I have been thinking about that Harper's Bazaar letter, "A Letter on Justice and Open Debate," signed by a number of writers and academics (a few I very much admire), not really asking for anything, but taking a stance against "cancel culture." Upon close examination of the real consequences of cancel culture in comparison to the everyday consequences that people who are victim to institutional power, it is clear that this letter was written as a protective measure for the powerful to remain unchallenged in the top-down structure of social influence.
The letter wraps itself in a shroud of panic and fear of unemployment (for the powerful), but elucidates its own hypocrisy through its own self-produced "stifling atmosphere." It writes "The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who 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. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.
The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms." The letter goes on to air its grievances against "cancel culture" because of its deleterious effects, yet it fails to mention institutional discrimination that allows editors to silence LGBTQ, female, black, and other non-white voices, deciding who gets published, who gets heard, and who gets read by the public. This silencing is more damming to the "lifeblood of liberal democracy" than holding people accountable from the bottom up.
The signers of the letter maintain that they believe in free-speech in the abstract, but then disagree when free-speech is used to hold them accountable to what is said with that free-speech, laundering their class protection through the argument for free-speech under their terms. Being held accountable by the masses feels more constricting to them because they have lived in a society where one's wealth has implied that they act and speak in "good faith." When light is blasted on this flex of privilege that goes on to claim that people should be able to say what they want to say, it is usually revealed that this demand for free-speech is to defend bigoted statements without being held accountable.
Mary McNamara from the LA Times criticized the letter and the lack of specificity, as it dances around vague accusations and does not address the hypocrisy of its statements or its signers (don't even get me started on the fact that Bari Weiss spent the first part of her career getting people fired for saying that Palestinians deserve to be treated with humanity). In McNamara's response, she writes, "I am old enough to disdain cancel culture, though not for the reasons the letter gives. My disdain comes from the belief that it doesn’t exist — at least not as anything new, anything more than yet another term used as a blanket criticism of people, often young but not always, deploying new forms of communication (in this case, social media) to call out those they believe are espousing or enabling racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, sexual harassment and capitalistic exploitation. (Or, less grandly, to promote inter-influencer feuds.)" There are few people who are actually "canceled." Most of these people who are "canceled" are powerful and have an elevated voice usually due to the amount of money they have, and once "canceled" are just relegated to being quiet, quietly rich. I mean, who do you know that has really been "canceled"? Anyone I can think of in my life who has been threatened with "cancellation" (and it was never said that way) experienced some fear, felt bad for the harm they caused in their blind spot, and then carried on in a more cautious way, decentering themselves in the process. In fact, many of the vague instances that the letter mentions never really experienced "cancellation" because of one instance. Upon closer review, many of those people were steeped in and perpetuated an unacceptable working and learning environment. I could take this letter more seriously if it were aimed at those with institutional power instead of the individuals who consistently point out the failures of those institutions and those who have been propped up by them.
What if these people who signed the letter took a week off of Twitter? Or, instead of resisting the people who are angered by their words, they listened? Apologized? Moved on? Or maybe they take the best defense by one of my favorite comedians, Dave Chappelle, who in his stand-up, anticipates anger in response to a joke and says, "You clicked on my face!" People don't have to pay attention to people they don't like.
If you want to read a much better, more nuanced response than anything I've said here, I suggest reading Osita Nwanevu's article for The Soapbox (part of New Republic), "The Willful Blindness of Reactionary Liberalism."
Lastly, Donald Trump as our president is (one example of) proof that cancel culture does not exist.
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