Each time a new law is proposed, enacted or signed in Florida, a smart and very decent friend twits something along the lines of, “and so The Atlantic will publish another million articles about why the real problem is college students.” I appreciate his angst, that from his perspective, whatever problems arise from campus consequence culture are dwarfed by unconstitutional right wing laws that expressly seek to prohibit, if not criminalize speech and ideas. He’s frustrated and I can understand his frustration.
But that doesn’t mean he’s right.
First, the law of free speech is only getting more robust. Americans have more concrete rights to speak free of government censorship than they have at any prior period in American history.
Reactionary legislatures in red states have been churning out laws chilling, if not outright prohibiting, free speech. Not one has survived scrutiny, which likely comes as no surprise and was never really the point of the laws. Let the leges pass unconstitutional laws that appeal to their constituents, and let courts do the dirty work of holding them unconstitutional so the legislators can say they tried but those darn liberal courts just ruin everything. In the meantime, the Supreme Court has been pretty good about holding firm to its free speech jurisprudence, recognizing that expanding exceptions to the First Amendment will open a Pandora’s Box.
At the same time, however, according to a survey from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, a strong majority of Americans self-censor. They’re afraid to exercise their rights.
Those darn college kids again. And nutty professors. And their friends.
Americans have read story after story (from across the political spectrum) of activists, corporations and colleges targeting individuals for speech that is squarely within the mainstream of either progressive or conservative thought. In other words, dissent — even thoughtful dissent — has become dangerous, in both right- and left-leaning America. Private organizations are acting punitively when the government cannot. This is the essence of cancel culture, the widespread use of private power to punish allegedly offensive speech.
David French gets to the core of a problem that’s manifesting itself across the spectrum of progressive ideology. Consider Title IX campus sex tribunals. With minimal arm-twisting by Catherine Lhamon, colleges found themselves in the business of policing sex disputes between peers. While it may have the surface gloss of official proceedings, it’s nothing more than the Dworkin Inquisition, creating a private mechanism to punish what government cannot.
Having achieved so much in the realm of sex wars, why not heretical speech as well? Seizing upon the “liberal paradox,” why not exploit the freedom to condemn to enjoy free speech to silence it?
That said, many of us who recoil from the excesses of cancel culture also reject the idea that organizations should have no standards at all. To take an extreme example, if you find out that a colleague is in the Klan, should you defend him from termination? Or should a private corporation remove a grand wizard from its payroll as an act of necessary corporate hygiene?
What is needed, and almost always subsumed by the fuzziness of either tribal choices (when it happens to me, it’s “cancel culture”; when it happens to them, it’s consequences), is a definition for cancel caulture that distinguishes between consequences of speech, both a right as well as an entirely normal thing that humanity has engaged in forever, and cancel culture, this new weapon deployed to force language and thought to adhere to an orthodoxy or be destroyed.
One of the most useful definitions of toxic cancel culture comes from the Yale University professor Nicholas Christakis. In a thoughtful 2020 Twitter thread that highlighted several examples of improper private censorship, he defined cancel culture as “1) forming a mob, to 2) seek to get someone fired (or disproportionately punished), for 3) statements within Overton window.”
If this sounds vaguely familiar, it should. But the addition of the Overton Window component to the mix takes the definition a step beyond where my definition ended.
But there’s a problem — the more that America polarizes, the more it contains not one but two Overton windows, the “red” window and the “blue” window. Speech that is squarely mainstream in Red America is completely out of bounds in Blue America, and vice versa.
We could list any number of topics where shifting standards and changing norms breed intolerance at the extremes and confusion in the middle. Millions of Americans thus tread lightly, fearful that even the tentative expression of a dissenting thought could lead to a vicious backlash.
French raises this question in the context of Scott Adams recent rant, calling black people a “hate group” and telling white people to avoid black people. His point was that this was clearly over the line, outside any non-racist’s Overton Window, and therefore whatever consequences ensued, like his “Dilbert” comic being canceled by newspapers across the nation, were well deserved.
But this places us in the same position as those advocating against hate speech. I agree with French that Adams’ speech was far beyond the pale, but who cares what i think? i’m not the boss of the Overton Window, and neither is French, nor you for that matter. The First Amendment protects racist speech, even if you think it shouldn’t, and as much as Adams went full racist, doesn’t he have the right to do so? And if he has the right to do so, should he lose his livelihood for it?
Yes. The newspapers across the nation did not succumb to a mob pressuring them to cancel Dilbert or else. They heard what Adams had to say and decided, without any outside coercion, that he crossed the line and they no longer wished to associate with him. That’s their right, just as it was Adams’ right to speak his mind. Whether it fell within the red or blue windows was of no consequence, not because he was canceled but because he went far enough to alienate his source of income and they imposed a consequence. That’s how it should work.
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