This totalizing narrative, according to which racial inequalities aren’t historically contingent and ever-changing results of particular economic and cultural conditions at particular times but an undifferentiated force stretching across centuries and explaining everything, irked many historians across the political spectrum. So, for example, did the highly dubious claim (that later “clarifications” of the project would back away from) that the revolution in 1776 was fought in large part to preserve slavery.

But the 1619 Project was a model of careful historical scholarship compared to the totalizing narrative about a long march of historically undifferentiated evil being used by conservatives to justify their crackdown on free speech on college campuses. It’s not as if slavery and Jim Crow weren’t very real parts of American history. By contrast, the Right’s narrative about “cultural Marxism,” which attempts to put contemporary trends in tepid academic liberalism in continuity with the Bolshevik Revolution, is nonsense through and through.

Universities Full of Marxists?

At the height of the protests against Israel’s atrocities in Gaza last year, Craig DeLuz wrote an op-ed for the Sacramento Observer where he said his “heart ach[ed]” for the Jewish students who are “living on fear on their own campuses.” Like the most deranged “woke” liberal, DeLuz views political disagreement on this issue as disguised bigotry and sees political speech he dislikes as not only misguided but harmful. Nor does the presence of large numbers of members of the harmed group on the other side sway him.

Where did this alleged wave of campus antisemitism come from? DeLuz has an explanation at the ready. Students had been taught an “oppressed vs. oppressor” narrative by their professors. And this in turn was part of “a long-standing trend towards Marxist indoctrination within our universities.”

Similarly, just a few weeks ago Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, in response to a Fox News host’s question about President Trump’s effort to “deal with these universities,” said, “We need to focus on engineering, math, science, the classics. And instead they are training not the next generation of leaders, but the next generation of Marxists.”

Commenting on these and similar claims, Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson makes some straightforward but important points. For one thing, while there isn’t a lot of polling on this, the data we do have suggests that only a tiny minority of university professors would describe themselves as Marxists. For another, even many members of that tiny minority are likely thinking of Marxism as an explanatory historical or sociological framework rather than anything that has much to do with their practical political commitments. And radical socialist commitments certainly aren’t common among the 97 percent of professors who don’t call themselves Marxists.

What’s more, Robinson points out, by far the most popular college major is business. Does anyone think business majors are being indoctrinated in Marxism? It’s true that conservatives are a distinct minority on campus, but there’s a lot of political space between conservatives and Marxists. You can, Robinson argues, “make a case that the academy leans Marxist if you redefine ‘Marxist’ to mean ‘center-left liberal.’” But if you have even minimal standards of intellectual integrity, the case falls apart pretty quickly.

What’s most insidious about this narrative is that, in practice, the definition of Marxism is whittled down to the point that any sort of claim about “oppressor vs. oppressed” dynamics is definitionally “Marxist.” This is a bizarre way to think about the history of ideas.

It’s true enough that, if you squint hard, you can make any claim about oppression and domination sound a little bit like any other claim about oppression and domination. If you replace “women” with “workers” and “men” with “capitalists,” for example, standard-issue feminism starts to sound a little bit like Marxism.

But of course if you go through libertarian writings changing every mention of “taxpayers” to “workers” and “government bureaucrat” to “capitalists,” those ideas too start to sound a bit Marxist. As the philosopher Walter Kaufmann once pointed out in a different context, if you go through the New Testament changing every mention of “God” to “the Aryan race,” Jesus starts to sound like Adolf Hitler, but it’s hard to say what this is supposed to prove.

Taken seriously, the belief that all narratives about oppressed and oppressor groups are “Marxist” would mean that Marxism predated the birth of Karl Marx by thousands of years. But the truly insidious part is that the effect of all of this is to make any instance of noticing and objecting to societal injustice an instance of the totalizing historical evil at the heart of this narrative.

In other words, the Right’s versions of wokeness and cancel culture share everything that was worst about the progressive versions. The hostility to free speech norms, for example, is an important point of continuity between the two, although far more dangerous in this version because the new cancelers have so much more power and so many fewer scruples.

Activists who mocked liberal defenses of free speech were never in a position to throw their political enemies into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention. But where the progressive versions of wokeness and cancel culture were at least tied to a morally admirable aspiration to reduce prejudice and discrimination, this new version demonizes the very act of noticing and objecting to any form of oppression. In this case, Marx’s formulation about how history repeats itself get things exactly backward. The farce came first. Now we’re facing real tragedy.