Cancelling Cancel Culture

In February, reactionary congressman Jim Jordan went on Fox News and declared "This is the number one issue for the country to address today!" He wasn't talking about the covid pandemic crisis--over half a million dead Americans and counting--nor the healthcare crisis, the consumer debt crisis, the climate crisis, nor any of the others top issues currently facing the U.S.

He was talking about "cancel culture."

"Cancel culture" is a relatively new phrase but it's really just a new handle on an old cup. In common parlance, it describes a form of social ostracism people mete out to those who say or do things they judge to be very inappropriate, beyond the pale. When then-rightist darling Milo Yiannopoulos makes pro-pedophilia comments, he finds that people are no longer interested in much of what he has to say and Simon & Schuster is no longer interested in giving him millions for his book or publishing it. He's been "cancelled." Rightist media have, of late, obsessively hyped "cancel culture," folding it into their usual persecution/"culture war" narrative and inflating it into some sort of totalitarian movement--by liberals, of course--aimed at eliminating from society everything decent, rightist and American. It's presented in such media as an exercise in stamping out free speech when, in reality, it's usually just people exercising their own free speech rights or, in some cases, conducting business in a capitalist system. The imprecision of the phrase allows it to be applied to nearly any activity rightists don't like, and they apply it vigorously, without regard for whether the very different things to which they do have any conceivable connection. Everything from refusing to buy My Pillow products because the company's CEO is a reactionary loon to social media platforms tossing white nationalists for violating their terms of service, it's all put in the same basket. Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced that they would stop publishing six of the author's lesser known works for racially stereotypical images, outrage against "cancel culture" ensues. Disney+ adds a disclaimer to some old episodes of THE MUPPET SHOW that they include "negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures," outrage against "cancel culture" ensues. Hasbro announces it's dropping the "Mr." from its "Mr. Potato Head" toy franchise name, this is treated as some kind of statement against gender designations, outrage against "cancel culture" ensues. One can still buy Dr. Seuss books, Mr. Potato Head or watch THE MUPPET SHOW but they've all been said--and said and said and said--to be cancelled.

Rightist media's "cancel culture" narrative is, in short, a fraud, yet another red-meat substitute manufactured in a bathroom laboratory at Fox to feed the Outrage Machine, a distraction from and substitute for any legitimate public affairs discussions. A world full of problems and fabricating this is their focus, promoting it their top "concern."

Jim Jordan's antics, offered by a political figure virtually worshiped by the Trumpanzee far-right, highlight the almost complete collapse of even the thin pretense of policy substance among Republicans (faced with a wave of critical reaction by the sane to his idiocy, Jordan later doubled down on this). Only a few years ago, a character like Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan could rise to the House Speakership and Vice Presidential nomination of the Republican party on the strength of policy wonkishness. His ideas were terrible and most of what he said to sell them were misrepresentations or lies but he put them out there, they formed the basis of legitimate policy debates and his star within the party rose on this. Only a few years but it feels like lifetimes ago. Being a Republican politician today is just about the projection of reactionary tribalism. There's no policy discussion and, beyond feeding the needs of their donors, no policy. Support for liberal democracy itself has almost entirely collapsed. The only things Republican voters now demand of Republican elected officials and candidates is that they hate and want to screw over the same people those voters have been conditioned to hate and to want to screw over.[2]

The punchline to all of this "cancel culture" nonsense: The American right created and has maintained, for decades, a mega-million-dollar/year industry devoted to carrying out what rightists now describe and decry as "cancel culture."

The American Family Association has been around for over 40 years, and its biggest mission in that time has been to organize and carry out an ever-expanding run of boycotts intended to drive from the public square any ideas and people they dislike. The number of rightist orgs that not only participate in this kind of activity but exist to do so (2ndVote, Consumer Research, Morality In Media, which has rebranded itself "The National Center on Sexual Exploitation," etc.) is seemingly endless, and their history quite long. Brent Bozell III has created a mini-empire around this kind of business. The Media Research Center, which has been around for over 30 years, and its big internet project Newsbusters--maybe the most prominent parts of said empire--are devoted entirely to trying to eliminate from media the liberal ideas and people they hate. They even go after comedians who tell jokes they don't like and other conservative Republicans who they either don't think are "conservative" enough or who aren't conservative in the way they like. The Family Research Council has, among other things, spent nearly 4 decades purveying propaganda that portrays homosexuals as subhuman degenerates, predatory pedophiles out to get your children, anti-family, anti-religious, disease-ridden junkie militants who live short, depressed lives, mentally deranged people who can be "cured," who, as homosexuals, have no place in society. People who should be made illegal, both at home and abroad, perhaps even killed--about as "canceled" as it gets. The org's leadership is so extreme that it has long objected to government or businesses even hiring known homosexuals. Rightists call for boycotts of companies and people--cancelling them--as a matter of routine, and have for decades.

These activities coexist and even thrive right alongside rightist denunciations of same. In March, dimwitted congressman Devin Nunes (also much beloved by the Trump cult) went on Newsmax to complain about "cancel culture"--aimed at "conservatives," of course--and to compare it to Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, in which deaths numbered in the hundreds of thousands and probably many millions. Nunes has positioned himself as a support of free speech and enemy of "cancel culture," but as he spoke, he, himself, was pursuing multiple frivolous lawsuits aimed at shutting up those who had criticized him.

Consider this:

"One of their [the left's] political weapons is cancel culture, driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism, and it is completely alien to our culture and to our values and it has absolutely no place in the United States of America."

That's Donald Trump from his Mt. Rushmore speech last year. How many people had Trump, by the time he said this, fired from their jobs in his administration in exactly the way he's describing and for exactly the same reason? Certainly many dozens, maybe hundreds. Scarcely a week went by, for years, without examples. He, himself, has constantly called for boycotts of companies who did something he didn't like.

Trump's Rushmore ranting on this isn't just a complete lack of self-awareness or the "h" word everyone often tiresomely throws around. Rather, it bespeaks the complete lack of seriousness in the entire rightist commentary on this matter. Trump had every right to fire all those people, every right to call for all those boycotts. Everyone else is free to buy or not buy My Pillows, to watch or not watch whatever tv show they like, to patronize or decline to patronize whatever business they prefer. That isn't "the very definition of totalitarianism"; it's freedom, and it can't be stopped, as Trump and so many other rightists have vowed to do, without eliminating freedom (something a lot of them, including Trump, would like to do). There are genuine issues about speech in a free society raised by what is broadly called "cancel culture." The right's weaponized "cancel culture" narrative doesn't touch--and isn't interested in touching--any of them.

--j.

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[1] On the other side of things--and in the other major party--there's now a strong progressive faction that has arisen, one built around a wide-ranging policy agenda, the polar opposite of this trend among Republicans. Unfortunately, there are also the dinosaurish Clintonite-right "Democratic" politicians who have no real policy agenda either, beyond PR-driven technocratic tinkering that doesn't actually fix anything, slavishly serving the needs of their big donors and weaponizing phony "identity politics" to try to defeat the progressives, whom they despise, on behalf of their donors, as intensely as do the Republican rightists. And this dinosaur faction runs that party.

Doesn't look like much of a recipe for a functional liberal democracy, do it?