We’re Canceling People for the Wrong Reasons

Cancel culture or accountability?

The debate about “cancel culture,” or “call-out culture,” has been buzzing for years. Are call-outs and canceling really just accountability for bad behavior? Or are they the result of wokeness gone awry?

I say yes and yes, depending on the situation.

I’d like to examine this question in the context of illiberalism, the social trend I wrote about last time.

In some cases, canceling is the result of a long-overdue reckoning as more voices are heard. Bad behavior that used to be tolerated is finally getting punished. This can be a very good thing!

Take former Raiders coach Jon Gruden, whose years of misogynistic, racist, homophobic, and transphobic remarks have recently come to light, resulting in his resignation. When someone behaves awfully, it’s not okay to look the other way, and they should face consequences. This is accountability.

But in other cases, the behavior in question isn’t awful. It’s reasonable and well-meaning, but offensive to some, due in part to political polarization.

When the “other side” is seen as crazy and dangerous, it’s easy for a vocal minority to label even reasonable behavior intolerable. Celebrities and public figures who seem to support horrendous views are swiftly canceled, often before their views are even fully understood. This can ruin lives.

This is when illiberalism comes into play. Intellectual liberalism is the free and open exchange of ideas, whereas illiberalism is the intolerance of diverse views—even reasonable ones.

Canceling people simply because they disagree with us can become a vicious cycle. Moderate and contrarian voices begin to fall silent out of fear, discourse becomes more of an echo chamber, and it becomes even riskier to disagree with the vocal crowd.

So, call-outs and canceling have their merits and their pitfalls. The question is, what constitutes “reasonable”? When is it necessary to shut someone down for offensive behavior, and when is it better to tolerate the discomfort of their views and engage with them civilly? Where’s the line?

Clearly, different people have different answers. I’m willing to engage with my cousin who disagrees with me about racism, but others might find his views intolerable. Meanwhile, I find Jon Gruden’s remarks unacceptable, whereas his colleagues seem to have given him a pass for years. In our polarized climate, the dial slides farther over—more people are less tolerant of each other, and the window of what most of us accept grows smaller.

My hope is to nudge us toward better discernment. I’d like a more intellectually liberal climate, with greater tolerance—not of all behavior and views, but of moderate, reasoned, and/or well-meaning behavior and views. When something fits those categories, I’d like to see us calling in more often than calling out.

Illiberal liberals

Contrary to stereotypes, the extreme version of cancel culture happens on both the left and the right. First, I’ll look at the left, where there’ve been numerous instances of people canceled for espousing reasonable but conservative opinions. The left’s cancel culture has gotten so much attention that I’ll give only one more small example here.

This one was described by linguist John McWhorter in a New York Times piece. A University of Chicago climate scientist named Dorian Abbot was recently disinvited to speak on climate change at M.I.T—and disinvited not because of his stance on climate change, but because of his vocal support of race-neutral university admissions policies.

McWhorter points out that Abbot’s stance on admissions is a popular and reasonable one, albeit unpopular on the far left:

[A]ffirmative action and its justifications are a complex subject that has challenged generations of thinkers. A Gallup survey conducted in late 2018 found that 61 percent of Americans generally favored race-based affirmative action. But in a survey taken a few weeks later, Pew Research found that 73 percent opposed using race as a factor in university admissions….

Clearly some cogitation is in order. Yet it appears that Abbot was barred from a more august podium out of an assumption that his views on racial preferences are beyond debate.

McWhorter also points out that Abbot was going to speak on climate change, not affirmative action.

There’s an argument for canceling someone with truly abhorrent beliefs, even if their beliefs aren’t relevant to the lecture at hand. If Abbot was a Nazi, it would be justified to cancel any lecture he might give, on any subject. But his views on race-based admissions don’t fit that description.

Abbot was but one example, prevented from speaking to a broad audience at a university on a topic that has nothing to do with racial preferences, as if his opinions about racial preferences irrevocably taint his climate science work. As if his views on racial preferences themselves are unworthy of reasoned discussion.

For many people, especially people who aren’t tenured professors at prestigious universities, the possibility of being canceled casts a pall of fear over their public and even their private conversations. This fear fosters an illiberal climate.

Illiberal conservatives

But this isn’t only happening on the far left; intolerance and cancel culture have also been blossoming on the right.

Across the country, conservative school boards have been making waves with their own cancelations. One example comes from just outside my hometown of Portland, Oregon, where superintendent Joe Morelock was fired last month for behavior that many feel was quite reasonable.

Morelock had hesitated to enforce a new policy instituted by the board: a district ban on teachers displaying Black Lives Matter signs and pride flags in their classrooms. He hesitated, he says, because he feared the ban was illegal—it’s being challenged in court.

Morelock has made a name for himself by rescuing his district from financial distress since his hiring in 2018. His wariness of the ban made fiscal sense and was supported by a broad array of students, teachers, and community members, but it was also condemned by other community members and conservative board members.

After Morelock’s firing, one of his supporters on the board approached him in tears. He met her with a statement that has become a rallying cry among his supporters: “Just remember that from the darkest dark comes the brightest light.”

Another example of conservative cancel culture is from Eastern Oregon, where superintendent Kevin Purnell was forced to step down for enforcing a statewide mask mandate. He himself didn’t approve of the mandate—he’s conservative, like most people in his little district of Adrian. But he’s known as a “rule follower” and an ethical leader, and he wanted to help Adrian’s schools meet in person.

As the Oregonian reports:

Local small businessman Eric Ellis said, “We say that an outcome of education at Adrian is to produce good citizens. To achieve that, our children must be led by honorable and moral leaders. Dismissing Mr. Purnell would send the exact opposite message – that we want only educational leaders who lead when it is convenient and non-controversial, and in accordance with the short-term passions of the vocal minority.”

That “vocal minority” is the mirror image of the one on the left.

These and other school officials’ stories have sent shock waves across the country, creating a climate of fear among school employees.

Conservative cancel culture looks different from that on the left, but it’s fundamentally the same: in response to a public outcry, an employee is punished by their employer, even for moderate and reasonable actions.

Meanwhile, GOP leadership faces its own similar turmoil.

At the national level, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has taken flak for supporting conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia representative. McCarthy says his goal is to make the GOP “a very big tent”—i.e., an inclusive, intellectually liberal place where various ideas are allowed, even outlandish ones. This is presumably in contrast to the left’s illiberalism.

Intellectual liberalism doesn’t mean giving equal weight to all ideas, even patently false ones. I’ll write about that in future posts.

But setting that point aside for now, the GOP isn’t as big a tent as McCarthy would like it to be. The same week he made his “big tent” statement, Liz Cheney was censured by her state GOP for refusing to toe the false party line that Trump had won the 2020 election. Just as sometimes happens on the left, in her case, the extreme voices won out.

But the left is worse!

So it isn’t only the “woke” left that unjustly cancels people. Still, I do think this form of illiberalism is more pernicious and widespread on the left.

I don’t have numbers to back my sentiment up, and perhaps I’m biased, because I’m immersed in the left’s culture. I’ve personally experienced my side’s illiberalism more than that on the right. But this is my impression, and I’m not alone.

New York Times journalist Amy Harmon describes the left’s debate over “wokespeak,” a term for the many new words and acronyms that are largely only used by educated elites. These words are hardly used at all by people who are actually in the marginalized groups they’re describing. “BIPOC” is only rarely used by Black, Indigenous, or other people of color. “Latinx” is unused by the vast majority of Latinx people. The effect, for many on the left, is a sense of elitism and judgmental pressure from a small group of people to speak the “right” way.

Among the comments on Harmon’s article was this one by “Brill”:

It is really challenging to be a liberal empathetic person these days because all of a sudden, no matter what you do, you have the constant feeling that you’re doing or saying something wrong. It’s important to be challenged, but it can be upsetting, to feel like there is no way to be a good person without someone or something judging the way you are a good person, or try to be.

I’ve personally experienced this judgment too. It’s why I spent months debating with myself about whether to start writing about race on this blog. Would I use the “wrong” language and accidentally offend someone? Would I get called out for it? My first few posts about racism described this fear of offending my fellow progressives, especially as a sensitive, empathic person.

Too many times, I’ve heard progressives correct other people’s language with a self-righteous smugness, as if assuming that a single “wrong” word implies bigotry or ignorance. It is helpful to let someone know when they’ve used an offensive word, and there are ways to do this gracefully. But sometimes, it can come with such a feeling of judgment!

Harmon writes:

In California, a Black college freshman from the South is telling a story about his Latino friends from home when he is interrupted by a white classmate. “We say ‘Latinx’ here,” he recalls her saying, using a term he had not heard before, “because we respect trans people.”

The condescension! The smugness!

This phenomenon especially bothers me because of its classism. How can we expect to make real social progress if we insist on using language that feels so alienating to working-class people? Often, I’ve found myself quietly but stubbornly refusing to use the newest social justice terms out of respect for the blunter, more straightforward sensibilities I’ve experienced around working-class friends, family, and colleagues.

The far left’s fixation on language has contributed to a seeping, uneasy feeling that has crept into our political conversations. I’ve heard many left-leaning friends talk quietly about fear of saying anything about controversial topics, for fear of offending or being called out.

I doubt as many conservatives feel this way around each other. In my experience, conservatives aren’t generally as sensitive as are many liberals, which has its pros and cons. One pro, I think, is that they’re often more tolerant of diverse views.

I’m curious to hear others’ thoughts on this. Have you found yourself biting your tongue among like-minded friends? Are you in the habit of unconsciously or consciously curating your speech, so that you only voice opinions you know will be popular, while you keep your more nuanced thoughts to yourself? Does it take an act of courage to say something that sounds moderate or compassionate towards the other side?

I’ve experienced all of the above.

Call-outs and canceling do have their place. They’re a way to punish truly egregious behavior and intolerable views. But we need more discernment about what constitutes “intolerable,” so that a diversity of views will continue to be heard. More of us need to courageously voice our moderate or controversial opinions, so they can become more normalized.

And above all, we need more compassion when others don’t seem to get it right.