Let me begin with a brief apology—if you’ve opened this newsletter hoping for a comprehensive analysis of the recent developments at the Supreme Court, I’m sorry. You’ll have to listen to the Advisory Opinions podcast. My co-host Sarah Isgur and I have spent more than two hours over the last two days breaking down every nook and cranny of the court’s recent abortion and religious liberty opinions. Give it a listen!
Also, for a quick, pessimistic take on the Supreme Court’s abortion jurisprudence, I’d refer you to my Twitter thread from yesterday:
(Oh, and stay tuned. Unless something changes, I’m going to spend my Sunday newsletter pondering the future of the pro-life movement in America.)
For today, however, I’d rather speak about something else—how cancel culture harms the very cause it seeks to advance. It’s a malignant force in the fight against racism and institutionalized injustice, and it’s spiraling out of control. My friend Yascha Mounk describes a series of unjust stories in The Atlantic. A utility worker was fired after being falsely accused of making a white supremacist hand gesture. A progressive data analyst lost his job after tweeting a study from a black political scientist indicating that nonviolent protest is more effective than violent protest. A man’s business is in peril because his daughter tweeted racist statements when she was 14.
Those are just the stories contained in one article. The stories are piling up even as all too many statues of American heroes come crashing down. In San Francisco, not even Ulysses S. Grant was safe.
The New York Times has extensively covered the Sturm und Drang inside various progressive institutions, including the resignation of the president and chairman of the board of the Poetry Foundation after this statement was found to be insufficient in the wake of George Floyd’s death:
The Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine stand in solidarity with the Black community, and denounce injustice and systemic racism.
As an organization we recognize that there is much work to be done, and we are committed to engaging in this work to eradicate institutional racism. We acknowledge that real change takes time and dedication, and we are committed to making this a priority.
We believe in the strength and power of poetry to uplift in times of despair, and to empower and amplify the voices of this time, this moment.
Last week the Times reported on “turmoil” within the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The cause of the controversy? An Instagram post critiquing the demolition and destruction of monuments:
A top curator’s Instagram post that seemed critical of protests over monuments and the Black Lives Matters movement — shared on Juneteenth — has ignited objections by staff members, and a larger internal critique. On Tuesday, 15 Met staff members sent a letter urging the museum’s leadership to acknowledge “what we see as the expression of a deeply rooted logic of white supremacy and culture of systemic racism at our institution.”
The post—from Keith Christiansen, the museum’s chairman of European paintings —reproduced an image of French archaeologist Alexandre Lenoir “saving France’s historic monuments from the ravages of the French Revolution.” Beneath the image, Christiansen wrote this:
Alexandre Lenoir battling the revolutionary zealots bent on destroying the royal tombs in Saint Denis. How many great works of art have been lost to the desire to rid ourselves of a past of which we don’t approve. And how grateful we are to people like Lenoir who realized that their value — both artistic and historical — extended beyond a defining moment of social and political upheaval and change.”
After an intense backlash, Christiansen took down the post, took his Instagram account offline, and then published an extensive apology to museum staff. Unmoved, a group of museum employees questioned whether Christiansen’s post meant he could be trusted to make decisions “with regard to programming, staff hiring, and institutional direction.”
Here’s my question. How does any of this help women like Marquita Johnson?
Who is Marquita Johnson, you ask? She’s one of the victims of a vindictive Alabama judge. This is how Reuters begins a comprehensive investigation of judicial misconduct in the United States:
Judge Les Hayes once sentenced a single mother to 496 days behind bars for failing to pay traffic tickets. The sentence was so stiff it exceeded the jail time Alabama allows for negligent homicide.
Marquita Johnson, who was locked up in April 2012, says the impact of her time in jail endures today. Johnson’s three children were cast into foster care while she was incarcerated. One daughter was molested, state records show. Another was physically abused.
“Judge Hayes took away my life and didn’t care how my children suffered,” said Johnson, now 36. “My girls will never be the same.”
In the days immediately after Floyd’s death, there was a moment when Americans—with remarkable unity—cried out not just for justice, but for knowledge. In a nation divided by race, class, religion, and geography, people yearned to better understand the black experience in the United States and to better understand the historical, legal, and cultural consequences of 345 years of slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow.
Many of those consequences are felt in cases like Johnson’s, in a criminal justice system that is too insulated from accountability and too often focused on profit over policing.
In a recent newsletter, advocating for the rise of “Bill of Rights Republicans,” I outlined a number of concrete legal and constitutional reforms that could help extend the blessings of liberty to all Americans—including ending qualified immunity, reforming civil asset forfeiture, reforming cash bail, regulating police unions, and limiting the reach of criminal laws.
But now the moment has changed. Yes, there are activists and lawmakers who are still engaged in good-faith efforts for reform, but in the media and in most of American politics the culture war is back, and it’s back with a vengeance. While the culture war is hardly confined to the left (readers know I’m not shy about critiquing the right), progressive cancel culture is exerting undeniable pressure on elite American institutions.
This development is not without cost. Aside from eating away at the culture of free speech that should characterize and define important American institutions, it has two particularly pernicious effects on the American race debate—it distracts, and it deceives.
The distraction is obvious. Elite media, conservative media, and millions of Americans are now fighting over alleged microaggressions when the fundamental facts on the ground that ignited such anguish after George Floyd’s death still remain almost entirely unaddressed. Indeed, at the federal level the momentum for meaningful legislation is fading fast.
In theory, a person can write outraged posts about Instagram offenses and organize bipartisan coalitions for qualified immunity reform, but we know human beings better than that—the allure of hashtag activism and online outrage is that in most cases it is a substitute for, not supplement to, the kind of courageous, persistent, and patient efforts that yield real reform. Online outrage is the social justice sugar high.
The deception is just as pernicious. In a closely divided nation, real reform requires consensus and compromise. It requires education and conversation. It requires taking skeptical Americans by the arm, and leading them to the truth. In that context, it’s one thing to speak about extraordinary increases in police killings, or the impact of mass incarceration on education and family formation, or evidence of distressing racial disparities in police violence.
It’s another thing entirely, however, to make the case for reform while spending time stamping your feet over microaggressions that no one outside the progressive bubble fully understands. The message sent by cancel culture is thus exactly the opposite of what anti-racists intend. “If that’s what you’re upset about,” many Americans respond, “then the fight over racism and the legacy of America’s racist past is all but won.”
Cancel culture feels a lot like political LARPing. If you don’t know what LARPing is, it stands for live-action role-playing. It’s a harmless hobby where people dress like knights and orcs, create fantasy worlds, and act out fantasy battles.
(I’m not judging, by the way. It sounds fun!)
But political LARPing isn’t quite so harmless. It’s the role play you often see online, where the activity, fury, and energy is often inversely proportionate to the real-world effect. Twitter warriors man the battlements over Instagram posts while the Marquita Johnsons of the world spend days and nights in the modern equivalent of debtors’ prison, victims of policing for profit.
In a Sunday newsletter last month, I wrote that “you don’t have to be a critical race theorist, agree with arguments about implicit bias, or buy into the radical social platform of Black Lives Matter to reach consensus on changes that can make a difference.” I believe that to be true. There are millions of Americans who are eager to work together on areas of common agreement—and debate differences another time.
I also know, however, that there are all too many Americans who place onerous preconditions on their alliances, who believe you have to join them on everything before they’ll work with you on anything. They’re not seeking converts. They’re hunting heretics. That’s where cancel culture lives, and cancel culture is the enemy of American racial progress.
One last thing …
Speaking of LARPing, I’ve never done it before, but one look at the 10,000 person Pennsic War, and I wonder why I’ve been wasting my time with World of Warcraft. Who shall join me on the field of battle?
Photograph by Eze Amos/Getty Images.
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