I know many of you aren’t interested in having a debate with Matthew McConaughey, but personally I believe it provides some opportunities to clear up a lot of misunderstandings about what we on the left believe in and to define the acceptable spectrum within which a productive debate should exist in America. I think Matthew defines one end (not the middle) of that acceptable spectrum, so I think it’s important to prove we can have that discussion. You can see my past responses to Matthew here and here.
I see this as a kind of proxy debate because I think Matthew seems to have many of the misconceptions about us that are common among Americans in general. First I’ll quote some of his new points and then I’ll respond:
If McConaughey had his way, he would push for a science-backed centrist approach to find common ground and help bridge the political divide.
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‘Some liberals don’t see they’re being cannibalised by the illiberals.’
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“I don’t get politics. Politics seems to be a broken business. Politics needs to redefine its purpose.”
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it’s “not fair” for Democrats and Republicans to “exaggerate [the other] side’s stance into an irrational state,” placing the blame at the feet of both parties.
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“I would argue we don’t have true confrontation right now, confrontation that gives some validation and legitimizes the opposing point of view. We don’t give a legitimacy or validation to an opposing point of view, we make it persona non grata
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“You need liberals. What I don’t think we need is the ‘illiberals,’” McConaughey said. “What I don’t think that some liberals see is that they’re often being cannibalized by the illiberals. Now, there are extremes on both sides that I think are unfair. … The extreme left and the extreme right completely illegitimize the other side, the liberal and the conservative side, which we need in certain places.”
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“Where the waterline is gonna land on this freedom of speech and what we allow and what we don’t and where this cancel culture goes — where that waterline lands is a very interesting place that we’re engaged in right now as a society of trying to figure out,” he continued. “We haven’t found the right spot.”
www.huffpost.com/...
So, a few thoughts:
1. I think the bottom line misunderstanding that’s causing Matthew and many other Americans, including many who identify as free-spirited liberals, to not understand where modern liberals in the political sense (ie Progressives) are coming from in 2021 is this: Liberalism for us isn’t synonymous with letting people do what they want and respecting everyone’s rights to define their own behavior despite the details. You call many of us “illiberal” which is a way of calling us nagging or the promoters of a “nanny state.” But when you swap in those other terms, you start to see how consistent our beliefs really are. It’s conservatives who just keep coming up with new labels for us once the old labels lose their heft. So now it’s “illiberal” or “cancel culture.” I can see the confusion for those who haven’t closely followed our political activity over the decades. The term “liberal” may be the problem for you because semantically it may imply that the root of our beliefs are found in maximizing all freedoms. But this isn’t so. We want to maximize healthy forms of freedom, but there are many many other types of freedom that we want to cancel, not promote.
People may come to believe these things about liberals because we support things like marijuana legalization, gay marriage rights, and other polices that are about “freeing up” people’s lifestyles in a way that might seem somewhat Libertarian, very “cowboy,” in a very generic sense. But I think people are confusing things at a very surface/aesthetic level. Liberalism and Libertarianism aren’t the same thing and in fact in 2021 seem to be almost polar opposites in most ways, mostly due to how the far right misappropriates the term Libertarian to use it as a Christo-fascist movement with little sincere concern about letting people be truly free in a Constitutional way that honors other people’s rights to be safe and HEALTHY. As liberals, our core hasn’t really changed since we were Republicans fighting the Civil War. We don’t believe in the freedom of the slavemaster or the polluter, the slumlord, or the monopolist to do their thing. We believe in the right to be free OF them… to CANCEL THEM. Libertarians believe in the freedom for powerful people outside of government to effectively take away other people’s freedoms to be healthy, simply because they can…. and then cloak it in a kind of free-for-all version of “freedom” that doesn’t result in freedom for the poor and middle class. It’s a paternalistic version of freedom. It’s Citizen Kane being rightly lectured about his desire to support the poor by giving them all the freedom that he’s willing to permit, rather than letting the poor self-organize via labor unions.
Liberals have never believed in maximum freedom to hurt other people, whether it’s via pollution, guns, wars, unhealthy foods, unsafe products or activities, lifestyles imposed by parents, etc. We believe in promoting what I’ll call healthy freedoms, while Libertarians believe in safeguarding unhealthy freedoms. The distinction between what is healthy and unhealthy as usual can be determined via science. Guns are an example of an unhealthy freedom in our country because science proves that... and Republicans made that obvious by succeeding for a long time in cancelling our ability to do government research on gun violence. I think if Matthew is honest about his dedication to science as the arbiter of a sensible middle ground, then once he better understands where we’re coming from and why we are closing down debate along certain unhealthy avenues, based on scientific data about the negative ramifications of letting those unhealthy avenues infect our society, he’ll better understand why we do what we do and why he probably fits better with us than with Libertarians. We’re not the government. There is no freedom of speech violation in “cancel culture.” Everyone is free in this country to cancel those in their lives and via their choices in consumption that they want to. Nobody has the right to shout racist obscenities in someone’s face and then prevent the target of their abuse from leaving and not talking to them anymore. Forcing people to listen to obscenities just because a sizable portion of the right in America is now obscene would actually be an exercise in taking away the freedom of people to protect themselves and others from abuse. Again, this isn’t the government, it’s merely what I’ll describe below as a form of ethical consumerism. All of the racists are free to shout at the clouds, but no media organization should be forced to go and record and then produce and distribute their rantings. Again, you’ve got it exactly backwards when it comes to freedom of speech, Matthew.
2. The kind of liberalism that has resulted in so-called “cancel culture” is entirely in line with what true liberalism is and has always been. It’s just been updated to fit with the modern Internet/Instagram age where largely random smaller publishers have bigger voices than they did when there were only a few networks who essentially controlled the limits on healthy debate, and twisted it for corporate purposes. Now we’re much more susceptible to fake news obviously, so some updates are needed on how we control the boundaries and prevent the poison from ruining average people’s minds.
But liberalism has always meant following through on your values via ethical consumerism. Where in the past (the spirit of the 60’s that I think Matthew believes he grooves on) we chose to live more organically and avoid products and companies doing bad things, today we’re just following through on that when it comes to media and media personalities. When you hear the term “cancel culture,” just swap it out with ethical consumerism. Because media personalities (actors who do anything more than act and then go home) are media products - that’s why you have agents and people marketing your image and why that image usually isn’t an exact reflection of who you are at home in private. It’s a manicured product. We’re choosing to cancel products that destroy our planet in the same way we’re choosing to cancel people who are racist or who are poisoning our politics and our public debate. We can’t force a Hollywood studio to not hire a certain actor any more than we can force a company to not produce a poisonous product. All we can do is put pressure on them via our own message and our choices to consume/promote certain things or cancel our consumption of others. That’s the same thing we’ve always done.
Because after all, as Hollywood has proven again and again, the voices in media that we allow to affect that public debate and form people’s opinions really do matter quite a lot. If we open it up to neonazis and/or white supremacists in sheep’s clothing, it just becomes a race to the bottom where we eventually end up with out of the closet neonazis forming the views of millions of Americans. We’ve allowed that to happen, and hopefully we’ve bottomed out. But I sadly don’t think we have. And we just can’t afford that. Sadly, we can’t leave it to average Americans to ingest all of the poison that represents the worst of humanity and naively imagine it doesn’t do real damage. So, in the Internet age, young people are now constraining the field of what is acceptable by “cancelling” the most extreme voices that used to be cancelled by cable TV restrictions on decency and acceptable boundaries. There are, scientifically speaking, some voices that cannot be part of our civic debate. Unfortunately, the right-leaning majority of today’s conservative half of the country still choose to be one of the very few things that can’t: white supremacist fascists, aka neonazis.
Ethical consumerism (cancel culture) is one of the greatest developments by young people in modern politics and we shouldn’t in any way refrain from encouraging it. So, there is no waterline on cancel culture when dealing with the modern Republican party and Trump supporters. There’s just too many talented actors and comedians and news anchors to waste time propping up people that got cancelled. We can accelerate the inclusion of minorities in media by making sure this process of cancelling and then introducing new voices is more inclusive of the people we’ve been ignoring for all the wrong reasons. Cancel culture is a huge opportunity to make our public debate and our consumption of media far more healthy. Nobody in Hollywood or anywhere else gets to lay any kind of permanent claim to fame or to their place in the public debate. Anyone can and will be relegated depending on the public’s desire to do that. That’s just life in any field where your success depends on your public popularity.
And again, it’s not a “both sides do it” reality. Liberals really haven’t changed as much as you might think since the 1970’s. We’re still trying and mostly failing to achieve the same key things that need to be achieved to save the planet and our democracy. The idea that we’ve become more radical these days is a fallacy. We aren’t advocating for communes built separate from average Americans. We aren’t hippies advocating for free love or arbitrarily for any drugs irrespective of their scientific impact on the body. We’re a lot more sophisticated now. The liberals of the 1970’s thought they wanted Communism. We’re advocating for Social Democracy like in Denmark, where if you ask the citizens, they’ll tell you it’s a capitalist system with healthy controls on the wealthy and well-controlled public unions.
In fact, in many ways Obama is much more conservative than any of our 1970’s era liberal leaders. It’s probably easier to argue that the extreme left of liberals have actually become more conservative, more pragmatic, more willing to concede and lower our expectations… thus Joe Biden is our president and had the backing (or publicly supported him if Bernie didn’t win) of almost all far left organizations. In the 1970’s, they probably would have stuck with Bernie, because a lot of that activism by middle class whites was new and not as refined as it is today. Our black leaders are more experienced and more reserved now… for better or worse. Us liberals have really become a lot less extreme than the era that brought us the Black Panthers. And they were reacting to rightwing politicians who were a lot less extreme and a lot more competent at the actual job than Donald Trump or Sarah Palin. On the other side, the party of Eisenhower is dead. They’re so extreme now that only Donald Trump or Sarah Palin are acceptable to them. Even Nixon would be castigated as a Rhino in today’s Tea Party-defined GOP. The only real science-based way to meet Republicans in the middle is for the far right position to be someone like John McCain, who then walks towards liberals to meet us somewhere in the middle, but that’s not possible right now.
So, the only option we liberals are left with is to attempt to silence the extremists who now run the conservative movement and talk with the moderates like Matthew who are really just conservative Democrats who can’t quite get over their toxic masculinity or other cultural hangups and admit it (Steve Schmidt only just did it today). I realize it may not seem cool to be just like all the other Hollywood actors and admit you’re a Democrat, Matthew… but I think one day you will. Why? Because sadly, I don’t think you’ll be able to reform the GOP into something more sensible. Why? Because it’s a dying party and they see the writing on the wall. Their only demographic move is to radicalize and secure the most racist 30% of our country, many of whom simply didn’t vote before. It’s poison, but it’s shrewd. And in the end, I don’t think you can stop them, Matthew. If you really want to implement a science-based middle ground, you’re only going to find it by shifting the very arbitrary duality that we have in our two party system to exist on a spectrum between conservative Democrats and Progressives. That’s the only spectrum on our greyscale that tolerates science anymore.