How we understand the Free Speech and Cancel Culture debate
For our latest conversation, Jay and I will focus on the debate around free speech, cancel culture, The Letter and controversial firings that have been recurring in public conversation for a few years but have increased in recent months.
About a month ago, Harper’s Magazine published a letter signed by a number of prominent writers, academics and public intellectuals. The Letter has resulted in a litany of responses, critical and affirmative, from the Left and the Right, and created a sustained conversation for over a month now.
The letter and the response
Samarth: Jay, since our last conversation, one active area of conversation online and between us has been The Letter, responses to it and the broader debate around free speech. Free speech is a legal category, a set of norms, it is a sign of a vibrant democracy, and, overall, one of the prized aspects of living in modern America. What has been your read on The Letter, the response and the threads of conversation it has kicked off?
Jay: For me, the most interesting aspect of the Letter was the response to it. The signatories to The Letter apparently recognized that no criticism of cancel culture would be taken seriously if that criticism came from the right, and they seemed to have crafted their letter specifically to appeal to proponents of cancel culture — most of the signatories were left- or center-left-writers, and they made sure to blame Trump in the letter just for good measure. And yet the signatories to the letter were mostly criticized in personal terms, while the substance of the letter — the existence and harms of cancel culture — was denied or refuted. Criticism of cancel culture is not likely to register with the cancellers, no matter who voices it.
Samarth: By happenstance, I was visiting my family when the letter was published. My mom, a realtor in our home town who deals with all sorts of people, often people who have politics different from hers, was telling me a story about how she was invited to a neighborhood get together and felt undue pressure to show support for Trump around a group of people who assumed that she did. She has described similar interactions with home-buyers who want to make sure they are buying a house from a Trump supporter, and not a Liberal. She has come up with her own solution, saying something like “I don’t vote for a party. I vote for the best candidate for the job,” which allows people to read whatever they need to read into it.
It struck me that my mom would never write a letter like the one in Harpers. She wouldn’t even know where to publish it. Most people don’t lead with their political identity as their most salient feature. The signatories, in addition to being writers, have politics at the forefront of their public selves.
As politics and partisanship consume more of our lives maybe there will be fewer spaces free from this dynamic. But, at least for now, The Letter felt somewhat parochial. Or perhaps, as the heightened, elite, version of a dynamic that happens quietly around the country all the time.
Jay: First of all, I have nothing but sympathy for your mother, who is in something like the inverse of my position. I also keep my political sympathies to myself when I’m in public, and have also probably lost work for having the wrong political allegiance.
And your criticism of The Letter is valid — the signatories were all professional writers who deal with politics everyday and who can’t be considered representative of most Americans. But I don’t know who else but writers are supposed to write a letter. And it has felt unfair to criticize the signatories for complaining about cancel culture when they haven’t been cancelled (obviously, or how would they have published their letter?). If cancel culture does exist, who else but non-cancelled writers could produce a letter critical of it?
Instances of suppression (Campus/Online/Visible workplaces)
Samarth: We should talk through a definition of “cancel culture.” Do we mean violations of speech law? Do we mean violating the spirit of free speech norms? Does it always have to result in someone being censured or fired? Something else? What do you think?
Jay: Those are good questions for producing a definition. If it were just about violating the law, it wouldn’t be much of an issue. Our mechanisms for resolving legal issues are really well established. So it seems like cancel culture is more about free expression and the punishments meted out for those who express themselves badly. While we are an unruly and critical people, the evolution from criticism to cancellation is characterized by something else. Instead of challenging a person’s idea or expression in a usually limited context, cancellation punishes the speaker as a person. Instead of rejecting bad ideas, we reject bad people. And the attempt at punishment is what really counts, even if, like JK Rowling, they aren’t actually cancelled, since the attempt chills the expression of everyone else.
Samarth: This helps narrow things down. And I particularly like the distinction between criticism, which is intended to create more conversation and speech, and cancellation, which shuts speech down.
Another element that I think is important, and helps bridge the gap between cancel-culture and free speech as something we should care about as a democracy, is that it has a public nature to it. If there was a bunch of cancellation happening inside every Mormon church in America, we would care about it less because it’s an insular community with its own culture and norms. But the public aspect of the cancel culture we’re talking about is important. It often happens through public platforms like social media. Through collective public action. And with the intention to send public messages about norms and values.
To my mind, the three biggest areas in society where this sort of behavior is relevant right now, to get more specific, are campuses, people talking together online, and in highly visible workplaces like the NFL and journalism. Would you agree? What do you think cancel culture looks like in these spaces and what are its consequences?
Jay: Those are probably the most vibrant places for cancel culture. I think what ties them together are elite sensibilities — and elite venues. On college campuses, cancel culture is the result of professors and highly-paid administrators re-envisioning higher education as high-level activism. Where, before, free expression was essential to the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, now academic activists apparently believe that free expression just gives airtime to one’s enemies and otherwise has no value. The transformation of the campus from a truth-seeking venture to a political rally is what underlies campus cancel culture. And it is what makes the failure of any academic, administrator, or even student, to toe a political line into grounds for cancellation; it is what causes someone like Heather MacDonald to be perceived not as someone who makes bad arguments, but as someone who can topple a political project. Fortunately, campus cancellations are generally limited to campuses, but that insularity also produces some of the most aggressive reactions to political outsiders.
Samarth: The worst example of this in recent memory was Charles Murray being physically assaulted during a visit to Middlebury’s campus. It is unbelievable that an old man would be subject to violence from young people like that. And to your point about college as an activist space, I’m also reminded of incidents like Steven Salaita’s “un-hiring” at my alma mater, UIUC. And Norm Finkelstein being denied tenure at DePaul in 2007. Campuses have indeed been at the center of these types of speech issues.
Overall, I get the sense that college campuses are reckoning with a new, empowered, motivated and armed-with-information student body. Who is asking for changes to things like programming, speakers, syllabi and other parts of college life, to be more in line with their expectations for the world they would like to live in.
In my experience, having taught for about 4 years as an adjunct at Fordham, students in my courses appreciated when I pushed back or challenged them on orthodox beliefs about topics like politics, race, religion and so on. As long as they felt respected and included in discussions, overall. What’s often described as “safetyism,” the idea that students don’t want to be challenged or pushed, in my experience, felt more like they were ok with being pushed, as long as they felt respected and like they were being taken seriously.
Where to draw boundaries around cancel culture
Jay: Maybe the campus version of cancel culture is the purest form of the culture, existing in some ideal space and guided by the longstanding public orientation of the universities. Colleges have changed a lot over the last century, becoming more democratic in who they admit and what they teach. So it is a cancel culture established in an environment still guided by a public mission that isn’t present in the workplace or online. In those areas, the culture is nastier and more personal without the restraint, or at least academic narrowing, we see on campuses. Which in practice means more score settling and rivalrous competition involving political behavior — less of a concern with holding a political line and more with keeping the wrong people out. I’m thinking of Adam Rappaport, who was forced out of Bon Apetit allegedly — but obviously not solely — for an insensitive Halloween costume he wore seven years ago, or Megan Kelly, who was fired for suggesting that it was possible for children to wear blackface respectfully as part of a Halloween costume: those people would probably still have their jobs if they were better liked by their colleagues (there’s a reason Jimmy Kimmel still has a job). Meanwhile, online discourse is a nightmare that I mostly try to avoid, except in long form like this. But it is mostly characterized by ad hominem argument and shutdown tactics. Read a comments section anywhere for details.
Samarth: I recently quit social media and after 10 years of experiencing the internet in the same way. I have been trying to change my reading habits. I don’t miss any part of the tone and use of the internet that you’re describing. It often attracts, amplifies, and creates the worst kinds of conversation. It’s like taking every family fight and repeating it over and over again, at loud volume, with no end.
There is something interesting about the idea that online conversation and visible workplaces employ cancel culture the way you’re describing. In the case of Adam Rappaport, for example, my understanding is that junior employees who had long held grievances got no traction through normal routes like HR complaints. So they went online, constructed a collective moment against him, and it resulted in the outcome they had wanted. Some part of me doesn’t begrudge them finding a way to use new-found collective power to get the results they want.
But another part of me bristles at the idea of asking for anyone’s resignation or firing. Maybe we can aspire to a cancel culture, or better yet, a criticism culture, that allows people to congregate together, to vote with their feet, vote with their dollars, or mount collective criticism. But stops at calling for firings. That seems like a worthwhile compromise to protect (a much maligned, but I still think important, concept) civility.
Jay: I think civility is worth protecting. But to do that we need to understand the difference between expressing a consumer preference and suppressing other people. There are a lot of things I don’t want to buy, including things I avoid for ideological reasons. Everyone should regulate their consumption and associations by whatever measure makes them happy, but we should think about adopting more tolerant measures of happiness — people shouldn’t find their happiness in punishing people who think differently from them. The destructiveness inherent in cancelling the good in pursuit of the perfect isn’t something our society can sustain for much longer. As the response to The Letter reminds us, very few of us are perfect.
