On Cancel Culture and Heads and Spikes

Noah Smith on the plight of being Bari Weiss:

Whether this particular pile-on had long-term negative consequences for Weiss’ life isn’t clear, but she encountered an increasingly hostile climate at the New York Times, the paper where she worked, and eventually was forced to quit. It would have been reasonable for people observing that pile-on — and similar attacks directed at Weiss over the years — to conclude that speaking up is dangerous and that Twitter mobs hold a lot of real power.

The perception that cancel culture was the progressive H-bomb — an invincible weapon that could be fired any time at anyone who didn’t conform perfectly to a set of progressive mores that had only emerged a few years ago — reshaped much of American society in the 2010s. Every organization in the country, from knitting circles to romance novelist associations to sci-fi conventions, had its internal hierarchy disrupted by the fear that disgruntled or opportunistic subordinates would take their grievances online and summon the dreaded cancel-mob against their superiors.

I am old enough to remember how Michelle Malkin travelled in time from 2025 to 2012 and tried to get a dude named Erik Loomis fired for a tweet.

This was part of an organized, concerted campaign on the part of Malkin to opportunistically attack university faculty for committing sins against decency, such as being upset about the fact that twenty kids just got murdered by a psycho with an AR-15. It preceded the cancellation of Bari Weiss by about six years, but nonetheless involved the mobilization of a twitter mob around a manufactured outrage with the purpose of silencing a political opponent by threatening his job. And it almost worked; Erik kept his job mostly because of union protections, not because of the goodwill or courage of URI administration.

It’s possible that Noah doesn’t know about this specific incident, or many other specific incidents that were just like this one (sometimes more successful), but if you’re going to try to tell a story about twitter mobs and you decide to start that story with the Cancellation of Bari Weiss in 2018(!!!!), you’ve gone down the wrong path, my friend. Even twitter wasn’t the start of this; our old pal Glenn Greenwald perfected the “flying monkey” method before twitter existed, sending mobs of readers to burn down the comment sections of, send letters to, and complain to employers about bloggers that he disagreed with. Like me.

It’s true enough that “cancel culture” represented a particular manifestation of the Internet Mob phenomenon, and that this manifestation was important for a few years and had a few really stupid consequences (it still beggars belief that an episode of Community was withdrawn from rotation because it featured Ken Jeong in blackface, in a scene where his character is directly called out for committing hate crimes), but Cancel Culture did not create these tactics, and it certainly did not cause the Right to re-embrace them as soon as Elon took control of twitter and Trump retook control of government. And as Yglesias notes (and he would know):

The chief victims of cancel culture (and the richest targets for its justly maligned enthusiastic practitioners) were people credible to the left and center-left and sensitive to its criticism, making it a curiously selective H-Bomb. Al Franken got cancelled because of the apparent hypocrisy of making jokes about women while also being a feminist. Brett Kavanaugh got a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court after being accused of things that were quite a bit worse. It’s silly and sloppy and outright stupid for Noah to pretend that he doesn’t know all of these things. In the end, his demand that “Progressives need to snap out of it. They need to realize that the late 2010s were a very special time that will not be repeated again in our lifetime, and that they need to go back to the older tools of persuasion, compromise, organization, and effective governance, instead of sitting around saying nasty things about each other until the country collapses around our ears” essentially boils down to yet another manifestation of Murc’s Law: Democrats must be the responsible ones because they are the only ones who have agency, because Republicans are just incorrigibly nasty and thus not responsible for anything.