The Firings Will Continue until Error Abates: on What it Will Take to End Cancel Culture

Last Thursday, the Associated Press fired Emily Wilder, a young reporter, after a concerted pressure campaign by right-wing media.  Wilder’s offense? While a student at Stanford (to a Cal grad, a minor outrage in itself), she was involved with a pro-Palestinian advocacy group, and had helped invite anti-Zionist speakers to campus.  She had a long history of retweeting criticisms of Israel.

Wilder issued a statement on Saturday, asking “after being fired after less than three weeks at my job, I have to ask what kind of message this sends to young people.”  By the end of the weekend, she had become a cause célèbre for the left – and rightly so. She’s asking the right question.

Many of the same voices defending Wilder have been fierce in their calls for conservative journalists to be fired for similar ideological errors.  Three years ago – in what might be called the proto-classical period of cancel culture – the Atlantic fired right-wing pundit Kevin Williamson after a similarly brief tenure on the job.  Williamson, like Wilder, was canned not because of anything he wrote while employed, but because of a 2014 satirical tweet suggesting women who get abortions might deserve the death penalty.

Partisans on the left will say that Wilder did not deserve her firing, while Williamson richly deserved his.  Many on the right will say the exact opposite.  Neither side objects to cancel culture; they only lament that they do not have a monopoly on its weaponization.  They are very much in favor of deplatforming voices they find offensive – and are indignant at the prospect that the other side might do the same.  The extremes share an identical conviction: public outrage should result in people with bad ideas losing their jobs.  The extremes differ in how they define “bad ideas,” but they are united in their contempt for the antiquated notion of tolerating the offensive, the provocative, and the heterodox.

Wilder and Williamson are just two of many journalists, artists, and academics who have lost their entire livelihoods – or at least, lucrative gigs – thanks to pressure from the Outrage Industrial Complex.  I could name dozens more, and you can probably think of plenty yourself.  Some, like Wilder and Williamson (or Teen Vogue editor Alexi McCammond) have lost their platforms for old tweets they sent out in haste, and now regret in leisure.  Others, like CNN contributor and former US Senator Rick Santorum, lose their gigs because of things they’ve said contemporaneous with their employment.  Still others are cancelled because of revelations of private sexual misconduct.  (I’ll be in the store, 1-9 today, selling pancake mix and bagging your groceries.)

You know all this.

Proponents of take-down culture are fond of saying that this isn’t so much about canceling people as it is about providing long-overdue consequences. In the past, they tell us, racism and sexism and sexual impropriety were swept under the proverbial rug, and bad people were allowed to flourish. At last, the public has insisted on throwing back the rug, and doing a vigorous cleaning. Twitter is the broom sweeping out the festering trash.  After the reckoning, we shall have a clean house at last, and we shall eat milk and honey all the rest of our days.

Justice Harlan pointed out one person’s vulgarity is another’s lyric. One person’s termination-worthy offense is another’s heroic stand for the defenseless (such as the Palestinians, or the unborn.)  The more one side deploys cancel culture to get folks deplatformed, the more the other side moves to even the score.  Given that every human being has made some public pronouncement (or engaged in some private behavior) that others find egregious, there’s almost always something to find in order to drum up outrage.  Corporations, be they Teen Vogue or AP or the Atlantic, are eager to seem responsive to public pressure – and they know well that it’s much easier to terminate rather than defend the controversial.  There will be many more Emily Wilders and Kevin Williamsons.

There will be more because neither side is willing to accept the détente of mutual toleration. If I had the power to make a modest proposal, and say “Emily Wilder gets to write for AP despite her views, and Kevin Williamson gets to write for the Atlantic despite his,” I suspect that a great many of the folks most active on social media would reject that deal.  There is great pleasure and power in being able to get someone out of a job; in a world where so many problems seem intractable, getting some reporter (or some adjunct instructor) fired gives keyboard warriors a heady sense of power.  I can’t end white supremacy, but I can get this one white supremacist canned!  I can’t protect all blue lives, but I can get this one cop-hater terminated!  If you can’t build anything, you can at least take fierce satisfaction in smashing what already stands.

Outrage culture is triumphalist.  Certain that it has God (or Social Justice) on its side, and convinced of the Fierce Urgency of Now, outrage culture sees America and the world at a vital turning point, one in which there is no room for tolerating error.  Pluralism – the basic idea that humans are never going to agree on much, so we need to create a society in which folks with radically different values can all flourish – is now seen as a dangerous concession to injustice.  

And yet.

Golda Meir famously (perhaps apocryphally) remarked “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”  Cancel culture, and the fear it legitimately generates, will only end when we decide we want our children, our friends, and our allies to be able to make a living despite their imperfections, and we decide we want that more than we want to punish or deplatform those with whom we disagree. 

May that day come soon.

Yesterday was Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday. Folks like to say they prefer the covers of his songs to his own versions, and I’m not always an exception. If you don’t know the Swedish duo First Aid Kit, you’re missing out — they’re a reminder that Americana and country music belong to the world, and not just those born and raised here.

A terrific live cover of Dylan’s hymn lamenting the greatest danger of all: moral certainty.