The “culture wars” of the past few years has brought us all experiences which we never thought we’d have. A special favourite of mine has been “agreeing with people but being really, really pissed off about it”. Time was when I enjoyed finding people I agreed with. These days it often seems to come with a side helping of exasperation.
Take, for instance, recent headlines over a clampdown on free speech following the Charlie Kirk shooting. As the Guardian reports, “teachers, firefighters and military personnel” are “among those who lost jobs after posting their opinions on social media”.
I find this deeply worrying. It’s especially frightening when government pressure is being exerted to cancel critical voices. At the same time, I can’t stop myself from thinking “oh right — so cancel culture exists and is bad now?”
It is not so long ago that as for many progressives, it either didn’t exist, or was deemed to function perfectly well as a means of promoting social progress. As one cartoon helpfully put it, “if you’re yelled at, boycotted, have your show cancelled or get banned from an internet community, your free speech rights aren’t being violated. It’s just that the people listening think you’re an asshole. And they’re showing you the door”.
One would hope, then, that this would be … a time to ask whether left-wing censoriousness has not made everything worse
Who could possibly have predicted that the assholes themselves — who tend to think other people are assholes — might embrace the same principles? Well, lots of people. As the “infamous” Harper’s open letter of 2020 — signed by Margaret Atwood, JK Rowling, Salman Rushdie and others — argued, right-wing illiberalism represents a real threat to democracy: “But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion — which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting”. One would hope, then, that this would be a moment for correction, a time to ask whether left-wing censoriousness has not made everything worse. Instead, a lot of what I am seeing is a further digging in of heels.
First, there’s the framing of right-wing cancel culture as real cancel culture, proof, in fact, that nothing that went before it counted. “Government pressure is not the same as social backlash”, as one article primly puts it. I’d agree that it isn’t. At the same time, the term “social backlash” doesn’t really capture events of the past few years. To name a few UK examples, I’d say that wrecking a woman’s career for writing a picture book, or repeatedly bullying venues to cancel film showings, or demanding candidates for Labour party leader sign declarations deeming left-wing feminist groups “hate groups”, or driving academics out of their posts for wrongthink, are all deeply sinister activities, no matter which group is leading them. The suffering caused to individuals, and the fear that is stoked, are not nothing. The people who facilitate these things are misusing power, no matter what form it takes.
Second, there’s the strange expectation that those who spoke against “progressive” cancellations, or were even the victim of them themselves, owe a bigger debt to the free speech cause than their erstwhile cancellers. It is as though the double standards of the cancel-happy right are to serve as proof that everyone who complained in the past was a hypocrite, so their complaints are invalidated anyways. This ignores huge swathes of the population who have no issue with finding both things unacceptable. If some of us find it difficult to shout this from the rooftops, a little empathy might tell you why.
After years of “it’s not cancel culture, it’s consequence culture”, “you’re free to speak but other people don’t have to platform you”, and “if you were really cancelled, I wouldn’t be hearing about it”, it is hard to witness the selective about-turn being performed by some. Losing your job for a tweet isn’t uniquely painful now — it has always wrecked lives. I personally know people who’ve had police visits or workplace investigations due to expressing utterly benign views on sex and gender (no death threats, no vilification of others, just standard feminist analysis). While I don’t expect this stuff to make the front page of newspapers, the sudden idea that this is chilling – because it’s happening to a different group – only reminds me how normalised it has long been for some.
It is disturbing when your progressive activist group is deemed a hate movement. It’s frightening when symbols and statements you personally consider to be harmless are reinterpreted as evil dogwhistles. It’s terrible to live in fear of unknown consequences for simply speaking your truth. The more powerful and ill-intentioned the person doing this to you, the worse it might be. But if you’ve already spent years arguing that such experiences are utter non-events — at least when they’re happening to someone else — what right have you to complain? The powers involved might be different, but you’ve already handed them the idea that no one really suffers anyway.
This isn’t to trivialise the particular dangers of the current moment. Any justified bitterness about the left’s denial of its own behaviours should not distract from a defence of free speech for all. At the same time, without any clear renunciation of the principle “you should be silenced if I deem you hateful”, there can surely be no way forward. Tit-for-tat cancellation leads nowhere. At the same time, the harm done by past cancellations isn’t magically erased if another, more frightening party starts wielding the weapon instead.
If you’ve wrecked a person’s livelihood in the name of your politics, maybe it’s understandable that they’ll want to focus on that first and foremost. There’s nothing to stop newly deposed livelihood-wreckers engaging in some self-examination, though. Starting with the question: whose side were you ever really on?
