Hello World
E Pluribus Unum: Out of many, one. This is more than a lofty ideal. It’s an indispensable organizing principle for a people with diverse and often irreconcilable conceptions of the good and the right. Rather than reinforcing existing hierarchies based explicitly on religion, class, education, race, or sex, America’s founders pointed the way to a society that recognized — eventually, after many fits and starts — that all are truly “created equal,” that no one’s right to rule or even be heard is greater than another’s.
The open expression of ideas is famously protected by the First Amendment, but substantive liberalism requires an exchange of ideas, and that means not just the right to speak, but the opportunity to be heard. An active and productive marketplace of ideas cannot rest on Constitutional protection alone. We the people of all political, ideological, cultural, and religious persuasions have a responsibility to preserve the norms that buttress pluralism, and to stand against the intolerance and illiberal thought currently coursing through American society.
We’ve been down this road before: Wartime restrictions on speech, yellow journalism, violence and intimidation of ethnic and racial groups, McCarthyism (both the original article, and its reiterations in other contexts on both left and right,) the 90s wave of “political correctness”, restrictions on free expression regarding God in the public square, and, of late, what many call cancel culture.
Sometimes these episodes were simply malevolent, while others contained an element of genuine concern that was tainted and distorted by demagogues on both sides. The present age adds a new and thorny complication: the speed with which both information and misinformation are shared. The result has been that ‘cancel culture’ has been twisted, caricatured, dismissed, and redefined through umpteen iterations even as good-faith interlocutors are trying to work out the limits of the original concept.
While others have undertaken to define cancel culture with checklists, our view is that the practice is generally characterized by disproportionate, punitive, coordinated, personal destruction and discrediting for a real or perceived offense with no offer of redemption. While targets can include prominent individuals, it’s not a given. A December 2020 New York Times article spectacularly misses the point, observing: “It’s instructive that, for all the fear that cancel culture elicits, it hasn’t succeeded in toppling any major figures — high-level politicians, corporate titans — let alone institutions.” The insidious nature of the practice is that social media can grant instant prominence and inflict grievous consequences almost simultaneously. Virtually anyone is a potential victim of the online mob.
Both individuals and, increasingly, intellectual property can be subject to “cancelation,” but the ultimate objective is both more ambitious and more sinister. It’s to punish dissent from an ever narrowing consensus by raising the penalty for transgressive thinking beyond what most are willing to pay. The goal of cancellers isn’t just to enforce conformity, but to install themselves as arbiters of right thinking. The tell that this process is more often about power than progress is the scarcity of grace, and the groveling required by those fortunate enough to earn indulgences.
All of this is but the latest crest in the cycle of illiberalism that has always been a part of liberalism itself, an unwillingness to coexist with those whose words and ideas are foreign or repellent to us. Rather than learning from one another, we snipe. Rather than hold one another accountable, we search and destroy. Unum remains a lofty goal, but an increasingly unattainable one absent a course correction. We must not surrender to our baser instincts.
Our mission here at Pluribus is likely to create strange bedfellows, just one challenge this social and religious conservative will face in presenting a broad spectrum of writers and ideas on this site. But the threat is too severe to address solely from our disparate, independent ideological camps. Therefore, while “cancel culture” is the current buzzword, Pluribus will begin by aggregating worthy contributions to the broader discussion of illiberalism with the intention of soliciting and presenting original work as well, as time and growth permit. I am indebted to those whose support and resources make this endeavor possible. Perhaps Pluribus can play a small role in shining a light on the encroaching darkness of illiberalism and encouraging the emergence of the more perfect union we the people committed to some 232 years ago.
