There's a running joke on the Left about people who claim to have been silenced for their conservative views — while standing atop the platform of a podcast, TV show, or newspaper column that has an audience of millions. You can’t have been silenced, goes the punchline, if someone can hear your scream.
This argument gets big applause on Twitter, but it is also, generally speaking, a cheap shot. For every commentator who has achieved too-big-to-cancel status, there are five who've found themselves sidelined, de-platformed or otherwise shut out of a public discourse in which the range of acceptable views seems to be ever-narrowing and strictly enforced. J.K. Rowling may be safe from ruination, but plenty of ordinary people who run afoul of the new norms aren't so lucky.
More importantly, there are countless more who see these incidents as cautionary tales and self-censor accordingly so as not to draw ire. The threat of professional and social death imposed by cancellation is like a shark attack: it doesn't have to happen very often for people to be genuinely and justifiably afraid of it.
[su_membership_ad]
That said, there is something ironic about the back-to-back release of two books this month by conservative authors, both with massive platforms, and both arguing that the battle for free speech has been all but lost to Left-wing authoritarianism. Michael Knowles's Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, and Ben Shapiro's The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent, argue that the illiberal woke have conspired to push dissenting voices out of the public square. They both issue from mainstream publishers.
While Knowles draws a meandering line through history from the American revolution to Marxism to 1990s political correctness to contemporary cancellations, Shapiro keeps it current, proclaiming that the entire mess is basically Barack Obama's fault. But both argue that free speech is in dire straits, if not outright doomed.
Shapiro is the more optimistic of the two: according to him, only a fierce and organised resistance can save the America he knows and loves. Knowles, on the other hand, says it's entirely too late: "Conservatives have wasted decades attempting to thwart political correctness through dime-store philosophizing over 'free speech,' progressively abandoning their substantive cultural inheritance for a misbegotten notion of liberty that can never exist in practice," he writes. The problem, in other words, is not the suppression of speech overall; it's just that conservatives, not liberals, ought to be the ones doing it.
[su_unherd_related fttitle="Suggested reading" author="Justin Webb"]https://staging.unherd.com/2021/08/barack-obama-was-a-false-hope/[/su_unherd_related]
It's not hard to see where the pessimism comes from. Over the past ten years, a militant faction on the Left has managed to lace its ideology into the bureaucracies of influential institutions — in academia, the media, technology and the arts — such that a small group of people has been able to impose a fairly radical set of sensibilities on the culture, the news, and the products that all Americans consume. The sudden appearance of preferred pronouns in bios and email signatures; the obsession with diversity, representation, and racial or sexual identity in popular culture; the clunker of a "nasty woman" joke in the most recent Jurassic Park film — as Shapiro notes, "membership in the New Ruling Class comes with clear cultural signifiers".
Liberal professors outnumber conservative ones by a ratio of 10 to 1; in departments like anthropology or sociology, it's more like 100 to 1 (that is, if there are any Righties in the ranks at all). The most educated Americans — the ones who graduate with advanced degrees and go into prestige professions — lean overwhelmingly Left. They write the books and articles that set the national conversation; they make the movies, music, and art; and they dedicate their disposable income and abundant free time to moral self-improvement projects like anti-racist colouring books.
Meanwhile, a multi-billion dollar diversity industry sells corporations pricey seminars that mostly serve to protect the leadership from discrimination lawsuits — and to keep their workers too distracted and distrustful of each other to ever think about organising. And yes, the faction of the Left that approves of this industry has also made political shaming into a spectator sport.
[su_unherd_related fttitle="Suggested reading" author="Tomiwa Owolade"]https://staging.unherd.com/2021/06/antiracism-wont-save-you/[/su_unherd_related]
But who is this a problem for? Who actually gets threatened, shamed or fired for failing to fall in step with the social justice Left? The fact is, it’s not conservatives.
What the free speech fretting from the political Right often misses is that this culture war is largely a Left-wing civil war — and its worst casualties tend to be self-inflicted wounds. American society is increasingly segregated along political lines: we live, work, befriend and marry people with whom our primary point of commonality is that we all vote the same way.
So when Shapiro describes the grave consequences people have faced for so much as nodding toward a conservative perspective — the newspaper reporter who was fired for mentioning the n-word in a discussion about offensive speech, or the Hollywood director who was dog-piled on Twitter for saying something nice about Shapiro himself — the people he's talking about generally aren't on the Right. They're liberals, being excommunicated from their professional and social networks by members of their own tribe.
When Senator Tom Cotton published a NYT op-ed arguing for the use of federal troops to quell civil unrest during last summer's protests, the staff revolted — not against Republican Cotton, but against the Left-leaning editor who'd approved the piece. The people who lost friends and professional opportunities because they signed the Harper's Letter in defence of free speech? All liberals. The group of women founders ousted from their own companies last year for crimes against diversity and inclusion had not a single Trump voter among them.
[su_unherd_related fttitle="Suggested reading" author="Adam King"]https://staging.unherd.com/2021/05/the-law-wont-protect-freedom-of-speech/[/su_unherd_related]
The function of all this speech policing is to enforce hegemony on the Left, a phenomenon that writer Freddie de Boer has identified as The Iron Law of Institutions in action: people care more about maintaining status among their fellow progressives than they do about advancing the progressive cause itself.
And indeed, the Left has struggled continuously in recent years to form meaningful coalitions that would allow them to obtain political power — in part because they're far more interested in the internecine sniping and status-seeking that ends up pushing would-be allies away. There's a reason why, despite four years of shrill #resistance, we still only barely managed to vote Donald Trump out of office.
If we did somehow manage to win the culture wars, as Shapiro and Knowles insist, it's only because the Right all but gave it away during the second George W. Bush administration, by leaning too hard into purity-obsessed, bible-thumping and anti-gay rhetoric at a time when the nation was becoming broadly more secular and sexually liberal. Outside their immediate bubble of similarly militant progressives, the Left's authoritarians don't wield much authority at all; most people find their rhetoric exhausting and alienating, if not morally reprehensible.
And even as commentators wring their hands over the death of free speech, there are already signs of a renaissance everywhere. Concerned parents are swarming school board meetings, speaking out against race essentialist curriculum in classrooms. Innovative alternatives to Robin DiAngelo-style diversity trainings are beginning to gain traction; so is organised pushback against discriminatory ones. A legion of writers pushed out of legacy media are launching a mini-revolution on Substack. Cancel culture is getting more unpopular by day, especially with younger Americans. Our legislators are beginning — albeit in their usual, halting, bumbling way — to address the difficult question of how to preserve America's speech protections in an age when most of it takes place on digital platforms.
[su_unherd_related fttitle="More from this author" author="Kat Rosenfield"]https://staging.unherd.com/2021/07/bill-cosby-deserved-to-be-freed/[/su_unherd_related]
The problems identified by Knowles and Shapiro are real, but we know this. We're working on it. And while ordinary Americans slowly move the culture back in the direction of living and letting live, the bubble in which the Left's most hardcore authoritarians seek to insulate themselves is getting smaller and less populous — not just because they keep eating each other, but because moderate liberals increasingly want nothing to do with them.
Salem, McCarthyism, the patriotism purity tests of post-9/11: as Knowles points out, spasms of intolerance are a recurring feature of American history. (Not that he mentions that last one, perhaps because he thinks it was good; indeed, Knowles' idea of a solution is for the Right to simply engage in an endless tug-of-war to win back the censor's authoritarian power). All of these moments were hard to live through. All of them inflicted enormous and unnecessary suffering on blameless people. But all eventually passed, always for the same reasons. People began to revolt and speak out. The pendulum swings back.
Of course, it doesn't need to swing at all. If we really wanted to, we could declare a ceasefire in the culture wars and simply leave each other alone. There's more than enough room in the America for people to live, and let live, pretty much any way they want to — and to settle disagreements quietly instead of turning them into a public bloodsport. But people like Knowles and Shapiro won't sell any books that way; to make money you need pessimism, alarm bells, proclamations of imminent doom and an audience of outraged and frightened people who genuinely believe that their way of life is under attack.
And so the culture wars rage on. But hey, if we're lucky, we'll get a decade or so before the audience becomes an army, and a bunch of Right-wing authoritarians energised by books like Speechless start campaigning in earnest, in their own way, to punish those who disagree with them.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeThis will never happen. The present day right is centre-right, doesn’t do censorship, doesn’t do intolerance, and certainly doesn’t do hate.
The only people who say otherwise are the left, but they say this because they hate everybody and they project their own moral incompetence onto others.
Currently, but there’s no guarantee it stays that way. At some point someone is going to start making the argument to moderates and conservatives that if you always play defense and never attack, you will eventually lose everything, just as they did when the USSR or Third Reich took over. That argument will fall on receptive ears as the population of people who feel attacked by the left keeps growing.
I’m not at all sure, reading the often toxic rants on here, for example about my home city, London, absurd and naive condemnations of Islam, not to mention lashing out at almost all and every institution and individual associated with liberalism or globalism (Bill Gates, George Soros, Joe Biden for God’s sake) that ‘the Right doesn’t do hate’.
So much easier to condemn the faults of the ‘other side’ than to notice your own
There’s a very important distinction between half a dozen BTL commenters on a website versus Stalinists being embedded, and formulating party and public policy, in the Labour party, the snivel service, universities, charities, quangoes, lobby groups and HR departments. One can easily point to exemplars of this pushing a neo-Marxist agenda but there are none on the right.
Sorry but Islam IS a problem. It’s maybe the primary issue that has turned a liberal leftie like me into a raging conservative. I’m a woman, an atheist and I believe in secular enlightenment values. Islam is the absolute antithesis of those and its repeated attempts to stamp its authority over the West, not just via jihadism and violent threats but through demographics, and facilitated by a resounding silence from the authorities, must be resisted. I do not want Europe to end up like Lebanon or Syria or anywhere in the Middle East frankly.
The centre right, yes. But the right also has its own loonies. The difference is they are not dominating all our institutions and public discourse. At one point they did though and the left, the counter culture most of us have grown up with, was a backlash against that. The wheel has just turned that’s all. There will hopefully be a re-balancing, then a few years of a nice sweet spot, then the right will once more attempt to impose its ideological authority on dissenters. And so on and so on.
Snarling, spiteful nutcase leftie ‘progressives’ who revel in anyone with an opposing viewpoint getting cancelled.. suddenly getting cancelled themselves, crying unfairness and full of whining and self-pity.
It’s wonderful to see, it truly is.
Sorry, but it is different this time, largely because corporate interests have jumped on the cancellation bandwagon big time. I don’t see how they are ever going to reverse field. Are Chief Diversity Officers going to be sacked because they are not needed any more?
And fellow leftists are not the only or even the principal victims when it comes to collateral cultural effects. Read Heather MacDonald’s latest, in City Journal, about the “suicide of classical music.” Every single major symphony orchestra in America is being pressured to abandon Beethoven and Mozart in favor of crap that was written by minority and women composers. That is a huge cultural loss for everyone.
Not to mention that symphony orchestras are abandoning blind auditions.
That’s so they can hire underqualified candidates to meet their quotas?
We really have to start hitting the corporations in the only place they hurt – their profits. We should be brave enough to loudly proclaim, on whatever platform, that we will not be using such-and-such retailers/companies – and why – they might just listen. After all we are their customers. I have indeed told my UK-wide opticians that I will not be using them anymore precisely because of their stance on cancel culture (I’ve cancelled THEM). I will NEVER buy a book from a biased publishing house either, and I buy a lot of books.
Sure many liberals are being being attacked, but many liberals have been forced further to the right as liberalism itself has been forced further right on the continuum. This is a significant change which cannot be ignored. I would even say that many liberals voted for Trump.
Maybe we are being tripped up by the language again, with people using the word liberal when thinking or talking about the ‘progressive’ hard left, who have done a good job so far of infecting institutions, governments, corporates and academia with their particular brand of hatred and illogic. I think there is every reason to be alarmed as many people remain ignorant of the size of the threat.
The ignorance is so true. Ostrich syndrome. I have an acquaintance, lifelong Labour voter, who up until recently would dismiss any of my warnings about the far left with “ah ignore it, it’s all just noise”
Suddenly, in this past 12 months he’s shocked and worried about the trans ideology being imposed on society, with regard his two young girls. Finally the penny drops.
For the time it’ll take for Western society as a whole to wake up to this madness and fight against it en masse, it’ll be far too late.
Agree 100% (love from a classical liberal now ‘far right’ LOL)
This is a very interesting article that provides a perspective on left-wing progressivism that hadn’t occurred to me.
I sense there’s a great deal of truth to the author’s argument that most of the people being cancelled today are members of the progressive left who were insufficiently devoted to the cause. But that might be because the right have already been cancelled, en masse, from the mainstream media and from most cultural institutions. All that remains is for the left to fight among itself.
There is a welcome note of optimism in this article. The author writes:
“…there are already signs of a renaissance everywhere. Concerned parents are swarming school board meetings, speaking out against race essentialist curriculum in classrooms. Innovative alternatives to Robin DiAngelo-style diversity trainings are beginning to gain traction; so is organised pushback against discriminatory ones. A legion of writers pushed out of legacy media are launching a mini-revolution on Substack. Cancel culture is getting more unpopular by day, especially with younger Americans. Our legislators are beginning — albeit in their usual, halting, bumbling way — to address the difficult question of how to preserve America’s speech protections in an age when most of it takes place on digital platforms.”
I sincerely hope the author is correct about the growing push back against progressivism. I certainly see signs, and some instances of successful resistance (such as by Jess de Wahls) have been reported here on Unherd. I’m still not entirely convinced this swing back to normalcy is quite as advanced as the author suggests. I hope I’m wrong and the author is correct.
Anyway, thanks for a fairly optimistic take on the future of wokeism.
The thesis that cancel culture hits the left hard has one flaw: deplatforming. This is explicit on social media, where right-wingers are demonetised, banned, etc. We only ever hear about cancel culture stories when it’s about a big, famous celebrity. Does anyone remember all those people fired for making the okay sign? Or how about Patreon banning Lauren Southern and Sargon / Carl Benjamin? Or ADL teaming up with PayPal? To say that cancel culture hits the left hardest is such an odd argument. It’s also a tepid take.
Once the left finds out there is a right-winger who is not mainstream, they will get doxxed, fired, harassed and banned. They just happen to be not famous enough for anyone to care. I don’t agree with Michael Knowles thesis, but I share his frustration. For decades, conservatives and right-wingers have tolerated the left. And for what? The left are not our friends. They treat us (the enemies) like enemies, like scum. If we treated them like how they treat us, oh how the tables will turn. Sure, the right would lose the moral highground. But it’s not like the right gained anything while having it.
That said, the right will win the culture war and it’s because the left are alienating so many people, the right is quick to accept them. Other external factors (such as war, economics) can help the argument for populism.
No, what is happening is the organized 2% of radical Left who have the actual agenda to destroy the West are out to consolidate power, that is why they attack middle of the road Liberal/Lefties.
The 2% have all used the Trotsky method of ‘Entryism’, this is a method where radicals move into power positions, and backing each other, they use militant ways to over ride the normal folk who are just running the organization out of civil duty. They rat-out, make malicious accusations, use actual fear, and consolidate the top, then they make the organization act according to the greater plan.
1980 the Marxist Frankfurt School moved to Columbia University, and spread till this amazing youtube is the result – Jordan Peterson, talking to the North Korean who escaped, and finally worked her way to Columbia University where she says it is as bad as North Korea about how everything one says MUST be correct or you are finished. She said her 4 years, and much money, were a wasted as the Teachers can not even teach. Here he talks to her, and others on “End of Universities?” https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=jordon+is+university+dead
So NO, the writer is utterly wrong – the 2% Militant Radicals out to destroy the West have won, and now before they trun to face the Conservatives they must finish terrorizing the moderates who are still sort of ‘on their side’ into submission. Then comes the World War/Civil War, and likely they win, and USA becomes North Korea, but even more twisted.
PS, the way the 2% militant (Marxist Militants) succeed in ‘Capturing’ organizations is by endless Lefty/Liberal sheep “Useful Idiots” they recruit and cultivate and make as tools – much like this writer, I noticed she is very inclusive with the Left/liberal….“despite four years of shrill #resistance, we still only barely managed to vote Donald Trump out of office.”
We….,
and the theme throughout. Watch out writer, these guys always bite the hand which feeds them. There is a story of a scorpion and a frog which is worth reading, it being such a human truth of the sorts whom are being discussed here that it has its own entire wiki….
I can’t imagine the USA ever becoming like North Korea for several reasons: it is too successful, too rich, has a remarkable history of invention and creativity and a heritage of individualism. I think she’s right about the pendulum swinging – McCarthyism eventually petered out. This too will die down for the simple reason that it is exhausting and actually very boring!
You’d be surprised by how many middle class Russians thought along exactly such lines before the fatal October of 1917. Few of them wanted a Bolshevik regime; most were either constitutional monarchists or moderate republicans as represented in the Provisional Government and their country was certainly rich, creative and successful. Against mighty Germany their armies had resisted at least as effectively as those of Britain and France, whilst they were squashing Austria and toppling Turkey. In that very year they were on the brink of a great military and diplomatic victory. Then the Bolshevik coup took place. Never, ever underestimate the fanatical devotion of the left to destruction. They are Utopians; they deny science, they deny truth, they openly preach mindless resentment – and their ideology fills the holes left by vanished religion. Once they have obtained a springboard of power, they will strike. You imply that their project will “fade away”. Why? If an army can see the tallest building in your capital city from the furthest point of its advance, it won’t call off the invasion, will it?
As Shalamov said ” One can survive along time on spite “. What is fascinating is how spiteful left wing middle class people can become bearing in mind they have never suffered, compared to to Shalamov’s time in the Gulag from 1937 to 1955.
Pretty much already happened. Mass shutdowns of travel, house arrests, papers please in every building, democracy decapitated and replaced with committees of entirely fraudulent “scientists” all of whom are hard-left extremists – one in the UK, a literal member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, an unreformed Stalinist. Vast amounts of media censorship, mindless loyalty to the new “Party” of academia. There’s plenty that can get worse but to believe cancel culture is primarily a left wing thing is naive. Indeed, the reason it looks that way is leftists purged everyone else years ago: they will simply flatly refuse to work with anyone even slightly conservative and throw epic tantrums until the moderates around them cave out of exhaustion. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any great solution to this. You’d need politicians who really, really recognize the danger of the left and wage total war on it as an ideology, in the same way that Germany and Japan were de-Nazified/de-Imperialized after the war. No such politicians are on the horizon anywhere.
The Tories are barely right wing.
“What the free speech fretting from the political Right often misses is that this culture war is largely a Left-wing civil war — and its worst casualties tend to be self-inflicted wounds.”
Try telling that to the comedian Andrew Lawrence, or even Lawrence Fox. Or the ladies who have had to go to court to fight dismissal claims. For example.
The issue is that government and corporations (small and large) have been infiltrated and they are promoting newspeak. If it all existed on twitter it would be OK.
I think the writer may have a point, but he makes it waaay too easy.
Interesting viewpoint of the left eating their own so leave them alone. Indeed the vast majority of people go about their business blissfully unaware of the firestorms in digital media. many may catch snippets on their evening news awaiting the weather forecast, but mostly ignore the turmoil. A few discovered that their children are being taught some very odd opinions that now concern them. Some are awaking from a fear that has consumed their lives and are not happy about the inability of policymakers to decide anything. They are beginning to distrust nearly everything they see and hear. With culture in flux there is great uncertainty about the future, perhaps as intended.
It is interesting how it seeps into the common consciousness though. Wokeism is the ‘aspirational’ stance and some of my very working class friends and family are starting to ape it in the same way they used to describe themselves as Christian on the census when they are not religious at all because they associated the term ‘Christian’ with ‘good person’.
This article makes a very good point about how and why the Woke, police and seek to take a trophy from their own caste.
There is a short story by the Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler called Lieutenant Gustl, where a young arrogant cavalry officer, threatens a Baker with a duel. The Baker manhandles him and threatens to break his sword. This causes a mental collapse in the officer.
The duellist, has to engage with a member of his own rank, otherwise he may get more than he bargains for. Likewise with the Woke, engaging with the proletariat or Conservatives, might result in them getting the kicking of their life.
Meanwhile the Overton window shifts ever leftwards
I don’t see any end to the culture wars other than society just splitting into two.
The institutions have taken sides. I don’t know if that’s happened before, but if it has, never when they were so powerful.
Yes, neutrality has completely gone out of the window. Even footballers now see themselves as a ‘political force’ who ‘have a voice that needs to be heard’.
Very astute article. I wonder if in our increasingly secular world that a swathe of people have merely swapped old style religion for a modern version. A kind of secular puritanism complete with dogma and witch-burning but somewhat lacking in the forgiveness or humility of which religion is also traditionally capable. And I say this as an atheist with no torch to carry for organised religion!
It’s almost as if a foreign authoritarian, communitarian power seeded the idea of radical wokism using an enormous social media army and multiple other means of covert influencing in order to cause western institutions to self-harm, lose faith in the liberal tradition, with aim of allowing that power to go on abusing human rights domestically with impunity.
I think it’s clear that a massive demoralisation programme is being waged on Western social democracies. The kick in the gut is that our politicians almost gleefully fall for it.
“Of course, it doesn’t need to swing at all. If we really wanted to, we could declare a ceasefire in the culture wars and simply leave each other alone. There’s more than enough room in the America for people to live, and let live, pretty much any way they want to”
Congrats – you’re now a conservative. The culture wars cannot have a cease fire because the left will never be satisfied that someone, somewhere has a different idea that could impose some unquantifiable indirect “violence” on somebody else, somewhere else.
My only question is when exactly will the liberals who are coming to terms with the radicalization in their party bite the bullet and vote conservative. Until that happens, this will continue. Trump is gone (for now). Good riddance as far as I’m concerned. But excepting abortion, which I understand is the third rail from hell, exactly what conservative policies are preventing liberals from switching? Honest question.
Leftists will always eat their colleagues and families first as they are the low hanging fruit. The more they take on solvent and independent people the less they succeed. Once in power they become the extractive dictators they claim to oppose, but can only get power in dirt poor countries like Cuba, NK or Czarist Russia. So yes a threat but probably not a significant one. They are reduced to race hate, warmist and covid lockdown scams etc to try and trash the economy so they can move in. Put yourselves in their shoes…its a daunting job, no?
I read a lot about “cancellation” and censorship, but I have never actually seen it in my daily real life.
This is probably because most of it seems to take place on Twitter and in other idiotic forms of social media that I do not use. Most of these seem to be populated by simpletons and nutcases, which is why I don’t use them.
I will continue to not frequent these rancid sewers for the hard -of-thinking, and I expect I will continue to see no censorship or “cancellation” in my real life. Except possibly for my subscription to publications like this one, if they will not put on some more interesting writers…
I would agree. But working in a rather well known woke company, in our little team we agree it’s all rubbish, but we are careful to self censor and worry about what backlash we might get if we put out a communication that transgresses some line we didn’t even know existed.