Drop the Whip: Cancel Culture and its Reactions

William Butler Yeats, arguably the greatest English-language poet of the twentieth-century’s first half, saw his share of revolutions. He saw a bloody uprising in his native Ireland, and when that rising first began, declared with some hope — in a poem written barely four months after the 1916 rebellion began — that all was “changed, changed utterly.” He later saw that it was not quite so, and came to accept (not without some understandable bitterness) that rebellion leads invariably to reaction.

A few years later, shaken not only by the failure of the Irish uprising but by the horrors of Bolshevism, Yeats penned a shorter, wiser, and less-anthologized poem. It is only four lines:

Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!
A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.

Revolutions do eat their own children. Ask Robespierre, or Trotsky, or Ireland’s own Michael Collins, each of whom was murdered for going too far — or not far enough. Yeats points out that revolutions tend to do something worse: their excesses invariably engender violent reactions that undo most (if not all) hard-won progress. Any revolution that is premised upon getting even with the oppressor will see only a fleeting victory. The oppressor and his children will suffer the lash, but the lash only inculcates a hunger for revenge. The whip will change hands again and again, and until someone decides to drop it, all triumphs will be temporary.

Writing in the Atlantic yesterday, (it’s a gift link!) Thomas Chatterton Williams lays the blame for the current crisis largely at the feet of the left.

If the genuine but ill-conceived goal (of cancel culture) was to create a kinder, friendlier, more inclusive and equitable world for all (often paradoxically by means of shaming, coercion, and intimidation), the real-world effect has been an abysmal rightward overcorrection in which norms of decency have been gleefully obliterated. We have not merely been delivered back to the pre-woke era of the early 2000s…On every single issue that mattered to them, progressives now find themselves in a weaker position than before.

When you threaten people with a whip, you will often get outward displays of compliance. If you are an ideologue of the sort who believes that people can be shamed and shunned, coerced or canceled into a genuine inner transformation, you will mistake compliance for acquiescence. You will imagine that the canceled and the de-platformed will have some sort of a change of heart. If you are slightly more realistic, you figure that those whom you held to bitter account may burn with resentment, but you assume that they burn impotently. You do not imagine that they can and will create coalitions of the cancelled, united in little more than shared trauma. You do not think it possible those coalitions can beat you. They can, and they will.

Of course, if you are a true ideologue, your nature is to love the whip. When you find yourself on the receiving end once again, you shake your head at your own foolishness. Our problem last time was we went to easy on these scoundrels! Next time, we’ll take sterner measures. (It has become an article of faith on the Woke Left that Jim Crow could have been avoided — and racial harmony swiftly achieved — if every last Confederate officer had been sent to the gallows after Appomattox. Serious historians convince themselves that most of America’s cultural problems are the consequence of excessive magnanimity towards the undeserving.)

Time and again, cancel culture and #MeToo inflicted consequences incommensurate with the original offenses. (I have long listed myself as an example of a sinner more sinned against than sinning, and there are plenty more like me.) The cancellers didn’t want a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, they wanted guillotines. As Chatterton Williams notes, the excesses of the censorious left sowed the wind — and now we get the entirely predictable whirlwind of “abysmal overcorrection.” We reap the gleeful, puerile vulgarity that characterizes so much of MAGA. The humorless, pitiless progressive scolds have been replaced by the callow and cruel Nerd-Jock Axis. The beggar has changed places, and the lash goes on.

Cynical politicians know that substantive change is really, really hard. Addressing the root causes that makes us into beggars, and makes us want to wield a whip, is difficult. So much easier to make the beggars switch places, and substitute the dubious pleasure of revenge for actual progress. As the left reels beneath the lash of the Second Trump Administration, the real question for progressives is not how to get back on the horse once more. The real question is whether, when the cannon comes again and the tide turns and all that — they’ll have the courage to drop the goddamn whip. That’s the only way to ensure that all is changed, changed utterly.