44: The Letter
'People who want democracy to happen on their own terms are doing fascism even if they use the language of democracy'
Coloured figures of the birds of the British Islands. 1885-1897.
Last week this infamous letter was published in Harper’s and it was all anyone in the media and academia in particular could talk about. It is a very trolling document and last Friday I was like, you know what, this is so stupid I’m just going to not. But then this week the debate raged on and then Bari Weiss quit and then I listened to and read some things that were really insightful about larger, actually important issues going on behind the letter and thought you know this is some Crisis Palace shit so here we go.
What exactly is The Letter, for those of you blessed enough to have avoided it? It’s an open letter that on its own actually says very little of substance, espousing ideas that would be hard for most to disagree with, such as open debate and tolerance for different ideas. But its shrouded references to specific events and the list of signatories load the document with far greater meaning than any argument it makes.
While it’s signed by almost 150 people, notable names include writers and academics who have come under harsh public scrutiny, mostly online, mostly coming from the left. The message is pretty clear—free speech and high-minded public discourse are in serious danger in America, and the threat is coming from progressives.
So, you know, people were fucking pissed about it, and it started this whole new debate about “cancel culture.” The premise of cancel culture being that, if you say something that does not conform to an inflexible progressive orthodoxy, you can, in effect, have your life ruined, swiftly and without due process—aka you got canceled bro. And when people get canceled, it makes it so all of us are afraid to express ourselves and we are living in something similar to Stalinist Russia (this is not me exaggerating, it’s something a Yale professor and letter signatory said, for realsies). To be honest, I too have some complaints about illiberal tendencies in certain corners of the left, and there are some components of this argument that I can sympathize with. But you know what it’s Friday and that is no fun so let’s just pretend I made some humble concessions and skip right to the part where I roast it.
Because when you break down the concerns and listen to signatories talking about why they signed, it’s very clear that The Letter is not really about what it claims to be about. In fact, that is The Letter’s defining feature. Instead of being about freedom of expression, for example, it is really about people with high-paying jobs scared of getting fired. But underneath that, The Letter is really about—drumroll—protecting the consolidation of power over who gets to participate in the public sphere, and the abject panic on the part of elites over comparatively minor harms they could incur as that sphere expands.
This was masterfully put by Tressie McMillan Cottom, author and UNC sociologist, on a WBUR radio show last night. In fact, you should really just go listen to that right now instead of reading this, it is the defining take on the letter for my money. She says:
More people than ever before are participating in public life… For someone at an elite social institution, the expansion of public life would feel like a contraction, because their space in the public life has probably contracted. But a greater liberalism was always about increasing access, or so that was what we were told.
She points out that while this relatively small number of academics, who are “overwhelmingly economically secure people,” are complaining about the public sphere being constricted, in reality, entirely new demographics and classes of Americans have been able to participate more fully in the media and academia, even just in the past 50 years (though their participation is still greatly restricted).
We see a similar panic among political centrists, pundits, and lifelong elected officials, sounding the alarm over our “hyperpartisan” or “hyperpolitical” or “hyperpolarized” public discourse. Hyper! But much of this political turmoil was merely tamped down in the past via oppression and disenfranchisement. Perceived glory days of political civility in the US existed in part because huge swaths of the population and certain political ideas were shut out of the arena, with concerns about how the status quo was harming some people left unheard.
Along with power, other concepts that get mangled in the panic over cancel culture are harm and safety. Some of the signatories, including JK Rowling, had their own brushes with cancellation (Rowling is still extremely wealthy and can write whatever she wants whenever she wants), for voicing anti-transgender ideas. When the Harper’s letter came out, Emily VanDerWerff, a writer at Vox who is a trans woman, wrote a response to the leadership at Vox, pointing out that her peer Matt Yglesias signing the letter alongside these figures makes her feel less safe at her job. That may sound dramatic, but keep in mind that anti-trans ideas and policies lead to actual physical harm to transgender people, including the idea that they suffer from a mental disorder.
The response to VanDerWerff’s complaint was swift. For one, letter supporters threw up a flag—see look she admit it, she’s trying to get Yglesias fired for his opinions (she explicitly stated she was not, and he will not be). This is cancel culture in action. But at the same time, VanDerWerff was barraged with actual, literal death threats.
In a recent Ezra Klein podcast featuring an interview with letter signatory Yascha Mounk, Klein, who is the founder of Vox, was livid about VanDerWerff’s treatment. He pointed out the hypocrisy of flying into a panic over a complaint being written to a writer’s boss, but turning your back entirely on another writer receiving death threats for her opinions. Klein is a very nice guy so he chalks this up to a mere blind spot among those who fear cancel culture. That their hearts are in the right place but they are just not being even-handed in how they express their concerns. I am not so sure.
Consider another cherished cancel culture allegory—the firing of NYT opinion editor James Bennett after the Times invited an op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton calling on armed troops to be deployed to Black Lives Matter protests. Bennett had drawn criticism for years for his ham-handed management of the editorial page, but in this case, readers and colleagues were livid that the Times would run something that might put people in actual harm’s way. This is a rare online cancellation in which someone actually did lose their job, but I suspect Bennett’s career will turn out just fine. Meanwhile, protestors calling for racial justice, also a constitutionally protected form of free speech, are regularly experiencing physical brutality at the hands of local and federal law enforcement.
There is a staggering imbalance in what the supporters of the letter are worried about when it comes to retaliatory harm for speaking out. Their concern over whose speech is protected appears to travel in one direction only, and it is in favor of the most powerful and the least vulnerable.
Speaking of the wave of protests that has been going on, that is one final thing that I would say this letter is actually about. Imagine if you will, a group of highly paid newspaper columnists and tenured professors sounding the alarm that “free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted,” all during a period of surging, historic political engagement. That speaks volumes about what this cohort thinks it means to protect public discourse.
Tressie McMillan Cottom again:
Everywhere in the country for the last 30 or 40 days, people have been out in the streets doing direct democratic action. People care for the first time in what feels like a really long time. People want to know what their budgets look like in their local municipalities, for goodness sake…. People are engaged and paying attention. That is a healthy public life… People who just want democracy to happen on their own terms are doing fascism even if they use the language of democracy. This is an exciting time, and it may be one of our last times to get it right.
This hysteria over imagined mobs of intolerant leftists is a response to the same underlying shift that has people wringing their hands over statues and storefronts during outcries for social justice. It’s the same underlying conditions that cause a couple in khakis to point their guns at peaceful demonstrators marching past their mansion.
People lacking voice, safety, high paying jobs, health care, and housing are rising up and demanding better. And a subset of people who have those things and more are freaking. The fuck. Out.
Links
In Portland, federal police in camouflage, no IDs, in unmarked minivans are grabbing protestors off the streets, even when they aren’t currently engaged in protests. Feds also shot a protestor in the head with “less lethal” weapons.
A detailed examination of revelations of grooming, sexual harassment and abuse in comics, in the context of the industry’s long history of exploiting talent.
John Kerry’s new bipartisan climate org asked Emily Atkin to moderate a conversation between organizer Jamie Margolin and John Kasich, who has a reputation as a Republican who is “good” on climate change. Kasich had no idea what he was talking about and was rude as hell. Bipartisanship!
Nick Tilsen’s statement upon his release from jail following his arrest during the Mount Rushmore protest is very powerful. “We’re not resisting for resistance sake. We’re resisting because we want a better world. A world that works for everybody.”
NYPD has been recorded punching, kicking, tackling, shoving, beating people on the ground over and over again during Black Lives Matter protests. They don’t care they are being filmed because there are zero consequences. You have to wonder what conservatives are thinking about this violence perpetrated by the state just kidding I know exactly what they are thinking!
Julian Brave NoiseCat on why the McGirt Supreme Court ruling is a historic victory for Tribes.
I fucking hate plastic. Here’s a photo spread of its return to dominance during COVID.
The awful couple who pointed guns at protestors are awful. Just one example: they live next to a Jewish congregation that started keeping bees near the wall around their mansion as part of Rosh Hashanah celebration and the guy went over to the hives and smashed them, left a note that he smashed them, and demanded they clean it up or he would sue.
In San Francisco, you can adopt and name storm drains. Writer Britta Shoot is adopting drains on alleys named for men, and naming them after her favorite women writers.
I would really love one of these backyard shed offices.
Reading
I’m in the middle of Paul Tremblay’s Survivor Song which is about people in New England during a pandemic that he wrote long before the real pandemic. I’m a big fan of Paul’s books and this one is no exception.
Listening
Watching
I know everyone already saw it but Knives Out was a true delight. Rian Johnson is great and also Last Jedi was way better than the Abrams movies sorry do not cancel me comments disabled goodbye.
Oooh boy this was quite a week wasn’t it. Sometimes it feels like nothing is happening and we are all just sitting around reading or watching TV and cooking and doing dishes but also simultaneously the world is on goddamned fire. Meanwhile, people are just ambiently dying of a disease with no vaccine and a subset of the population is locked behind glass indefinitely.
You never know how things turn out, but man it really is starting to seem like the covid story in the US is going to be: We all rallied together and fought back a dangerous disease but then after two months we got sick of it and wanted to go to the gym and decided it would be fine if another 100,000 people died.
Real cranky one this week turned up the dial on the old crankotron and just left it there.
Tate