The censorious right never went away

If they deign to mention it at all, the preferred way of Respectable conservative pundits to downplay the Trump administration’s war on free speech is to claim that it’s “conservative revenge for the great woke cancellations of 2020 and 2021.” The main problems with this, as Nicole Hammer observes [gift link], is that 1)conservatives were cancelling people way before 2020 and 2)they don’t need any liberal precedent to do what they want to do:

“It’s the idea that the illiberalism that has swallowed the progressive left — what we often refer to as wokeness — has come for the right,” The Free Press’s Bari Weiss explained in the introduction to a podcast on the subject. And while conservatives are split over whether this is a positive development or a negative one, they all seem to agree on one point: The right learned its vengeance politics from the left. “Turnabout is fair play,” the conservative activist Christopher Rufo posted on X. Right-wing cancel culture was simply “an effective, strategic tit-for-tat.”

That argument rests on a flawed premise: that the right had been devoted to open debate and restrained government power, only reluctantly abandoning these principles to counter left-wing illiberalism. But the right did not learn cancel culture from the left; the modern right in America emerged as a censorious movement. It took decades for its free-speech faction to develop, and even then, it has only ever been a minority part of the coalition.

The conservative movement that arose at the start of the Cold War readily married government power and private efforts to crack down on its political opponents. Take the case of Counterattack, the newsletter of an anti-communist organization with the anodyne name of American Business Consultants. Funded by the textile millionaire Alfred Kohlberg, Counterattack began publishing in 1947 with hiring managers in mind, regularly publishing the names of people it believed had communist sympathies.

In 1950, Counterattack published a lengthy pamphlet called “Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television.” The cover featured an outstretched red hand cradling a microphone; the interior contained 151 names of people and a list of their suspected connections to communism. Though pitched as a list of “Red Fascists and their sympathizers,” “Red Channels” targeted people for their involvement with unions, civil liberties groups and Black civil rights activism. Philip Loeb, who lost his role as one of the stars of the TV series “The Goldbergs” because his name appeared in the pamphlet, was included for supporting groups like the Committee to End Jim Crow in Baseball and the Stop Censorship Committee.

The blacklisting of the 1940s and 1950s comprised both public and private efforts. Counterattack began publishing just a few months before the first Hollywood blacklist began in the midst of a House Un-American Activities Committee investigation. Senator Joseph McCarthy announced his dubious list of 205 communists in the State Department a few months before the publication of “Red Channels.”

Leaders in higher education, film, broadcasting and government used mass firings, loyalty oaths and censorship to purge both supposed and actual leftists from their institutions over the next several years — a reminder that ostensibly liberal industries quickly came to the aid of largely right-wing censors. And while McCarthy would ultimately be censured by his Senate colleagues and disgraced in the public eye, he remained a hero of right-wing activists like William F. Buckley Jr. (who, in his 1951 book “God and Man at Yale,” derided academic freedom and sought to pressure colleges to teach conservative orthodoxies).

For the right, this crackdown wasn’t a sign of the excesses of the early Cold War but rather the proper role of government: to police public life to make sure it conformed to conservative values. Communists remained a constant target during the Cold War, as did people who broke from traditional gender and sexual norms. Thousands of gay men and women lost their government jobs in the so-called Lavender Scare as part of the anti-communist crackdown that started in the 1940s.

Even after that wave of persecution ebbed, gay people could be arrested or fired if outed. When Miami approved new employment and housing protections for gay people in the 1970s, the singer Anita Bryant fought back with the Save Our Children campaign, which led to the successful repeal of those protections.

One thing that is too often forgotten about the war on LGBTQ people led by not only Bryant but Saint Reagan himself was that getting people fired (especially teachers) was a major part of it. One can argue that losing your job is even worse than having to read someone tell a student reporter that it’s kind of insulting to call a pulled pork sandwich a “banh mi.”

Here’s another of the many pre-2020 cases to have gone down the memory hole:

Or consider Shirley Sherrod, who worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture as the state director of rural development in Georgia. One morning in 2010, a website run by the right-wing activist Andrew Breitbart posted a video of Ms. Sherrod, deceptively edited to make it appear that she used her position to discriminate against white farmers.

As the outrage built throughout the day across right-wing media and the internet, the Obama administration quickly moved to appease the online mob and forced Ms. Sherrod to resign. (After the release of the full recording, the administration apologized and offered to rehire her.) The Sherrod incident was an important moment in a longstanding turn toward framing the Obama administration as anti-white; a year earlier, Mr. Beck made his infamous claim that President Barack Obama was “a racist” who had a “deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”

In light of this long history, it makes no sense to suggest that a tolerant right was forced by an intolerant left into adopting cancel culture. Book-banning groups like Moms for Liberty did not need liberals to teach them anything; right-wing campaigns against pro-L.G.B.T.Q. books like “Heather Has Two Mommies” and “And Tango Makes Three” flourished in the 1990s and 2000s.

I recommend the whole piece, which is the kind of historical corrective we need more of.