Cancel culture as a weapon of the weak

With Daniel Bessner

In this installment, Daniel Bessner catches me off-guard with his analysis of the cancel culture as “a weapon of the weak” after listening to me call it “witchhuntery,” “mob justice,” “mass hysteria,” “petty,” and “anti-intellectual in the extreme.”

If you find this exchange interesting, I encourage you to listen to the entire four-part series, in which Daniel has interviewed me about my intellectual journey.

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BESSNER: We have to talk about cancel culture! Particularly, what do you think cancel culture is and what do you think the problem is?

Because I would say this is a term that is so capacious, that it refers to universities retaliating against political speech to, again, the student demos protesting Ray Kelly.

So I was just wondering, what is your view of cancel culture and why do you find so problematic about it?

LOURY: Well it’s not just the universities of course. People are losing their jobs or their platforms all over the place for running afoul of one thing or another: for offending, for giving someone cause to call them misogynistic or homophobic or racist. 

You know, this N-word thing that has arisen in the news recently with one incident or another of someone using the word or defending the use of the word and getting canceled. 

The Me-Too movement and the reprimand of people for sexual transgressions from the past that leaves them unfit then to be the public face of this or that. 

Tweets. People retweeting. You retweeted something, you must be a QAnon advocate or whatever. And then the person becomes an inappropriate host of a TV show.

Or you say something in class. I have said this in my class: in the 21st century African-Americans on the whole have failed to measure up to the challenge which was open before them by the liberalizations associated with the civil rights movement and the end of Jim Crow. I have said that. I could try to defend it here, but that would take us off the beaten path.

My point is a white professor can’t say that. Literally. A white professor cannot say in a classroom in America that black people have failed. If he does, he’ll be a white supremacist and he’ll be finished (or she). 

And you asked me, what problem do I find with this? It’s anti-intellectual in the extreme. It’s witchhuntery. It’s mob justice. It’s mass hysteria. In the extreme! 

Now, there’s a spectrum. There’s going to be a range of cases that we could present, and yes, there does exist an offense so offensive that even I would cancel the offender.  But saying the N-word is not one of them, frankly. Certainly not in the context in which Donald McNeil was dismissed from the New York Times for what he did. And I don’t want to get into the particulars of the anecdotes. What am I, defending the use of the N word or whatever? 

You’re a Marxist, don’t you all have a word for this kind of thing where it’s like a trivial—what did Prudhomme do that was wrong? Doesn’t Marx have an essay where he refutes the intellectual triviality of the claim “property is theft?” Or something like that. It’s petty.  It’s small-think morality. It’s small-think racial justice.  It’s etiquette.  

I know Orwell has got something in Politics and the English Language or somewhere about the thing that I’m talking about now, which is that people are policing certain aspects of performative social presentation instead of making arguments.

Arguments about political economy. Arguments about ethics and morality. Arguments about esthetics. Arguments about political theory. They’re not making arguments! 

They presuppose that the arguments have already been made and resolved in favor of whatever fluff fills their heads. And then they think they can go around and cut people’s heads off because they don’t affirm their nostrums. 

Maybe, at this level of abstraction, it’s hard to say, but on the race thing a person had a photograph from 1982 when they graduated from high school in which they wore blackface. [Long pause.] And now it comes out, because somebody looks at the yearbook and they decide that they’re going to run an expose in the Washington Post about this person. I don’t see how they survived it. And I think it’s, like I say, petty. It’s small bore.  

First of all, I know almost nothing about whether or not the person is actually a racist from the fact that I’ve stipulated, whatever we mean by the person being a racist. What I mean is I know almost nothing about whether or not the person has values and beliefs relevant to his current behavior that are indicative of some kind of racial antipathy or malice that should cause me to want that person not to serve in public. I don’t know anything about it. 

You’re trying to have an argument with lower middle class Alabama culture in the early 1980s. Yeah, they all voted for Ronald Reagan. Yeah, they all liked Jerry Falwell.  Yeah, they were all mostly racists who thought that the civil rights movement was bullshit, a lot of them were.

So the politics of 2020 becomes about whether or not somebody who had blackface on in 1982—don’t you guys see that that’s a triviality? What it is is it’s a kind of power move. We get to flex our muscles because we control who can speak.

So this is what I think is crucial, because you mentioned power. 

I think many, many, if not most, people would agree on the excesses, but to me cancel culture strikes as such a weapon of the weak, to quote James Scott—there are people who feel that there’s not normal channels through which to affect decisions about basically the elite that control society and that’s not incorrect. 

We are a society that’s been organized to give certain groups enormous amount of power totally disconnected from the Democratic will. So cancel culture is this explosion of anger by people who don’t have any other mechanism by which to express that anger, who don’t even feel the need to engage in argument because they feel that they would lose the argument either initially or because they won’t be taken seriously.  And it’s another reflection—and I think a lot of the things that we’ve been talking about—of a delegitimation of American elite institutions and American elite culture. 

I mean, we could all rail against the excesses of cancel culture, but there’s a reason that these things are no longer legitimate. And that’s a rational response to the history of the past 30 years, is that not?

You are impressing me, Daniel, really, because these are things that I hadn’t quite thought about and it sounds to me like you’ve got your finger on something. And it has really powerful implications because you’re right: even I could feel a little hollow sometimes complaining about cancel culture just to be complaining because I don’t really know what I’m—I am, in a way, being petulant myself: “It’s an imposition upon me, it’s stupid,” but I don’t have any analysis. And you just offered something to think about. 

And it would mean, if you’re right, that even though you still might not want to let them have their way—if you can stop them—you might think a little bit differently about it. And this is not a policy prescription—what do you do to empower people so that they needn’t use flailing out, petty means of asserting themselves or feeling that they have some control over the political culture when in fact big money in politics or corporate advertising or whatever is really running the show?

Well, then they’re going to do these kind of things. They’re going to set bonfires or leave the fire hydrant running and flood the street or…

You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of Mexico in the 1960s where the only way to attack one party rule was to basically do what were called denunciations, which is the exact same thing as cancel culture. There’s no space, there’s no political mechanism, so the only thing you can do is basically explode in a paroxysm of anger.

And it’s not a surprise, with a lot of particularly the elite media cancel culture: two weeks, three weeks later you find out that actually everyone hated this person and they weren’t retiring or they weren’t pushed out, and so this was the weapon that people used, the powerful weapon of the moment, to basically force something for which they had no other mechanism. Right? 

How many times have you heard someone who was canceled—and I agree, it’s a real thing and I agree there’s lots of excesses—but very rarely do you hear, “Oh, that guy was actually a great guy who took everyone seriously and really responded to people’s demands and they interacted in a nice way and oh, no, they made this one misstep and they were canceled.” I can’t think of one. And there’s a reason for that. 

Because this is basically a circumvention of a system that has collapsed, in my opinion, a system that is no longer viewed as legitimate. Does that make sense?

It’s something I want to think about. I don’t know if I want to sign on entirely, but yeah, it certainly makes sense. 

What I’m not signing on to is that every victim of cancel culture is an asshole that had it coming which is kind of what you just said.

That’s not true. I think in particular elite spaces with people in elite jobs that wind up getting pushed out, that’s a lot of the things that are happening.

But you mentioned Hershman recently. You know, if you can’t exit, and you don’t have loyalty, all you have is voice. And cancel culture is a reflection—maybe not the ideal reflection—but it’s an expression of voice, is it not?

Well, it certainly is, and that’s certainly a way of looking at it. And like I said, it gives me something to think about.

I mean I agree with you, there’s clear excesses, of course. Of course. But to me they reflect the social problem. And it’s the social problem, that some might say is the base, that’s more interesting to me than the superstructural reflection of it, which is what I think cancel culture ultimately is in the final analysis.

I want to know who these people are and I want to know exactly what’s going on. There are many examples, but some of these are very privileged people who are launching the crusades against…

I mean, if I’m in a newsroom and I’ve got a goodly number of journalists of color who are part of the organization, but they’re younger and they don’t have major positions of power in the organization, and I’ve got a 35 or 40 year veteran who’s a kind of centrist Democrat Mad Men era misogynist type—he didn’t actually do anything but he’s a certain type—and he doesn’t like affirmative action, he’s probably said something to somebody that made them think that he didn’t respect them. He might even vote for Trump, God help us! We don’t know, he lies and says he doesn’t, but he just might. He could, we could see him doing it. 

That’s a prototypic setting, it seems to me, in which, if he says the N-word, we get him at the jugular. 

And it’s true, the editors had his back. The publisher had his back. They were buddies, they drank together at the club. They came up in the same prep school. It’s true.  They don’t know diddly about, I don’t know what, graffiti artists. Or Black Lives Matter. Or queer literature, or whatever. They don’t know anything about anything! 

And therefore, we are voiceless—that is, those of us who are in that young generation, who are of color, who are queer, who didn’t go to the prep school. So now, once he’s out and exposed, we go for the jugular.  

Your story would have me read that through your Marxian class analysis and it would be just this hierarchical situation. 

I see that little anecdote that I’m telling as symptomatic or emblematic of many of these situations. I see it as much more complicated and much more interesting because it’s not just who owns the means of production that determines who has the power.

In fact, obviously, the people who have the ability to cancel have some kind of power depending on the institution. It can be the students determining what’s on the syllabus because they are postcolonial, and the guy that wants to put the memoirs of a British raj administrator from the late 19th century because it’s interesting as a historical document on the reading list hasn’t got a leg to stand on. 

Anyway, basically yeah, I hear what you’re saying, Daniel, and you’re probably more right than wrong, but I don’t want to completely concede the kind of economic class-based analysis of the thing because I think the cultural power is more nuanced and subtle than that.

Sure, cultural power is a real thing, absolutely. But the fact is millennials own like, what, 2.1% of national wealth and boomers owned like 23% of national wealth at the same age. There’s a general feeling of precarity.

I didn’t know that. That’s a stunning number. That’s an unbelievable number.

It might not be two, it might be three, but it’s something ridiculous.

Wow. But you’re saying boomers, when they were the same age as millennials are now, were on the upswing of the post-World War II bonanza?

I’m one of those people ,and my 401(k) is looking pretty good right now. (Laughs) 

My point is that it’s a weapons of the weak thing by a generation that has been, one, I think really crucial, promised a lot growing up in the ’90s and 2000s and didn’t get it—and that is the perfect situation for these sorts of phenomena to emerge. I mean, it’s the exact situation. So I just wanted to emphasize that I think there’s this serious thing happening that underlays a lot of these phenomena.

It’s interesting because I feel like the cancel culture discourse occurs totally at the level of discourse, and there’s this fundamental change in how an entire generation relates to the political economy and the institutions of their country that is just never talked about. “Why is everyone all of a sudden so angry,” you know?

That’s pretty profound. 

Actually, your contribution to the conversation we’re having here, I think, deserves to be somehow pulled together and summarized as a nuanced critical cultural analysis.  Have you done that anywhere?

No, I haven’t yet.

I encourage you.

But I think it’s a thing missing from this entire discourse. To me, this is an enormous causal element of all this stuff.

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