Annals of Populism: Who Is in Charge of Cancel Culture?

Liberals increasingly embrace the progressive critique of structural racism, but they are far less certain of what to do about it.

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells @ NewYorker.com, March 11

Dr. Seuss Enterprises is not a political entity.  [.....]

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When politicians or commentators talk about “cancel culture,” they are typically speaking of a fear that even ordinary people who express ideas that are politically incorrect will be publicly shamed—that social media has enabled a universal speech surveillance, and that people and institutions are now self-policing, out of fear of it [....]

I covered the 2020 Democratic Presidential primary and found that its signal characteristic was that the candidates spoke as few others had, on many topics but especially on racial ones. Even milquetoast candidates like Pete Buttigieg spoke earnestly (if in his case also defensively, having failed to connect with Black voters) about the necessity of dismantling systemic racism. Bernie Sanders’s rallies sometimes began with a blessing from indigenous people. Nearly all the candidates spoke of “Black and brown communities”—the “brown” was new in a context like this, and it defined Mexican-American or Filipino-American communities not by their own heritage or experience but by their relationship to whiteness. Democratic Presidential candidates often adopted activist language in even more casual ways: Elizabeth Warren described her intention to “lift up the voices” of marginalized communities. This was striking coming from a powerful senator. Activists “lift up the voices” of the marginalized. Senators (and Presidents) are usually in a different business, the allocation of power. They don’t lift up voices; they decide whether to fund wars, and whether a line cook at McDonald’s should make eleven or fifteen dollars per hour. Democratic politicians’ connection with the cause of racial justice strengthened throughout the Trump era—an expression of their horror at a President they openly described as white supremacist or racist. It strengthened further during the spring protests over the police murder of George Floyd. In June, Nancy Pelosi knelt in the Capitol wearing a kente-cloth stole, an idea that had come from the Congressional Black Caucus. Still, the choice made you wonder how closely she was listening, and how much of this was for show.

Among those politicians who thought it imperative to dismantle white supremacy quickly, a natural question was how to do it. One approach, explored by the Minneapolis city council, was to allow racial-justice advocates a more direct role in defining public policy. Within two weeks of Floyd’s killing, following a week of intense lobbying by activists, a majority of the city-council members appeared at a protest and announced that they intended to “end policing as we know it.” I reported on that initiative, and found that the city councillors had well-grounded criticisms of the old police system but only a vague sense of what would replace it. I kept asking whose idea it had been to pursue defunding. Cam Gordon, a city councillor, named the activist groups: “It was Reclaim the Block and Black Visions Collective’s baby.” By September, the proposal, which would have first sought ballot approval to amend the city charter’s definition of policing, was functionally dead, after the charter commission voted against approving the necessary ballot initiative. Several of the councillors acknowledged then that they had never really agreed on what it would mean to defund the police, and the initiative lost steam when it encountered what a Times report described as “public opposition.”

Another approach, in San Francisco, was to aim at symbolic targets, in this case the names of schools. As in many other places, the education board had formed a committee to review school names in 2018, after the previous year’s white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, and, like the city council in Minneapolis, the committee proceeded deliberately. While schools in San Francisco were closed for the pandemic, the board of education voted, 6–1, to rename forty-four schools in order to “dismantle symbols of racism and white supremacy culture,” including schools named after Abraham Lincoln (for his role in the killing and persecution of Native Americans), James Russell Lowell (an abolitionist who the Committee alleged did not want Black people to be allowed to vote), and the nineteenth-century tycoon James Lick (whose estate funded an offensive statue). By then, the school board had a new president, Gabriela López, a thirty-year-old activist schoolteacher who had moved to San Francisco after receiving her master’s, and it was never clear how much support this broad renaming enjoyed from San Franciscans. The renaming project was botched, probably in part because the committee charged with renaming the schools did not consult any historians. “What would be the point?” the chair of the renaming committee and first-grade teacher named Jeremiah Jeffries wondered, insisting that the history of oppression was plain to see. In pursuit of dramatic change, the committee made basic errors: assuming, for example, that Paul Revere’s Penobscot Expedition had been a colonizing raid against indigenous communities in Maine, when it was actually an effort to capture a British fort. A month after the school board’s plan was announced, it was shelved indefinitely.

In cities like San Francisco and Minneapolis, these kinds of progressive ideas are often associated with the political opposition to gentrification. But they may actually share some of the ethos of gentrification, in that they aspire to wash away a complicated past and replace it with one that is beyond rebuke. Such ideas may also be held, in large part, by gentrifiers: college-educated white Democrats are now more progressive on many racial issues than Black or Hispanic voters, as Matthew Yglesias and other commentators have pointed out. (There’s an echo of this progressive desire to wipe the slate clean in a proposal by Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president and a New York City mayoral contender, and a Black Brooklyn native himself, to revive the borough’s “agrarian economy.” Brooklyn!)

No one deserves to have their name on a school in perpetuity, and little violence is done by erasing it, but when I went through the full list of forty-four names it seemed to me to be dominated by historical figures who had done many admirable things and some objectionable ones. The stumbling efforts in Minneapolis and San Francisco suggest that even the people who most sincerely believe in dismantling white supremacy do not really know how to do so. At least not yet.

Senators and Cabinet officials, at least, have the power to attempt broad social remedies: to raise the minimum wage, to address the racial wealth gap by issuing “baby bonds,” as Senator Cory Booker has long proposed. Change is harder for the many others—not “élites,” but just people with responsibilities—who might run a church, or a school, or a business. You have to balance the budget, and plan the retreat, and fire the person who won’t show up on time, and then you have to work to dismantle white supremacy. How, exactly? Most liberals can agree on the ends of a movement for racial justice. But what are the means—what would be sufficient? The uncertainty characterizes much of progressivism right now, at the outset of the Biden Administration. Plenty of people are stuck in it.

Last month, the Times columnist Michael Powell published a story that quickly entered the cancel culture canon, about an incident at Smith College in the summer of 2018 [.....]

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Each of these incidents, up close, turned not on the intervention of activists, or the mechanisms of mass protest, but on the anxieties and misjudgments of élites. That held true in cases in which the activist was outspoken (as at Smith) or perhaps hypothetical (as with Seuss). The college president, the city-council subcommittee, the panel of experts: these figures are often described by their political opponents as if they were as coherent and determined as a closed fist—that there is something cohesive that could be called cancel culture. My own sense is that something close to the opposite is true. The claims of racial justice have upended liberal élites in interesting and profound ways, and left them deeply uncertain: about how much history should be revised, about what kinds of retributive steps should be taken, and, above all, about how many people, really, want radical change.

Oct. 2019

Really? The "same" Marxist principles? Got a reference to those racial economic principles that underpinned Soviet thought? BTW, did you know Marx admired Capitalism for wiping out feudalism? Presumably no ladder to climb in Russia *was* a bad thing worth revolting against, no? No Edisons or Henry Ford's, just (very few) Tsars & royalty, plus (lots of) peasants? Seems like you're complaining the Russian Revolution shouldn't have happened at all, not that it replaced the staunchy status quo poorly with planned economies and wiping out populations in terror campaigns (kak zavyt "lynching" po-Russki?) as part of a different but not dissimilar kind of total control? Thought of that way, blacks were largely serfs, so inevitably they *were* 2 classes, 1 submissive to and supporting the other's lifestyle, only the upper classes in the US were more diverse. Of course the Russians exiled the Ukrainian Jews to various parts of the Soviet Union, while helping to starve millions of non-Jewish Ukrainians in the Holodomor - whether that's racial or simply territorial "other" is up for debate, but as long as Ukrainians spike Russian, the Russians didn't seem to mind them so much, so maybe it's Critical Linguistic Theory you're looking for.

Alright, your turn.