At the Fork Between Two Dead Ends: Slim Hope in the Time of Trumpism and the Woke Cancel Phenomenon

"This counter-movement is predictable because the cancel phenomenon is not one that anyone really likes; it is an entirely negative phenomenon, a negative movement: it offers no vision of what should be, only an ever-roving eye for what shouldn’t be, for what must be cancelled. Free speech aside, think about how lame and pointless this little episode involving Pinker is: there are real issues that privileged white people in positions of academic leadership could engage, issues in which black lives really matter, are really at stake—capital punishment, for instance, which is thoroughly racist in practice.

But here they are, these professors of linguistics who live nowhere near areas of urban crime, combing through the social media postings of a colleague looking for impurities."

                                                    *****

In an exceptional column this past weekend in the Washington Post, Matt Bai accomplished something more than another take down of cancel culture—he staked out the territory of belief and politics occupied by people like me who fear we no longer have a home: between the reactionary nationalism of Trump and Trump-ism, and More-Woke-Than-Thou Progressivism, what is an old-style New Deal Democrat to do?

His subject is a recent “furor” created by some academics who want to strip Steven Pinker of his honors within The Linguistic Society of America. Pinker is an intellectual provocateur and has tweeted some “controversial” things about police, urban violence, and related matters.

From Bai: “In one tweet, from 2015, he referred to data suggesting that police might not shoot black citizens disproportionately, compared with the general population. In 2017, he tweeted that the focus on racial disparity might distract from solving the problem of police incompetence.

More recently, again citing research, Pinker had the temerity to suggest that “under-policing” might well be as dangerous to black neighborhoods as “over-policing.” He has also used the terms “urban crime” and “urban violence,” which his incensed brethren denounce as “dogwhistle” terms that reinforce racial stereotypes.”

Along the way, Bai—who worked as a crime reporter in his early days—acknowledges his sympathy for the importance of policing to minority communities, and scores some first-rate parenthetical shade when he notes that “urban crime” neighborhoods are conspicuous for the scarcity of linguistic professors.

(As an aside, I once tried my hand at an essay, long since vanished into the ether, seeking to refute Pinker on the subject of genetics and the influence of environment in child-rearing. It was emblematic, I think, of Pinker to fall on the side of genetic determinism. I was reaching well beyond my level of competence to pretend to argue about genetics, though I think it is safe to say that the ancient debate about “nature-nurture” has only been made more complicated and interesting—not simpler—by the revolution in genomics; and I will add that the durability of this belief, call it a wish, that humans are determined, is a subject all to itself. Why do we want so badly to be relieved of the responsibility for our actions, for the environments we create for children and others? Why do we want to give up so easily on the possibility of change?)

But Bai’s concern is less with Pinker—with whom Bai admits to being only “glancingly familiar”—than with how to think about and respond to the purity tests being administered by elite thinkers against others.

What struck me most, reading about the coordinated attack on his integrity, is something Pinker said in his own defense. “I have a mind-set that the world is a complex place we are trying to understand,” he said. “There is an inherent value to free speech, because no one knows the solution to problems a priori.”
That’s such a familiar sentiment, I thought. Where have I heard it before?
And then I remembered: Oh, right, it’s what we used to call liberalism.
Whatever this thing is that stands opposite to the “mind-set” described by Pinker—whether you call it cancel culture or woke progressivism; Bai calls it the “cultural left”—it isn’t the center-left liberal consensus that built the post-World War II America those of us over the age of 50 inherited. (The America, by the way, that most MAGA people, whether they know it or not, are harkening back to when they talk about making it great again. You want the 1950s? Great—that was when a Republican administration built the interstate highway system, a massive public works program funded by our parents’ tax dollars. And everyone—everyone—was on board. A subject for another day.)

I am of two minds about the durability of this new thing, the cultural left, the cancel phenomenon. To be sure, social media gives it an insidious staying power. But it is also, fundamentally, a form of bullying and like all bullying—like all bullies—it is easily shut down when people simply decide to stand up to it. And this is now happening, predictably, in all sorts of ways. There is the letter that appeared in Harpers, signed by notable figures on the left (including Noam Chomsky, no less), and later the resignation of Bari Weiss from the New York Times.

Also very hopeful for this slightly-left-of-center man without a country is the return of Andrew Sullivan to The Dish, writing in his last column that he was no longer welcome at New York Magazine and Vox. Like Christopher Hitchens (with whom he was bosom friends) Sullivan plays for no team, and the team he spurned day-after-day during the first incarnation of The Dish is contemporary American conservativism. Sullivan saw it all coming before anyone else, saw that it was American conservativism that had gone off the grid. Very often he seemed to be jumping up and down, screaming at the top of his lungs, trying to get others to see.

If he comes back now principally to be a scourge of woke cancel culture—well, let no one pretend to be surprised.

This counter-movement is predictable because the cancel phenomenon is not one that anyone really likes; it is an entirely negative phenomenon, a negative movement: it offers no vision of what should be, only an ever-roving eye for what shouldn’t be, for what must be cancelled. Free speech aside, think about how lame and pointless this little episode involving Pinker is: there are real issues that privileged white people in positions of academic leadership could engage, issues in which black lives really matter, are really at stake—capital punishment, for instance, which is thoroughly racist in practice.

But here they are, these professors of linguistics who live nowhere near areas of urban crime, combing through the social media postings of a colleague looking for impurities.

I should resist making too much of these counter movements, which have already been through the digital wringer of skepticism, second-guessing, and snide dismissal. The woke cultural left is deeply entrenched in academia and journalism. And Trump-ism—which is an existential threat to the American project—both feeds the movement and feeds on it.

We are in a dark, dark place.

But I am going to choose to be sanguine and hope, precisely because the moment is so dark, and so many people are scared and worried. Americans despise the woke cancel movement (even if none of them chair departments of history at the nation’s colleges); there is a potent movement of conservatives who are sickened by Trump (even if none of them hold office in Congress, where it’s spineless careerism all down the line).

Is it possible to hope that the really creative potential of our current moment is the recreation of the center? 

(Image: Aquir/shutterstock.com)