Two articles exploring the impact of cancel culture and group think on democratic discourse and on the press: “Mob Justice Is Trampling Democratic Discourse” by Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic, and “The Problem With Media” by Ross Barkan. I’m going to come back to these two articles, but let me just pull out some quotes right now.
Barkan writes,
But there is an underlying irony to the current reckoning around race and the new rush to instill anti-racist teachings in newsrooms. Today’s newspapers are more likely than at any point in recent history to be staffed with the children of elites.
And on the death of local news, he says:
Today’s 28-year-old living in an exurb doesn’t understand how much coverage of a town meeting, a county executive’s office, or a public school they would’ve read 20 or 30 years ago. They merely see nothing and learn to live with it.
And from Anne Applebaum:
Right here in America, right now, it is possible to meet people who have lost everything—jobs, money, friends, colleagues—after violating no laws, and sometimes no workplace rules either. Instead, they have broken (or are accused of having broken) social codes having to do with race, sex, personal behavior, or even acceptable humor, which may not have existed five years ago or maybe five months ago.
Some teachers’ union leaders are trying to push the line that it didn’t matter that kids didn’t learn to read or do math last year, because they learned RESILIENCY!
Some entrepreneurial types made $$ when life went online last year.
Picture: I’m a sucker for the Colonial Caribbean decor. It’s all pink and green with dark wooden furniture. And big fat ceramic lamps. This was the lobby of our resort.
Food: I make chicken thighs on a sheet pan about once a week. Usually, I just put some spice rub on it, a pad of butter, and roast at 425, but I also do more complicated versions of it with vegetables. This looks good.
Watching: The Chair, Titans, And on Thursday, What We Do in the Shadows. Success is coming out soon, too.
Apt. 11d 
Laura retweeted Noah Smith’s tweet:
“This is a great post. I think it comes down to this: As a country, we needed to give rural White Americans some sort of identity they could be proud of other than Confederacy-style white supremacy. We failed to give them one.”
Wow, that is the most patronizing thing I’ve read this week. What gives him the idea that that’s his job, or that it’s even a possibility to give members of a different group an identity and a raison d’etre?
Consider how demeaning and disrespectful it sounds when you pop in other ethnic groups and stereotypes in place of “rural White” and “Confederacy-style white supremacy.”
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I’ve had a hell of a night with the remnants of Ida, which hit overnight here and a little earlier in NY/LI, where my mom, 2 sisters and son are all living. My son’s college campus was hit pretty hard; one whole quad of dorms has been evacuated because flooding knocked out power. My son is fine, but videos posted on Reddit documented flooding in the ground floor of his dorm (he is on the 1st floor). And of course, my beloved NYC was hit hard.
Needless to say, I have issues with Anne Applebaum’s article. She lost me, of course, when she evoked Stalinism, and then blithely went on to say “In America, of course, we don’t have that kind of state coercion.” Yes, that is true. So don’t evoke Stalinism. And also, don’t cite The Scarlet Letter/Hawthorne; I think people forget that “the Puritans” he was talking about and Applebaum references did have really porous boundaries between church and state, which was part of Hawthorne’s point. Hawthorne’s novel is considered one of the first great American novels precisely because he is reminding his audience in 1850 that this is the type of society that America left behind when it asserted its independence and embraced democracy.
Of her examples of people who have “lost everything,” the evidence is scant. On one level their anonymity is understandable, but we the readers have no way of assessing whether the condition of these people who “lost everything” is accurate, and given the weak examples of the non-anonymous people she cites, you really have to wonder. Ian Buruma can’t publish his essays in some magazines? Boohoo. As far as I can tell, he is still publishing; his most recent book was published by Penguin Random House in 2020.
“Peter Ludlow, a philosophy professor at Northwestern (and the subject of Laura Kipnis’s book), lost two book contracts after the university forced him out of his job for two alleged instances of sexual harassment, which he denies.” LOLOL. Well, he denies it, so I guess that’s that. *eyeroll*
Daniel Elder: well, I can’t quite assess whether he “lost everything.” The only articles on him are by known right-wing outlets, and as far as I can see, there wasn’t much media about him prior to his comments. He does have a bunch of music on Spotify that gets hundreds of thousands of plays.
“After the poet Joseph Massey was accused of “harassment and manipulation” by women he’d been romantically involved with, the Academy of American Poets removed all of his poetry from its website, and his publishers removed his books from theirs.” I don’t see anything exculpatory here. But that aside, the only “consequence” Applebaum brings up about Massey is that he contemplated suicide, which is something that guilty people are just as likely to do as innocent people.
Applebaum writes, “David Bucci, the former chair of the Dartmouth brain-sciences department, who was named in a lawsuit against the college though he was not accused of any sexual misconduct, did kill himself after he realized he might never be able to restore his reputation.” Applebaum actually has no proof that that is why he killed himself. The extensive NY Times article on his case has evidence that he worried about the loss of his reputation, but even his wife (according to the NYTimes article) “was unwilling to point the finger at anyone for her husband’s death.”
Stephen Elliott seems to be currently devoting his life to suing the compiler of a “whisper network” spreadsheet, which raises the question of the “Streisand Effect.”
“After Alexi McCammond was named editor in chief of Teen Vogue, people discovered and recirculated on Instagram old anti-Asian and homophobic tweets she had written a decade earlier, while still a teenager. McCammond apologized, of course, but that wasn’t enough, and she was compelled to quit the job before starting. She’s had a softer landing than some—she was able to return to her previous work as a political reporter at Axios—but the incident reveals that no one is safe.” In other words, Applebaum says, there were no consequences and McCammond did not “lose everything.”
I bring the specifics of these up because of this sentence in Applebaum’s article: “Right here in America, right now, it is possible to meet people who have lost everything—jobs, money, friends, colleagues—after violating no laws, and sometimes no workplace rules either.”
This is emotional and overreaching language. I can’t see that any of the people she has mentioned have lost “everything.” They have lost some things. But mostly, they have bounced back or moved on to other options. There is an underlying idea of entitlement held by the people in these examples, an entitlement that most people do not feel. And in terms of making an argument, Applebaum is making a flimsy one. She’s relying on readers to make inferences rather than to follow logically sound points. She wants you to believe these are examples of Stalinism even as she says “Well, heh heh, this isn’t Stalinism. Obviously. Wink wink.”
That’s what’s so irritating about Applebaum’s article.
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Valid points.
I do have to say that almost all of my journalism friends have gotten off twitter, because they are terrified of saying something that could be read the wrong way. It’s highly stressful. I’m still on twitter, because A. I don’t give a shit and B. I totally avoid certain topics. I show disapproval by not talking about things.
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“because they are terrified of saying something that could be read the wrong way. ”
Yeah, when I’m on Twitter, it helps that the only people I think of as my audience are old fandom friends, so I mostly just say stuff about tv shows.
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I got off Twitter to save my mental health.
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Wendy wrote:
“My son’s college campus was hit pretty hard; one whole quad of dorms has been evacuated because flooding knocked out power.”
Yikes!
“Hawthorne’s novel is considered one of the first great American novels precisely because he is reminding his audience in 1850 that this is the type of society that America left behind when it asserted its independence and embraced democracy.”
I think democracy is the wrong term here. Maybe limited government or constitutional democracy, instead? Because you could definitely have an oppressive democracy that lacked the equivalent of our Bill of Rights.
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“I think democracy is the wrong term here.”
Yes, but I am actually coming at this from an old-school perspective of American literary history. I’m evoking F.O. Mattheissen’s American Renaissance and the idea that the literature produced during this period (mostly 1840s to 1860s) in America was an attempt to develop American literature and culture as things separate from British literature and culture, animated by a different kind of political and cultural philosophy. Hawthorne et al thought of it as democracy.
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excellent critique. I think it might show how you teach writing?
“There is an underlying idea of entitlement held by the people in these examples, an entitlement that most people do not feel.”
I agree with this evaluation — and the sense of entitlement is often distributed systemically (what’s the book title about the finance guys) — but Alexi McCammond (and her fiancee/husband), who exude that sense as well are examples of the character trait beyond the systemic propping up of the golden boys.
Of course there are consequences to posting publicly. And, like Wendy, I haven’t seen many (or even more than a few) people loose everything.
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