Cancel Culture & Mutually Assured Destruction, redux

I didn't mean do it to me!

"The same justifications we’ve used to restrict conservative speech are being used to silence us on Palestine. We need a different approach," says Tascha Shahriari-Parsa in the Nation this morning. Another leftist has had a change of heart. She didn't reason from core principles of any sort of course; rather, she found living under her own rules quite unpleasant.

Last November, I wrote that "unless the consequences of their behavior are visited upon them, those on the left who have succumbed to the belief that they are on the side of the angels in some Manichean struggle will remain unswayed by principles…" Nellie Bowles writes depressingly of the same dynamic: once the mob came for her, she discovered a newfound respect for freedom of conscience.

In that post, I referenced an article by Yascha Mounk. Earlier this year, he debated Christopher Rufo on "The Right Way to Fight Illiberalism" and I highly recommend a listen as it brings into sharp focus what really divides us, today. Mounk & Rufo agree on the ends: freedom of expression. They differ deeply on the means (appeal to principle and visiting cancel culture on its advocates, respectively), but the real divide is in tone: Mounk clearly loathes Rufo and finds him unbearably… crass. For his part, Rufo regards Mounk as a hopelessly naive academic. Once again, we come back to class as the true divide in American politics, today.

I have to wonder if the attempted cancellation of Mounk has awoken him to the fact that this isn't some graduate seminar, but rather a political struggle for power?

06/26/24 17:18