Red Cancel Culture Isn’t Any Better Than The Other Kind — BCB #111
Also, Biden caves to voters’ wishes, and an exercise to mitigate election fears.
Retribution won’t work this time either
Recently, a Home Depot employee publicly posted, on their personal account, that they wished Trump had been killed. A mass call-in campaign from Trump supporters got him fired. This set off an argument among Red about whether they should use cancel culture as a weapon against Blue.
In a post titled Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy of Vengeance, Scott Alexander says there are lots of reasons this is a bad idea. He’s discussing cancellation specifically (i.e. public shaming campaigns) but most of what he says applies to any sort of weapon. Retribution never works, no matter how much we might want it to.
Still, Alexander does understand why vengeance is an attractive option:
Take a second to sympathize. From the Right’s perspective, the Left has beaten, shamed, and terrorized them for at least a decade. Now, the moment they get some chance to retaliate, their enemies say “Hey, bro, come on, being mean is morally wrong, you’ve got to be immaculately kind and law-abiding now that it’s your turn,” while still obviously holding behind their back the dagger they plan to use as soon as they’re on top again.
But the best arguments against retributive cancellation aren’t moral or emotional; they’re pragmatic.
First off, people won’t learn not to cancel from being canceled—if this was true, then Red folks who have been on the receiving end for years wouldn’t be arguing for its use now!
Second, groups are composed of individuals with different views and their members are always less extreme than we think (a point we keep making). In this case, there aren’t many situations where most Democrats feel that canceling someone is defensible while most Republicans do not, according to survey data from places like FIRE.
Finally, ostracizing people for holding views that oppose your own is a bad strategy for institutions like journalism, government, and academia which need to be able to get to the truth no matter how unpopular it may be.
The solution, Alexander writes, “isn’t to get the other side and balance the ledger, it’s to keep developing the physical and social technology that’s gradually improved things in the past.” He has a few suggestions for “boring incremental progress, ie the only thing that has ever worked”:
Politicians should dismantle the government apparatus propping up cancel culture.
Academics should encourage their schools to adopt the Chicago Principles, and businesspeople should encourage their companies to become mission-focused in the style of Coinbase. Ideally these commitments would have legal force, letting students/stockholders sue for violations. Politicians should incentivize the institutions they influence (eg state universities, government contractors) to do this.
Tech companies should come up with better technologies for Internet moderation that help people avoid unproductive comments without letting moderators transition into ideological censors.
The most important job for bloggers and other public intellectuals in particular is figuring out what the heck we mean by cancel culture. The “bad” kinds of cancellation shade imperceptibly into things like social norms, petitions, and boycotts. Where do we draw the line? Part of the reason it’s so hard to get a strong anti-cancel-culture coalition is that most people want some things to be socially unacceptable and aren’t sure how to draw a bright line.
Biden finally did what Blue voters wanted
Isaac Saul from Tangle News offers a cogent summary of the main takes from both Democrats and Republicans as well as some of his own thoughts about Biden’s stepping down. His post is worth reading in full, but one point seems particularly noteworthy: Saul points out that Biden’s stepping down is a clear instance of party elites listening to what Democratic voters want—something they have repeatedly failed to do over the last decade.
While prominent Trump supporters immediately called the announcement a coup, it seems clear that voters pushed for this:
Democratic elites actually did the opposite of leading a coup on Biden — they circled the wagons and held out until it was obvious they had no other choice. They tried to stop this and they failed, then they came together to push Biden to step aside.
Are you able to lose an election gracefully?
How can we curb the sense of fear that so many people seem to feel about the election? Heidi and Guy Burgess have outlined an exercise that might help.
They suggest getting together, ideally in groups of people with a range of perspectives. Ask the people you are gathered with to imagine that the election is over and their side has won. Then pose a series of questions:
First, how would you want the other side to respond to losing?
We want you to describe, in a fair amount of detail, what a constructive response to electoral defeat in a healthy democracy should look like. As a starting point for discussion, you might consider what ground rules for interaction you would want your opponents to follow. For instance, you might conclude that they should treat your side with respect (avoiding name-calling, for instance). You might conclude that they should acknowledge the legitimacy of your points of view (even though they most likely will still strongly disagree).
Next, ask participants what their side, as winners, would be willing to commit to in order to assure the other side that this loss will not be catastrophic for them.
This question is not as easy as it might seem. Elections do have consequences. Since, in a democracy, they do much to determine whose views guide social policies, the losing side will, no doubt, be bitterly disappointed. The question that we are asking you to address is what voluntary limits you are willing to place on your ability to exploit the majority power that comes with being a winner.
From there, have participants imagine their side has lost and ask themselves these questions again. What should your opponents expect from you if your side has lost and theirs has won? What commitments should each side make? Ask people to consider how their answers change depending on whether their team wins or loses.
This is in essence a "Golden Rule" exercise. If we win, are we willing to treat the losers as we would want to be treated if we lose? And if we lose, are we willing to treat the winners as we hope they will treat us? If the answer is "no," we should at least consider why that is so, whether failing to follow the golden rule is really going to do either side — or the democracy we each claim to hold dear — much good.
Quote of the Week
The priests of Amun probably felt pretty great revenge-canceling the priests of Aten after they regained power. But nobody remembers them today and they’re not part of the story of human progress. Jefferson and Madison wrote the First Amendment to defuse the entire conflict from above, and everybody remembers them, and it actually made a long-term difference.