To do or to say something insufficiently progressive these days risks the wrath of what’s being called “cancel culture.” A mostly young and mostly online gaggle of so-called “social justice warriors” will attempt to silence anyone they deem to hold views sufficiently problematic or insufficiently “woke.”
So far, the list of cancel culture’s casualties includes editors who publish controversial op-eds, campus speakers whose views were labeled “unsafe,” professors who quote from egregious classical literature and researchers who published their politically incorrect findings.
Though those behind cancel culture would be on the far-left side of the ideological and political spectrum, the effect of what they are doing is the very opposite of liberal. Free speech and open debate, long-claimed values of classic liberalism, are stifled, not by a political oppression that so many feared, but by mob-like tactics.
On July 7, a number of high-profile thinkers (153 to be exact), many of whom would sit on the left of the spectrum, expressed their collective concern over cancel culture. In a letter published by Harper’s Magazine, this group of authors, journalists, academics and artists warn of cancel culture’s “intolerant climate” and reaffirm the value of open and civil debate.
The group includes some of the brightest stars in the progressive firmament: Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling; left-wing linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky; author of “The Handmaid’s Tale” Margaret Atwood; feminist Gloria Steinem; “Satanic Verses” author Salman Rushdie; New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, journalist Malcolm Gladwell; and the magazine’s president, John MacArthur.