The ‘cancel culture’ myth was always about censoring the center-to-left

Episode Summary  

For decades, the American far-right has been screeching constantly that its activists and politicians are being censored by “cancel culture.” It’s nonsense, of course, because almost invariably everyone who supposed canceled ends up with a huge media following and a very profitable victim narrative.

But the lies about mass censorship of reactionaries and conservatives aren’t just about manipulating the public into feeling sympathy for completely unsympathetic figures like Donald Trump. They’re also about power.

In the so-called marketplace of ideas, right-wing ideas lost decades ago. Among many other things, well-educated people know that race is a social construct, that transgender people have existed for centuries, and that America’s most-influential founders were not Christian nationalists. Reactionaries have failed to make their case, and this is the main reason they don’t get hired by universities. You can’t have a credible biology department if “creation science” is the mandated policy. Anthropologists pushing discredited “race science” are regarded as disturbed freaks, and rightfully so.

But instead of trying to come up with some better ideas, like they’d have to in an actual meritocracy, the American far right has decided to force them into the public square. This is what the cancel culture narrative is all about, establishing a false scenario to justify the gigantic censorship regime that the second Trump White House is establishing.

Outside of the United States, right-wing parties have been envying the success Republicans have had, and they are applying the lessons to their own countries. Unfortunately, the mainstream media in other countries have not learned anything from the mistakes of American journalists in falling for these deceptions.

Will the left in the United States and elsewhere ever be able to effectively counter these manipulations? And are the people at the top even aware of what’s going on? We discuss it on today’s episode with Adrian Daub, the author of a book on the subject called The Cancel Culture Panic. He’s also a professor of humanities at Stanford University and the host of the podcast “In Bed With the Right.”

The video of our December 3, 2024 discussion is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full page.

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—How the Trump administration is attacking science and scholarly merit at the National Institutes of Health

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—University administrators are totally ill-equipped for Trump’s massive censorship regime

—Trump, Nietzsche, and the collapse of the Republican mind

—Inspired by Trump, reactionary comedians are the most popular media figures in the Republican party

—Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA are building a reactionary cult for young people, does anyone on the center-left care?

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

07:17 — Why 'cancel culture' rhetoric is more about affirmative action for illogical reactionary opinions

13:00 — Right-wing campus speakers are performance artists rather than academics

19:11 — Campus speech surveys rarely ask if people are afraid to disclose marginalized identities

22:39 — William F. Buckley Jr. and "God and Man at Yale"

28:12 — Insincere 'censorship' arguments as a hack of liberal epistemology

33:01 — Cancel culture narratives are about masking real power through fake populism

36:31 — Alan Bloom and "The Closing of the American Mind"

42:14 — Libertarianism and hierarchy in American politics

47:26 — Lies about cancel culture as permission structures for reactionary repression

57:39 — Conclusion

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So let's focus our discussion here at the beginning about the premise of your book. Lay that out for us real quickly, if you could, please.

ADRIAN DAUB: Yeah, so the idea is it's a story of or a history of the worry about cancel culture in U.S. media. And the argument is really threefold that one there is this longstanding discussion within the U.S. tends to start on the right, but then almost always makes its way to the center. That is that basically proposes that there is this rising tide of left wing liberalism or left wing censoriousness.

And that cancel culture is basically the latest iteration of that. My book tries to show with what data we have available, that's very likely overstated. That is to say, that's not to say that there aren't people who have bad things happen to them on college campuses or in media based on what they say.

It does mean that the picture, if you look closely is a lot less a lot less obvious and a lot less. Monolithic, then sort of narratives about cancel culture would make it seem right. That is to say, when you hear cancel culture, at least until recently, people would think, well, this is from the left.

This is from young people. This has to do with online spaces. This has to do with wokeness, right? And that it does exist. But it turns out that kind of occludes much larger swaths of, things that we might, call cancellation, but we usually don't. That come from, state legislatures from Ron DeSantis, what have you, right?

So that's the first part of the argument. The second part of the argument is that this debate really, unlike the earlier panic over political correctness, which [00:04:00] very much resembles, is something that didn't sort of get cooked up. In right wing spaces and then kind of jumped over this one traveled the opposite way it from the very beginning appeal to a kind of, I mean, some people might say reactionary centrist or, center right, kind of,

SHEFFIELD: I call it conservative liberalism.

DAUB: Yeah, exactly. Right. Like a, it started in the pages of the Atlantic and the New York times far more than it did on Breitbart or Fox News or whatever. And due to that fact, it sort of very quickly made its way across the globe and mostly as a print phenomenon, that is to say, before it's, not, it's a story about social media, but it's not a social, a story about social media that traveled through social media. It really is a story about social media that traveled.

From the New York Times to Le Figaro in France, or to Die Welt in Germany, or to The Times in the UK, right? It becomes a kind of story about print journalism, and for a print magazine. Journalism audience, which is also to say that this is not really a freak out among people that we might think of as low information or might be in a kind of, or we sort of classically think are in a media bubble.

These are people who are very interested, who are very well read, who consume media exactly the way, we're all supposed to consume media and none of us. Do any more right. By like picking up a paper in the morning. And yet I would argue that they're being fed something very close to disinformation when it comes to cancel culture stories.

And then the third point is that what this really enables is a, bunch of breaking down barriers. There is a, it's a libertarian story. In an age where kind of libertarianism is making common cause with something far more authoritarian. It is a, as I say, a center, right? Panic. At an age when, especially in Europe, the center right is becoming more and [00:06:00] more curious towards the far right or the populist right.

It is a panic for an age in which people not just on the right, but probably particularly on the right kind of have to, they wear two hats. They wear a hat, a populist hat and a institutionalist hat, right? On the one hand. Still have a residual respect for institutions that they nevertheless think have been degraded by You know the woke mind virus or whatever So it's it is this panic for an age in which A bunch of things that used to structure our politics rather clearly Are breaking down And it allows people to sort of not Have to mak