Our Cancel Culture King
There’s a vast difference between someone getting dogpiled on social media and the most powerful man in the world using the machinery of the state to eliminate dissent.
This week, in two seemingly unrelated decrees, Trump World moved again to reshape America’s culture. First, President Trump signed an executive order renaming the Department of Defense as the Department of War. Then, news broke that “The alumni association at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point has canceled an award ceremony for actor and veterans advocate Tom Hanks.”
Hanks was scheduled to receive the Sylvanus Thayer Award on September 25. The honor goes to a non-West Point alumni citizen who embodies West Point’s ideals of “Duty, Honor, Country.” The cancellation was rationalized with the baffling explanation that West Point is now focusing on preparing future officers for war. “Sorry Tom, nothing personal, we just don’t have time to honor you for your support and prepare for war.” (It’s worth mentioning that presently America’s National Guard is busy in Washington D.C., spreading mulch, erasing graffiti, and picking up trash–all of the classic war-preparation drills.)
New names and canceled awards, all in the name of politics. It’s a phenomenon deserving of a label, though I’m simply not creative enough to invent a clever one. Let’s just be literal and for now call it “Cancel Culture.”
But wait—isn’t cancel culture supposed to be over? Trump himself has railed against it time and again. In his 2020 Republican National Convention acceptance speech, he warned:
“Americans are exhausted trying to keep up with the latest list of approved words and phrases, and the ever-more restrictive political decrees. Many things have a different name now, and the rules are constantly changing. The goal of cancel culture is to make decent Americans live in fear of being fired, expelled, shamed, humiliated, and driven from society as we know it.”
Let me confess (no sarcasm here) that Trump’s critique sounded (kinda sorta) reasonable to me. Before MAGA turned “cancel culture” into just another talking point (see my earlier post on Harry Frankfurt’s discussion of “bullshit”), I had countless discussions and friendly-ish debates with left-leaning friends and colleagues whether cancel culture really existed and whether it was as dangerous as those on the right claimed. Compared with many of my colleagues, I was an alarmist. My colleagues dismissed my examples of disinvited speakers or chilled campus speech as merely anecdotal. And they were right—they were anecdotal. But they still disturbed me.
My instincts on free speech are broadly J.S. Millian: maximum liberty. Now admittedly, no “outsider” has a first amendment right to a campus podium or is entitled to receive an honorary award, but rescinding an invitation under political pressure always struck me as cowardly and, frankly, stupid. Canceling speakers, it seemed to me, served more than not to amplify their message rather than to silence it.
So although I was troubled by Trump in countless ways, I nonetheless (kinda sorta) agreed with his anti–cancel culture critique. He may not have had the details straight, but he was, as his allies like to say these days, basically “directionally correct.”
Here’s the problem: whatever cancel culture existed before Trump has, under his second term, become far more widespread, more dangerous, and infinitely more chilling. He punishes universities and law schools for dissenting ideals. A “big part” of why he has acted to move the U.S. Space Command headquarters from Colorado to Alabama is because Colorado uses paper ballots–a fact that has nothing to do with the merits of the move. He renamed the Gulf. While war rages on in Gaza and Ukraine, he has worked to reshape the Kennedy Center’s culture, leadership, and guest list. He ordered his DOGE team to scour the internet for mentions of DEI or climate change for their removal. He’s attacked the Smithsonian for accurately describing slavery as horrific. He’s reverted military base names and mountain names to suit his politics.
Trump is the Cancel Culture King.
The result of Trump’s petulance and insistence on remaking the world in his image is a government and culture in which people are afraid to speak. His own party is terrified to criticize him. The chilling effect is beyond debate.
Which is why “cancel culture” is no longer quite the right name for chilling speech under the Trump administration. Cancel Culture is almost too cute. “Police state” doesn’t quite fit either, however. “Patriotic correctness” comes closer, but it lacks the menace. Political theorists have distinguished between institutions that shape values through culture and those that impose order through violence or its threat. Trump has shifted the world of cancellations from the realm of culture into the power of the state itself. There’s a vast difference between someone getting dogpiled on social media and the most powerful man in the world using the machinery of the state to target dissent by, say, abolishing your institution or denying it hundreds of millions of dollars in funds or grants. Neither Twitter mobs nor government punishment are good for free speech, but only one is deserving of constitutional protection.
So perhaps we should retire the phrase “cancel culture” for now. What we are facing–or will soon be facing if our current trajectory continues unchecked–is much closer to this: the Repressive State.
Of course it’s worse when government does it, and they would say that it was government that renamed bases. And I’m quite certain that a number of words and phrases have been scrubbed from official communications by Democratic administrations to be replaced by other terms. And I am not convinced by the liberal/progressive effort to pretend that ‘our’ cancel culture was somehow trivial. It wasn’t. I personally know people whose careers were badly hurt by liberal cancel culture. I know of books that were mulched because of liberal cancel culture. It was not trivial, and it is not over.
I would remind everyone that the infamous Hollywood black list of the 1950’s was inspired by HUAC but assembled and enforced by the Association of Motion Picture Producers. It didn’t come from government, it came from gutless, unprincipled executives. Their spiritual descendants in modern media, in publishing, and in Hollywood, did the same damn thing. The Gina Carano incident (beloved by the Right Wing) is an example. She lost her job and much of her career over a series of pro-MAGA and anti-Vax tweets. She was fired because her politics did not match Hollywood’s, which is exactly the reason Dalton Trumbo was blacklisted. And we do not laugh off or dismiss the Hollywood black list, we make movies about it.
Why can we not admit that it was wrong when it came from our side, and yes, even wronger when it comes from the White House, and yet, still wrong when we do it? Why do we refuse to see that freedom of speech is not revered on the far right or the far left? We are being taught a valuable, bi-partisan civic lesson that cancel culture however motivated, however enforced, is wrong. It is first cousin to book burning.
Only government censorship is unconstitutional. But that is not the final word on the morality of trying to shut down freedom of speech. The Constitution does not grant us freedom, we are endowed by our creator with that freedom, and government is not the only threat to that freedom.
From the git-go it has been obvious that MAGA was all about “canceling culture” despite decrying that very thing.
Seriously, they have found offense in liberal expression on college campuses, while seeking to place a blanket over the same, with authoritarian heft.
They have demonized “social justice warriors,” political correctness, and virtue signaling with their own cultural warriors, non-pc correctness, and lapel Christian crosses and American flags.
Nancy Mace wins the virtue signaling contest!<
This isn’t push back, it is a cultural coup état, a complete eviseration of liberal values.
Some people (here and elsewhere) express annoyance at the liberal values agenda. But if we place both mindsets side by side, MAGA and “woke,” the former consistently assaults personal freedoms, human dignity, and furtherance of this nation’s arc towards a sustainable, inclusive community. The latter does not. But MAGA does love to festoon itself with the words “liberty” and “freedom” in a fit of total contradiction.
Being annoyed over “they/them” pronouns and D.E.I. simply isn’t reason enough to upend our national economy and vital security relationships with our long time global partners —- unless one is using petty viserceral conflict to cover for an earth shattering power grab and massive aggregation of wealth for a very, very narrow set of self interests.
@Michael Reynolds: On the day the Trump administration is hauling MR into a camp for something he wrote, his last public words will be “But liberals are bad because they had cancel culture!”
I think everyone here understands your point about cancel culture. But at this point the constant repetition in the face of a real and growing threat of state control over what can and can’t be said or read legally is like looking at Jan. 6 and saying “Yeah, but those hippies in the 60s used to blow up a lot of bombs.”
I can’t find the quote, but Matt Taibbi said liberals and conservatives both ban speech they don’t like, but only conservatives have the courage to do it openly, by law. One of the dumbest things I’ve ever read.
Despite quoting the Declaration of Independence I’m pretty sure you don’t really believe God granted us natural rights. Rights are something we agree to grant each other.
Rightly or wrongly, and often it’s wrongly, social obloquy has always been used to enforce social norms. All that’s changed lately is that conservatives are outraged that it’s being used against them.
@wr:
I’m looking ahead. Every D candidate in existence is asking me for my support, by which they mean money. I’m holding off til I see whether the party is serious about winning. I don’t want to sink more resources into a party that doesn’t know its core beliefs, is as yet unable to address its mistakes, is all too likely to come up with some new Twitter-defined shibboleth that will alienate allies, and will at the worst moment lose the plot and go haring off after the next Gaza. We are united only by our contempt for Trump, and I don’t think that’s going to be enough. And we are still fucking stupid when it comes to talking to actual humans beyond the campus quad.
Do we believe in free speech, or don’t we? That should be an easy one, and the fact that it still isn’t, is not encouraging. We should believe in the First Amendment at least as strongly as they believe in the the Second.
To be blunt: I want single-issue ‘advocates’ to STFU unless they’re helping us win. I’d like academics not hold off on theories that do nothing but feed the right wing beast. I would like to see some recognition that the largest voter demo is White people, and I would like Dems to stop cringing the way you are cringing right now, when I point that out. We are a year out from mid-terms and three years out from the general, and aside from hating Trump, I don’t know what the hell our sales pitch is. Do you?
So, in the faint hope that maybe we won’t do the same stupid shit we’ve been doing, I’ll keep pointing to the fact that we have done a lot of stupid shit.
@gVOR10:
Sigh. No, I don’t believe in a creator, but I do believe that we are born free, and have a right to live in freedom whether or not the government recognizes that in law, and whether or not my neighbor agrees. No, I do not just have the rights others grant me, I have ALL the rights except for those where a government representing free people, determines that regulation is necessary to stop me infringing on your rights.
Do you think the Russian people agreed that Solzhenitsyn had the right to freedom of press and speech? Do you think they’d have granted him that right? And yet, he had that right. At least I believe so.
When liberals were engaging in cancel culture I pushed back on the grounds that if we did it, we were creating precedent for them to do it and in abandoning core principles we were weakening ourselves in any future fight. Was I wrong?
ETA: By the way, we are the ones who supposedly believe in unenumerated rights. Right to privacy anyone?
@Michael Reynolds:
I’m personally inclined to disagree about “inherent rights”, being more of a Bentham/Austin type “utilitarian”.
However, in the political and cultural and historical context of the US, individual rights are a core element of the collective ideology.
Attrempting to over-ride them in the cause of some schema of political rectitude, either of the right or the left, is unlikely to be a successful strategy in the long term.
Trump and MAGA are currently attempting to do so: this plays well with the “pwn the libs” base, but outside that c.20% of the population, it’s more likely to be either ignored or actively annoying.
I mean, cancelling Tom Hanks? ftlog
@Michael Reynolds: Oh, Michael, I’m not “cringing” at the hard truths you’re flinging around here.
I’m just bored with you posting the same message time after time after time.
Everyone here knows how you feel on the subject, so you’re not enlightening anyone. And no one here is doing what you want to see stopped, so it’s not serving any preventative goal.
You’re such a good writer, and you have a lot of ideas. I don’t know why you insist on writing this same message over and over and over again where it can do no one any good.
Can’t we argue about the definition of genocide or something for a while?
The constant refrains from the regime about war, enemies, America First, warfighters, no more being treated unfairly, warrior culture etc, together with the open use of crude coercive methods to punish anyone who dares defy it, would (correctly) be interpreted as precursors to the start of wars of aggression if any other world power engaged in them. I see no reason to draw a different conclusion with respect to America.
Given the appalling implications of that, arguments about whether the regime’s manipulation of public opinion is different to “wokeness” strike me as unimportant.
@Ken_L:
The whole “warrior culture” and “warfighters” shit stinks to high heaven.
Being British, and of my generation, most adult males I knew growing up were veterans of some sort, either of WW1 or WW2.
I suspect most would have either laughed, or puked, or both, at such nonsense.
They did what they had to do.
And were, in most cases, rather proud of it.
But most would have pissed on chat about “warrior culture” from a great height.
That was the rhetoric of our enemies.
To hell with that.
@Michael Reynolds:
She was not fired. Her contract was not renewed.
Big Mouse does not want the hired help rocking the boat, whether they are rocking the left or the right. They want bland, centrist pablum or silence. Had she live streamed herself getting an abortion and pissed off the right wing, she also would not have had her contract renewed.
And this treatment isn’t limited to Hollywood. If you become a problem for your employer, even on your spare time, you may not be invited back. Lots of overt racists have discovered this over the years, justified by “your colleagues will not feel that you are treating them fairly going forward” or “we cannot put you on a project with a woman, Jew or black person, so good luck on your future endeavors” or some such.
And those are employees, who do not have a clearly defined exit point.
Has she joined Dean Cain and joined ICE yet?
Cancel culture is just democracy. If you find yourself foaming at the mouth and raving because somebody asked you to use their pronouns, you hate democracy. So many of these grievances are exactly what you would find if you went to any grassroots org.
Reynolds’ example of getting an email and then sending a money is a perfect example. If that’s your sole interaction with the democratic process (other than voting and having an opinion) then you aren’t engaged at all. Some might say: you don’t want to be. You are alienated. I feel the same way. I don’t hate democracy. But like many people, I’m ambivalent in the sense that I’m not out there doing anything other than money, voting, and having an opinion.
Anyway, Trump uses the state to imprison people for writing op-eds about Palestine. There’s no comparison and MAGA and Trump did not come from cancel culture. If anything, cancel culture came from right-wing do-nothing America.
@Michael Reynolds:
Lol wut? So then, who are you to give lectures about free speech and word policing, when in the next breath you announce those who’s speech you find distasteful or unhelpful should be word policed, silenced, and canceled unless you approve?
That you don’t don’t see the very obvious hypocrital contradiction here shows how easy it is to justify cancel culture when you think your cause is righteous.
If you think you have a good case for why leftists who use terms you dislike should be word policed, that’s fine. But then you can’t also position yourself as some free speech purist. Can’t have it both ways.
Except when the motivation is “I think this way of communicating is stupid and alienates voters”?
Free speech absolution always ends like this, in a mess of hypocrisy — see Musk and Trump, as in Bailey’s piece. Because, like originalism/textualism, it’s a bogus ideology that cannot stand up to reality. Because, yes, some people do need to be canceled — it’s not always wrong. Yes, some words do need to be policed by the marketplace of ideas. No, the First Amendment does not by word, spirit, or intent grant anyone a right to say anything they want whenever and wherever they want, to whomever they want with guarantee of no consequences, blowback, boycott, critique. Yes, boycotts are also a form of free speech. Yes, people have every right to jockey for their preferred ideas (including word preferences) to prevail in the cultural marketplace.
And no one believes all of that more than fake free speech purists.
I think the way the Trump admin handled this was pretty clever as a compromise, naming the bases after a non-Confederate soldier with the same last name.
I thought it was deft. Leave Fort Benning, but take away the traitor element. Droll.
Here’s the thing: conservative *invented* cancel culture. When I was growing up, my parents would not go to see Jane Fonda movies because of her actions in Vietnam. I was besieged by religious right nuts boycotting everything under the Sun because of supposed Satanic messages. And they cancelled Colin Kaepernicke pretty thoroughly, didn’t they?
Be against or be for it. But don’t be a hypocrite.
@DK:
If by “clever” you mean “exhibiting the mentality of a sniggering high school student being smart to the teachers”.
@Michael Reynolds:
Come again?
@DK:
I agree.
I would also note that “cancellation” is not all it is cracked up to be. Two examples of this week: Bari Weiss, who made herself out to be a martyr vis-à-vis the NYT, just signed some big deal with CBS that is going to make her mega-rich and very important. On a smaller scale, I would note that Louis CK was in Atlanta at the Fox Theater, a rather large venue (I saw Hamilton there, for example). Somehow, he escaped his (I thought well-deserved) MeTooing cancellation.
@Michael Reynolds: First, I think (like my post about the Gulf/Department of War post), you are missing the key point of MB’s post.
The notion that Gina Carano’s firing/non-renewal (I am honestly unclear on this issue and I what little research I was willing to do did not clarify as much as I would like), it is not like Blacklisting Trumbo and, as per the OP, it is not at all comparible to what the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES is doing.
I have little doubt that there were things I could have said that would have gotten me removed as Dean (and even gotten me fired from a tenured professorship).
Carano gave a mid-level performance on The Mandalorian and was not considered worth the trouble to retain. This is not the same as blacklisting (there was no attempt to bar her from working) and it certainly isn’t what Trump is doing.
Back to MB:
I get it, you don’t like being told what to say (Although I would counter, are you really being stopped from saying what you want to say? Last I checked, you have turned saying what you want to say to having homes in two countries).
I know that you have scars and legitimate gripes from various wars within kidlit, but I honestly think you should put some of this into a sense of proportion on these topics.
You are more than entitled to your views on all of this, but you are not being especially persuasive in the way you approach these discussions.