As anticipated, Bari Weiss appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher last night to talk about “cancel culture,” and while it was not nearly as infuriatingly-cringeworthy as it could have been (the Mets took care of that), it did meet expectations in that (a.) the host, characteristically, agreed that “cancel culture” is not only a major problem in the U.S. but one that rightly (in his view) helps Republicans win elections; and (b.) no one brought up Weiss’s career of making sure that no one is allowed to have the wrong thoughts about Israel-Palestine, and her personal crusade(s) to “cancel” anyone who does.
Without getting into the question of whether “cancel culture” exists or is a real thing, and assuming that it is, I just have two questions:
1. Why is “cancel culture” a good reason to vote Republican (i.e., why should the Democratic Party and Democratic candidates be held responsible, and punished electorally, for “cancel culture”)?
2. How is telling people what they can and can’t think, say, or do in response to what others, particularly public figures, say, write, or do — i.e., canceling “cancel culture” — any different from “cancel culture”?
It’s really the second question that I want to talk about today, because I’ve written ad nauseam about the first. In my experience and observation, the main objection to things like “cancel culture” and “political correctness” has always been that they constitute a form of thought control, or thought policing, that makes people “afraid” to “speak out” and prevents them from “being heard.” But I’m wondering; how is railing against “cancel culture” and looking for ways to make it go away not also a form of thought control and thought policing?
Weiss complained again last night that her boss was fired from the New York Times because he ran an Op-Ed by Tom Cotton essentially advocating siccing the U.S. military on American citizens to punish them (i.e., punish us) for protesting police brutality in a non-Tom-Cotton-approved way; Cotton’s is a “voice” that Weiss believes “should be heard.” Who fired Weiss’s boss for allowing that “voice” to “be heard”? The Times, in whose pages it was published. Why? Because an amorphous aggregation of largely-imaginary* people, let’s call it The Mob™, “demanded” it. *Not “imaginary” in the sense that they don’t exist, but in the sense — and this is a little hard to explain — that when one thinks or talks about The Mob™ one doesn’t name anyone or identify anyone by name so much as refer to an amorphous category of people, but not people who can be picked out or identified by name or address or face or anything else; an indefinite aggregation of random, anonymous, types who say and do things collectively as if they all together constituted a single autonomous entity.
Again, it’s hard to explain, and therein, I think, lies the problem with so-called “cancel culture” and these lugubrious complaints about how awful it is. The so-called “victims” thereof, like Weiss’s boss (and, in her own mind, Weiss herself, albeit not those whom she has sought to cancel for having the wrong thoughts about Israel-Palestine, and to ensure that those thoughts/people cannot be heard), are identifiable named individuals; The Mob™ that demands their punishment or ouster, is not. The Mob™ is like a golem from Jewish folklore; an anthropomorphic creature created from inanimate matter (or in this case, from aggregated social media content), to personify whatever anyone wants it to personify.
This golem can be attacked, but it can’t be destroyed; it can’t be “canceled” in the way that Bret Stephens can be “canceled,” because Bret Stephens is a corporeal person with a name, an address, and a bank account; The Mob™ has none of those things. Tom Cotton can be thought-policed, targeted and punished for expressing the wrong thoughts; The Mob™ can’t. Bari Weiss can target and ensure the punishment of college professors for the offense of having non-Bari-approved thoughts about Israel-Palestine, but she can’t target or ensure the punishment of The Mob™ for targeting (or “forcing” the Times to punish) her boss. The Mob™ doesn’t have a job that Bari can get it fired from, or a platform that Bari can get it kicked off of.
That’s what makes this anti-”cancel culture” crusade so very, very conveeeeenient for its proponents, like Maher, Weiss, and Andrew F***ing Sullivan, and whoever else professes to be a “victim” or to speak for or sympathize with the “victims” of “cancel culture.” It’s why no one who complains that the Washington Football Team’s former name and logo were “cancelled” by The Mob™ is ever asked, or has to answer, why they and others who have demanded (and still demand) that it not be changed also constitute a Mob™. We saw this self-serving double standard in Congress the other day, when Rep. Jayapal called out Attorney General William Barr for treating liberal protesters like a Mob™ while ignoring their white, heavily-armed right-wing counterparts.
Mainly, though, it’s what allows the Bill Mahers and Bari Weisses of the world to avoid question #2 above, viz., the implications of canceling “cancel culture” by controlling the thoughts of The Mob™ and ensuring that its individual voices “can’t be heard.” Weiss smugly asserted on Maher’s show last night that “cancel culture” is not about criticism but goes “beyond” criticism into “punishment” and “social murder;” of course, she could neither explain nor demarcate the difference, by way of example or definition. Maher, of course, didn’t press her on this conclusory assertion, nor put the shoe on the other foot and ask whether canceling “cancel culture” is just a way to avoid, or to shield oneself from, legitimate criticism, or heaven forbid, the consequences of one’s words and actions.
I don’t think anyone disputes how difficult, nigh impossible, it is for a public figure to get out from under a mistake of saying the wrong thing, and of being unable to go back in time and un-do that mistake. As frustrated as I have been with Maher lately I still have to give him credit for doing the absolute best he could to atone for his “house n*****” gaffe by having all African-American guests on his very next show and expressly inviting each one to take him to the proverbial woodshed, which they did, while he sat there and took his medicine and made no effort to justify or rationalize the very, very bad “joke” he had made. I don’t think anyone could have expected any more, from anyone, but some still won’t let it go notwithstanding the fact that he can’t go back in time and un-say it.
But, again, those who won’t let it go can’t be made to let it go because, in my mind and his, they’re just The Mob™, they’re just a golem, which faces no consequence of not letting it go. The fact is, people are going to have thoughts and express thoughts that we don’t like or agree with; we can be aware that those thoughts are out there, and aware that they’re being expressed somewhere by someone somehow, but we can’t control them — except to the extent that we can tie the thought to a name, to an actual, discrete, distinguishable person who could then face actual consequences.
That, I think, is what bothers the Mahers and Weisses and Sullivans so much: they have to own the thoughts that they express in public, but The Mob™ doesn’t. The Mob™ can “target” them and see to their “punishment” (supposedly), but they can’t target or punish The Mob™ — they only think they can by going on television and complaining about how awful “cancel culture” is, and tacitly encouraging their audience to vote Republican and thereby force The Mob™ to re-think its tactics. In other words, We can’t punish The Mob™ by going after its [anonymous] members’ reputations and livelihoods, like they do to us, so let’s punish The Mob™ — and let’s cancel “cancel culture” — the only way we know how: by getting Republicans elected. To me that’s rather like curing the disease by killing the patient, except it doesn’t cure the disease.
But it does answer question #1.