Republicans Are the True Cancel Culture Warriors

One hears much bloviating and warnings about Democrats and liberals leading a cancel culture that seeks to censor those not sufficiently politically correct.   Yet, as a column in the New York Times lays out, the true cancel culture warriors are not on the left, but rather among Republicans and MAGA cultists who want to erase entire groups of citizens or to condemn them to a marginalized status. The irony of the 2024 election was that many black and Hispanic men voted for Trump even though they are among those MAGA seeks to erase, deport or take back to a Jim Crow like era. Surveys indicate that voters who were the least informed or rarely followed politics voted for Trump by significant margins, suggesting that these voters may not have had any idea of what they were truly voting for.   It is the political right that wants "don't say gay" laws, book banning, the elimination of non-discrimination laws, and forced right wing "Christian" indoctrination in public schools. Oh, and did I mention the mass deportation of Hispanic migrants?  The political correctness of the far left pales in comparison to the right's agenda of bringing back the racism and white heterosexual domination of the 1950's. Many who voted for Trump are likely in for a brutal surprise when they find themselves targeted.  Here are column highlights:

In the days since the election, I’ve read thousands of words of Democratic introspection. This was the election that repudiated cancel culture, campus protests and identity politics. This was the election that transformed the debate about everything from trans people’s participation in sports to the use of niche ideological words like “Latinx.”

According to this commentary, the lesson is clear: Democratic identity politics and the Democratic Party’s move to the left cost the party working-class voters and alienated the great American middle. If Democrats want to win again, they have to shed their ideological baggage, meet American voters where they are and stop scolding them when they’re puzzled by the ever-shifting ideological demands (and language policing) of the very online left.

I agree with much of this. . . . There has been an intense amount of intolerance in far-left spaces, and not just on campuses. There is a need for a reckoning.

But let’s be very clear about the course of this election. One candidate leaned away from the extremism of her base, and she lost. The other candidate leaned into the worst excesses of his movement, and he won.

Kamala Harris spent her short campaign running away from the excesses of the left. She abandoned her most left-wing positions. She wasn’t using left-wing buzzwords, and rather than cancel ideological opposition, she tried to create the largest possible tent, stretching from Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.

Donald Trump’s campaign, by contrast, reveled in its most vicious language. It’s not necessary to recount every outrage, but we can’t forget that Trump and his allies spent days falsely accusing Haitian migrants of eating ducks and pets. My news colleagues accurately described Trump’s election-closing Madison Square Garden rally as a “carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism.”

MAGA’s problems extend well beyond the campaign. In fact, every dysfunction you’ve seen on the far left has emerged on the far right, and the far right hasn’t been repudiated; it’s been empowered. Dissenting Americans should brace themselves for an assault on free speech, extreme intolerance and a vicious form of cancel culture that includes an avalanche of threats and intimidation.

And make no mistake, the most intolerant campus activists in America could take notes from MAGA. In the past eight years, we’ve seen MAGA threaten and intimidate election workers and school board members. We’ve seen MAGA engage in its own forms of cancel culture. It targets critics for termination and public humiliation, and when red America became Trumpified, it embarked on crackdown after crackdown on free speech.

In Florida, for example, Ron DeSantis’s administration enacted unconstitutional limitations on the free speech of social media companies, university professors and private corporations. Across the United States, activists initiated a wave of efforts to remove books from school libraries.

In my home county in Tennessee, Moms for Liberty activists even used the state’s anti-critical-race-theory law as a pretext for (unsuccessfully) attempting to ban the book “Ruby Bridges Goes to School” from the elementary school curriculum. Bridges was the 6-year-old Black girl who desegregated New Orleans public schools, and her courage is memorialized in Norman Rockwell’s famous painting . . . .

MAGA hostility to L.G.B.T.Q. expression culminated in a series of bills aimed at drag queens and L.G.B.T.Q.-related speech in public schools..

If you’re alarmed by social media mobs and vicious online rhetoric, MAGA perfected the art of calling critics of its speech codes groomers and implying they’re pro-pedophile.

And while MAGA mocked the term “Latinx” as a silly and offensive virtue signal, it cheered as Trump declared that the Biden administration’s acceptance of immigrants was “poisoning the blood” of our country. I dislike the term “Latinx,” as do a vast majority of Latinos, but it’s far less offensive or empirically disgusting than the idea that people entering the country seeking a better life were somehow poisoning our blood.

From Tucker Carlson’s documentary on masculinity that featured heroic images of testicle tanning to the bizarre Christian nationalists who want to repeal the 19th Amendment (which granted women the right to vote) to the junk science of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Oz, the right has become the home for multiple strands of conspiracy quackery.

It’s important to chronicle MAGA’s excesses, but it’s also important to understand why its intolerance and bizarre ideas weren’t ballot box poison. If Americans hate intolerance and bullying, why did a critical mass of Americans vote against the party that was moving away from its extremes?

I have a few theories:

First, don’t make this too complicated. This election was mainly about prices and the border. Discussions of wokeness and cancel culture are more or less beside the point. They’re topics more for the engaged elite and not for the mass of Americans who voted on Nov. 5.

Second, if it’s not just the economy, then is it also civic ignorance? Do voters even know how strange and intolerant parts of the right have become? One of the most fascinating elements of the election was the stark information divide.

According to a poll from the left-leaning group Data for Progress, Harris won among the voters who said they paid attention to the news “a great deal” or “a lot,” while Trump won by decisive margins among those who paid attention “a moderate amount,” “a little” or “not at all.” Trump won those who don’t pay attention at all by 51 to 32. . . . You can’t vote against actions or ideas that you don’t know a thing about.

Third — and most ominously — Americans are turning their backs on liberty, tolerance and decency. America possesses a unique culture, but it does not possess a unique people. We’re prone to the same sins and flaws as the people of any other nation, and protecting the rights and dignity of our opponents is just not something that comes naturally to us. It’s a learned behavior, modeled by leaders, and when leaders stop modeling tolerance and decency, Americans are prone to backslide to fear and animosity.

The founders understood this reality clearly. That’s why they kept concentrated power out of the hands of a single person and created separate branches of government. That’s why they removed civil liberties from majoritarian control through the Bill of Rights. But throughout history, we’ve been tempted to reject their wisdom, blow through constitutional safeguards and suppress the freedoms of people we despise.

In this analysis, Trump’s fury and MAGA’s intolerance are assets, but only if they’re targeting the right people. Americans don’t hate cancel culture in the abstract; they hate being canceled. At the same time, all too many of us are more than happy to cancel others, especially if we deem their ideas dangerous or immoral.