I also find it interesting how this rhetoric is now so common among people who have absolutely zero public profile. Not to get all my-uncle-at-Thanksgiving, but my aunt was recently complaining about all the things she's not "allowed" to say. I pushed back a little on what she meant by that - she owns her own business, she's not online at all, her social circle is pretty aligned with her politically. Who exactly is not allowing her to say things? Basically what she conceded she means is her kids get mad at her (and I should be clear, they still have a close relationship and see her often). But there's this broader language out there about cancellation that allows her to put an age-old phenomenon of kids disagreeing with their parents politically in this language of persecution and fear.
I am not a psychologist so take this with a grain of salt, but grievance politics seem pretty seductive regardless of political affiliation. People seem to sleep better at night thinking they're targets than to think they do any targeting themselves.
100%. I see it in all kinds of areas of life too. People like to complain that their lives/jobs/relationships/etc. are all awful, as if it's some kind of competition of badness. When I hang out in my social circle, it's almost like everyone is working extremely hard to prove that THEIR job is the one that sucks the most or that THEIR struggle is the greatest. And this is amongst incredibly successful young professionals (competing or achieving partner at large law firms, etc.) who are actively choosing to have these jobs that require all these hours, and whose resumes mean that they could incredibly easily find other jobs that don't come with all downsides that they're currently competing to prove are so oppressive. I just find it bizarre how people in America in 2023 can spend so much time acting like life is so terrible and struggle so mightily to recognize that we're living at inarguably the greatest time to exist in the history of humanity. It's an odd quirk of human psychology.
My facebook feed is full of college acquaintances with two working parents with six figure jobs, massive exurban houses, and one kid complaining about how torturous and awful being a parent is. Its wild watching people who have by an metric "won" the American Dream publicly beg for pity.
You couldn't get me to publicly complain about my kids at gunpoint.
And then people wonder why so many women want to forego having kids! If you give the impression that having kids is a big life-ruining bummer, then you don’t get to be surprised Pikachu when the general reaction is “not for me, thanks!”
I’m childfree, but I chose to be childfree long before social media was a gleam in Zuck’s eye, and for personal reasons. I don’t get people who actually plan to have kids, and want to have kids, and then complain that they are miserable because they got what they wanted. (Sometimes it’s because the child is difficult or they have a spouse who is not helpful, but other times I think they just like to complain.)
I wonder how the kids feel knowing that they are a millstone around their parents’ necks? It can’t be good for the ol’ self esteem.
Absolutely. My wife and I had our first kid early relative to our social cohort of college educated urban libs, so I luckily missed seeing all that when we decided to start trying, otherwise it might have scared me off of it for a while!
And the bummer is that you can't really counter those posts without coming across like an asshole. If you talk about how great having kids is, it gets perceived as bragging to people who struggle with infertility, or a value judgement against childfree people, or you come off like that freak "pro-natalist" couple that have invaded my twitter feed.
I wish there was a way to tell people that contrary to the popular posts you may see about "mommy needs more wine because my uncontrollable little shits have ruined my life", actually having kids is pretty great if it's something you may want to do, especially if you're in a double income, high-ish earning and stable household.
I think having money and stability - as well as both partners being “all in” - are important to having a happy family. Not in a “the poors should not have kids” sense but “when you are exhausted, it can make all the difference to be able to get DoorDash rather than have to cook from scratch” or “Being able to pay for a dog walker means we can keep our dog rather than rehome him” sense. Being able to throw at least some money at problems helps. As does knowing you can afford to pay for a decent daycare rather than some unlicensed under-the-table one. And the stable relationship goes without saying.
A lot of the instances where mommy really DOES need more wine because she truly IS miserable come from some combination of threadbare finances, an absent or unsupportive partner, no family or other outside help (aka “village”) whatsoever, not treating mental health issues before having that kid, and, unfortunately, having a very high-needs child.
The clear majority of child-related posts that I see are from people showing off how cute their kids are, or describing cute things they said or did. Only a little bit about complaining. That includes a lot of professionals, but not all. I guess we're just in different subcultures.
It's the modern American version of the hair shirt. Your suffering sanctifies you, justifies your current rewards, and ensures your future entrance into the holy kingdom.
if only we added Nietszsche to the high school curriculum, normies could reject slave morality and channel their inner ubermensh. your mileage may vary.
For sure. Everyone is constantly looking for reasons why they good and valuable. Left, right and everything in between. Grievance politics signals all your problems are external, not internal.
I think on the right especially, there is a massive reluctance to face up to policy failures like the Bush Doctrine, wholesale opposition to Obamacare, over reliance on supply side ideology. Politicians on the right for the most part don’t want to change their actual policy positions, so focusing on cancel culture and grievance politics becomes appealing. Its not failed policy, its your domestic political partners ruining everything. What is more problematic is that in our free society, there is precious little acceptable use of government power to dominate domestic opponents or force changes in culture. So once right wingers win on culture war campaigns, their base expects them to then dominate factions within the USA. And we get things like Jan 6 and retribution against Disney for legitimate policy dissent
A lot of Boomers and older people in general think that their ideas should be given great deference by younger people. A lot of younger people disagree. It doesn't help the Boomer case that they are quite wealthy and yet seem (as an aggregate) to be miserly and ungracious towards their own children.
I’m not sure how to assess that statement in the interpersonal sense, but it is true that Boomers (on aggregate) have consistently voted for baskets of policy preferences that enhanced their own wealth while leaving their children worse off (capital gains and income tax cuts, erroneously austere response to 2008 financial crisis, defunding public universities, NIMBY opposition to home and transit construction, infrastructure underinvestment, refusing to use state power to bring healthcare costs to heel, dilatory response to rising CO2 emissions, etc).
My guess is that the average Boomer parent is reasonably generous toward their children in the ordinary interpersonal sense but voted for policies that were bad for their material interests without fully understanding that that’s what they were doing.
There were no referenda on these in which Boomers could state their explicit preference, so we can't say for sure that Boomers support capital gains and income tax cuts etc.
What we do know is that the Boomer generation voted almost 50/50 Biden vs Trump (maybe a tad bit more for Trump), so when we claim things like "Boomers support X" we're at most about half right, because half of Boomers likely support "not X."
Younger generations tend to identify more as "independent" than older ones, though I really have no idea what that means. Putting the independents aside, we see these breakdowns for %R/%D (with % independent in parentheses):
Gen X: 30%/27% (44%)
Boomer: 35%/32% (33%)
Silent: 39%/35% (26%)
In terms of actual party identification, there's not really a significant difference among these generations, basically a three percentage point advantage to the Republicans. Millenials and Gen Z do tilt more Democratic though (yay!) but are 52% "independent."
I suspect the Boomers were just as Democratic/liberal as the Millenials/Gen Z when they were that age. Getting somewhat more conservative when you get older, though, is not really a feature of the Boomer generation per se.
I was referring to an interpersonal sense. I see what you mean in the aggregate, but a) pinning all of that on Boomers feels a bit overly simplistic, and b) employing the phrase "miserly and ungracious" in a political sense feels so tangential as to be functionally meaningless. That's just not how people think about politics.
Re: point b-- I find your response here interesting, because it feels perfectly natural to me to think about politics in those terms. (Indeed, I would predict that a Likert personality scale measuring general miserliness and ungraciousness-- especially toward those outside one's immediate ingroup-- would strongly correlate with preferences for the policies I listed above. Indeed dark triad personality trait assessments and low honesty-humility factor scores, which capture similar psychometric variables, have been found to pretty strongly correlate with conservative beliefs.)
Genuinely curious about where that difference in intuitions comes from.
(Also, researchers found these assessments way back in 2010. Would suspect that the rise of Trump-- who practices a sort of identity politics for assholes-- just further intensified the relevant set of correlations. Politics is personality writ large.)
Do boomers think their ideas should be given deference to a greater degree than recent college graduates do? Hard to settle empirically and probably a lot of variation among individuals.
Yeah, it seems to me that EVERYONE wants deference to their views. If anything, Boomers are more accustomed to live-and-let-live approach. My boomer parents have friends and associates across the political spectrum in a way that would be very unusual for my social set.
The thing about Boomers is that there's a lot of 'em. They've been part of the dominant cultural/economic/political force their whole lives, they certainly aren't used to not being given deference.
A lot of Boomers seem to feel like they like hierarchical structures and respect for the old now that they are old, but probably didn't show it as much when they were young.
I've heard it said that the reputation for Boomers being a "never trust authority" generation was set by a few long-haired outliers and that actually the cohort was as well-behaved as any other.
Most boomers were boring suburbanites like everyone else. Even the ones who were or are alleged “hippies turned conservative yuppies” might have been “hippies” in the sense that they grew out their hair, wore paisley velvet pants, and saw Jefferson Airplane live while smoking a joint. Hardly indicative of core beliefs.
I’d agree with this for myself. I regularly “self-censor” on Twitter and real life about trans issues. I consider myself extremely supportive of important rights, like workplace protections, etc. But as a cis woman, I do not want to share a locker room with someone who has a penis. I feel strongly about this, and I also don’t think it’s important enough to trans rights that it should be a front-and-center issue.
But the thing is, I am totally free to express these opinions anywhere. I choose not to, not because I fear for my job, but because I think it would hurt some people’s feelings and they might decide not to be friends with me anymore. Which of course, would also be their right. They aren’t obligated to respect my opinions. If they came out as Trump supporters, I would probably stop being friends with them.
"I choose not to…because I think it would hurt some people’s feelings and they might decide not to be friends with me anymore.... If they came out as Trump supporters, I would probably stop being friends with them. "
Yikes! Can I encourage you, maybe, to not make your extension of friendship so conditional on political views?
You can do whatever you want, but the reality is you have standards for your friendship, even if they are different from mine. That’s my whole point. I spend a significant amount of my free time and money on Democratic causes, and that’s only because of Trump. This is a core value for me, and completely my prerogative. I chose only to associate myself with knitters, that would be valid as well.
I live in one of the bluest areas of the country. Maybe if I didn’t, I would have more conservative friends, and the choice would be more difficult. But happily for me, it’s not.
It absolutely is. The ability to constructively disagree, hold your own ideas up to criticism, dispassionately argue from different sides, etc. etc. are 100% trainable skills we need to do vastly more to cultivate. Instead, in our zero-tolerance, anti-fighting/anti-bullying/conflict averse/maximum fragility paradigm, the only conflict resolution skill we teach is how to make appeals to authority.
Don't forget how often disagreement was physical in the past. It's a net benefit that strong emotions are now more often left in the verbal domain (though the are plenty of people who lament it).
I think we also more charitable to our past selves since we understood our intentions, something we can't afford to others. Our lashing out at our parents probably looked pretty bad from the outside.
I'm not sure if 2000s family political fights were less psychotic than the late 2010s, but they were definitely less all-encompassing. Most of all, the word I'd use to describe the latter is "exhausting". Wake up every morning, pick up your Dread Screen to scroll some doom and see what latest stupid shit we needed to start paying attention to. Every damn day for years and years.
Oh my gosh yes. When Biden won, or at least when he was inaugurated, I made a conscious decision to not start (and continue) my day paying attention to what the latest outrage was --- and I'm much happier and saner for it.
I have a couple relatives who just kept on keeping on, and their constant sense of urgency and angst about every bad act by every batshit crazy right winger everywhere is just dragging on them.
On the other side, my wife's parents are the only close family I have truly on the other side of the political spectrum, and they too can't seem to turn the volume down. It has really had a negative affect on our relationship because my wife and I just don't want to engage with it
For the love of God, could we ever considering ending our habit of such absurd over-emphasis on these generational labels as if they explain anything? All things equal, a Millennial born in 1992 is going to have more in common with an early Gen Z person than they are with a fellow millennial born in 1982 (three years vs. ten years). And yet the shorthand society uses to describe age cohorts would imply otherwise. I get that shared generational experiences count for something. Probably a lot! But the particular way we've decided to slice and dice these generations is meaninglessly vague and often flat out innaccurate. They're just too broad. We'd be better of saying "Us early 80s babies blah blah blah" or "We late 60s babies blah blah blah." These synthetic generation boundaries (Boomer, Xer, Millennial, etc) are a sloppy intellectual scam for the vast majority of discussions.
Took the words right out of my mouth. I swear every time I see someone like Michael Wilbon yell about "Millennials", my first thought is "old man yells at a cloud".
I feel like there's two parallel phenomenon involved here, there's the kind of direct, whipped up outrage people like Matt experience regularly on Twitter that I think this article is right on about. Twitter is not really life. 99.9% of the time, online outrage can simply be ignored as the impotent whining of an overamplified minority.
The second version is more pernicious. This is the one where your personal ability to disregard bad faith criticism is secondary to the whims of the middle management/hr/dei/administrative drones that have real power over your employment prospects. A growing subset of corporate, government and non-profit institutions maintain fully ideologically captured layers of bureaucracy who's entire purpose seems to be to sheild the entity from criticism on Twitter. Some of these people are academically inflected true believers, a larger subset are simply cowards looking for easy answers, but none have the incentive to stand up for an individual's attempts at boldness.
Most people can't make more money by ditching the HR department and moving to substack
I don’t know I think the old fashioned don’t talk about politics, sex, money or religion in mixed company shields people from this incredibly well. I’m sort of woke and I don’t know many people who share my convictions about a lot of stuff and they have no problem keeping a job and privately referring to kids as retards or saying trans people have fear of better options.
I work in teaching and it seems to me we’re much more vulnerable to attack from the right than the left. Even before the current round of culture war stuff we heard how parents will scour your social media for drinking or swimsuit pictures and how these private expressions of self off hours are harmful to youths for uhhh reasons.
Yes, the phenomenon where people live in fear for their careers if they fail to aggressively sanitize their private life as it appears on social media is a seriously problematic manifestation of "cancel culture"/HR brain.
I'm inclined to wonder, though, of perhaps, in order to re-establish and once again have the benefits of a public national mass culture, with broad consensus and more unity on many issues like we have in the pre-internet mass media days that we haven't seen since the 90s, we need to stuff the social media genie back in its bottle a bit, and and find a way to articulate and enforce public consensus on big issues, as was done then (there was still plenty of alternative culture, it just wasn't always in everyone else's face). Things seemed to work better that way, than in our current excessively fragmented culture -- the pendulum may have swung too far.
Of course, there's no going back in a literal or reactionary way, but rather, instructive lessons we might be able to learn from what worked in our past that could be useful in shaping the future.
I think you’re right about the first bit, the need to seriously gut social media, but I think the answer is that the internet doesn’t need a town square at all. This place is fine and would be better without Twitter. There will be other places for other folks, which will be more comfortable without Twitter, and that’s fine. I struggle to find anything Twitter has made better.
We simply aren’t built/evolved to stare at irritating or disturbing “wrong” opinions from others all day long and remain equanimous about them. The answer isn’t a monoculture, IMO, so much as some room to breathe.
"I struggle to find anything Twitter has made better."
I'm always sort of amazed at how people say that Twitter has made them miserable. Why would you read things that make you miserable? Just read things that you want to read. I find Matt's tweets fun and often educational; I enjoy reading them and ignore the replies. I learn *tons* of things from smart people on Twitter. Jason Furman on fighting inflation. Mick Ryan on how to assess the coming Ukrainian offensive. Eric Topol on COVID and medical research in general. Etc a thousand times.
Maybe if Twitter didn't exist they would spread their thinking through an equally accessible format but for now that's what they use and I'm grateful for it.
What suggests to you that I'm on Twitter? I read occasional Tweets from about 5 people without an account and that's it.
Without Twitter and all of its downsides, they would absolutely use something else, and that something else would likely work better if there were a regulatory bar to recreating Twitter.
My inclination is that that's an impossibility. Short of a Butlerian Jihad the trend in technology is towards greater and greater visibility into the private lives of our neighbors and greater documentation of our past behaviors. The imperative needs to be a culture that is less punitive towards disparate cultural values and behaviors.
The one possibility I see is this. (I think I saw this idea first from Lars Doucet.) with the rise of generative AI, social media will become flooded with bots. Everyone will be so sick of bots that they will retreat from social media to locations where it is clear that everyone is a real person you know (eg, group texts among friends).
The Internet is also about to get flooded with ai generated porn of every attractive human on earth that is indistinguishable from an actual recording.
Not going to happen if we can all see everything. Better to inflict enough anti-trust action on the big boys to shatter the web into a million little communities. The ideologues will infiltrate one another and scream about what they see like they always have, but the bulk of humanity won’t have to give a damn as it does now.
I think the evidence is very strong that the public has great appetite for people who go into other communities and highlight their "crazy." E.g. Libs of TikTok and such.
I don't think you can create different online communities that are really separate from each other.
The problem is that network effects are a huge factor in the internet. If you shut down Twitter, another new site will take its place and you’ll have to shut down that new site too.
A huge perk of social media sites is the idea that most people you know have an account on it. So people will naturally consolidate into large platforms.
I don't think I disagree, so much as I have to retreat to my libertarian priors about whether the state can actually force people back into their silos by taking a sledgehammer to the bullhorns of twitter/facebook/tiktok.
I want the system to be sufficiently liberal/pluralistic for people to feel comfortable self selecting into the cultures/discourses that actually impact their lives directly, which means reducing the power of the state imposed monoculture, not empowering it to smash it's competitors.
Like there’s something about Twitter that’s inherently conflict oriented. My other social platforms are just like recipes, running, dogs and Taylor Swift and then there’s Twitter which is oriented around outrage and scorched earth.
Back to work in a moment but I want to distill my point down to one thing:
What you're describing is the status quo for all of human history, completely innate to what we are. It cannot be done away with, hopes for a "cultural solution" of some kind are sheerest fantasy with no empirical support whatsoever. We are barely-evolved clan primates, the vast majority of us need a clan and will craft one for ourselves if denied the real thing.
Pluralism and democracy put this particular facet of human nature on the back burner; it became possible to segment political and social views from the rest of one's life, aided significantly by a publicly-supported monoculture. As that monoculture has died out under the influence of leveling technological progress, the ability of our pluralistic institutions to prevent us from reverting to the mean has come under stress.
The American 1940/s-1990's monoculture is not really desirable for most folks now that we've had a taste of freedom from it, and could not be recreated even if it were, so I am firmly convinced that the only way out is to reengineer the digital public square into a bunch of discrete meeting rooms and give us all some breathing room in which the issues over which we're bickering can fade and become less salient.
What you seem to expect is that people are going to change their very nature in response to technological change, to become more tolerant and accepting. I would argue that expecting such change to happen in the span of less than a generation is unrealistic and we need a policy solution that will take the pressure off.
To a certain extent, “try to avoid arguing about politics at work” is a social norm that gets you most of the way there in a lot of for-profit private sector workplaces.
I work with a mixed-political affiliations team at my current job and try to restrict my commentary on politics to work-relevant and relatively value-neutral descriptions and predictions of events. My colleagues aren’t always quite as good about it, but they lean in that direction too. All of us know that we’re unlikely to change each other’s deep fundamental assumptions by arguing at work, and we all have strong economic incentives to communicate and cooperate well; feuding or even just being rude to each other would just be a dumb waste of time.
Of course, this works because our financial incentives are well-aligned, we’re all reasonably smart, and we all take a fairly mercenary approach to our work. This is probably much harder at more mission-focused orgs or among teams of workers not well set up to catch upside from good performance.
First of all. Thank you for teaching. (I’m a veteran and people always say this to me… But honestly, I think there’s a lot of occupations, including teach him, which deserves this respect. So I acknowledge it is awkward and kind of nerdy to say, but thank you anyway.)
I pay attention to my local Idaho news. And Idaho being Idaho is probably a outlier, but you are definitely right that you’re more likely to be tempted to be canceled for being woke on the left. Then you are on the right as a teacher.
I’m not sure what grade do you teach, but do other students try and cancel their fellow students? This is something that I sort of seen. I don’t know if cancellation is the right term, but out shouting and out crying their fellow students.
I think one Idaho case is pretty emblematic of what happens on the normie people side, and its the one that got a freshman diversity class literally cancelled.
The rumor was that a professor had mistreated a student for disagreeing. The actual story was that a student had (inelegantly) disagreed and the other students jumped down her throat. The professor stopped class early and them called the student to make sure she was fine.
I know a lot of professors. Its a career enriched with crotchety assholes who love to argue, but even the rest will see usually disagreement as engagement, not a threat. But other students... they are a lot less flexible and students care way more how they think. Its awful to be on the receiving end of group opprobrium from your peers, and knowing the loudmouths may be a minority does not help.
I’ve taught mostly 2&3 and people are weird when it comes to what they think is racist.
Bullying has always occurred and we haven’t cured it but I don’t think they have the ability to really play that up anymore than they did 20 years ago.
which direction you're vulnerable from is entirely a product of where you live. teachers unions in blue cities don't give a flying piece of fudge what right of center parents think, but in the suburbs those folks have much more cultural cachet.
I don’t know I live in a D+20 city and basically I’ve never once felt pressure from the left.
I’ve been teaching for 10 years so well before the current round of culture wars and my whole career from teacher prep onwards I’ve always felt pressure to be as ‘Apple pie’ as possible.
HR/middle management/administrative drones being incredibly small "c' conservative is a pretty long standing practice. HR is there to protect the company, not the employee. What you're describing is not now, what's new is the social media component.
I really don't think you can talk about the phenomenon of HR/middle management being overly afraid of Twitter mobs without acknowledging that a whole lot of these same people/parts of companies are implicated in some pretty gross cover ups of awful behavior. Those NDAs that Weinstein made his victims sign, heck the NDAs Trump has made basically all his employees sign all had to be stamped with approval by some HR flack. Heck we're likely to see many more shoes drop in this JPMorgan/Epstein story.
The easy "c" conservative thing to do has always been "sweep under the rug and hope no one notices". With social media that's much more difficult and likely has meant some overreaction the other way (I saw a troubling racially insensitive Facebook post from 12 years ago and it should be taken into consideration when contemplating renewing your contract).
It's a bit wild how you took something you don't like and just labeled it conservative. Not everything falls in categories of liberal/conservative. I think your other points were quite valid. But just like Bari Weiss isn't a small "p" progressive for being a bit of an iconoclast, neither are HR groups conservative for taking the easy way out. Otherwise your describing almost every liberal org in the country as being conservative for taking the easy way out and having liberal beliefs.
When I see the phrase "small-c conservative", I assume that the comment refers to personal or institutional behavior. If I run a business the conservative approach to any scandal is to downplay it, buy off a victim behind closed doors, and sweep it under the rug. Not because it's politically conservative but because it's the most likely to avoid or mitigate major negative outcomes, which is the dictionary definition of conservative in this context.
Let me suggest an analogy from the opposite direction to illustrate my point. The Intercept had an article about progressive groups struggle to overcome internal group dynamics that distract from their core mission. You might say that was little "p" progressive because instead of sweeping it under the table, they are constantly trying to address issues. But I wouldn't call it progressive, because to me, its almost the exact same kind of "purity" search as what I see in "real conservatives" in kicking out "RINOs." If I came in and described the Freedom caucus as being "little p" progressive when they are trash talking RINOs about not adhering to the true vision of conservatism, you'd (correctly) say that was nonsense. I see the same thing here.
This is an extraordinarily common turn of phrase, used by a huge number of people I know.
My (politically conservative) father refers to his attitude on a bunch of personal issues as "small-c conservative," my right-leaning mom describes herself as a "conservative driver," my very, very liberal sister says she has a very "conservative teaching philosophy." I was talking with some similarly liberal/center-left friends and referred to my wife's and my saving habits as "maybe even overly conservative" literally last Monday evening without a scrap of misunderstanding, and another buddy who's pretty much a circa-2016 Bernie-head has said he's "very conservative" in managing his direct reports at work.
None of these uses have anything to do with or imply anything about politics.
I would agree with this! I think the difference is that you read his description the way he wrote it below "as risk averse" while I read it as sweep it under the rug. Those are very different things (to me) and I agree the first is "small c" conservative, I wouldn't say the latter is for the reasons I laid out above. Quite possible that I'm reading it wrong though.
I think you're misunderstanding my usage of small "c" conservative. This I guess is the problem of using the term conservative interchangeably as a political term and a term about human behavior. I was definitely going for the latter. If you want me to say that HR/administrative/middle management is very risk adverse, I'm fine with saying that instead.
Now that large "C" Conservatives aren't at all small "c" conservative and are instead trying to end small "l" liberal democracy, they get mad when you remind them of the origin of their name.
As I replied to David R., I didn't read it as "risk averse," I read it as "sweep it under the rug." To me those are different and the former is "small 'c' conservative," while the latter is not. Or perhaps I just misunderstood and read more into your comment than was there - that happens too.
In general, I'm definitely on the side of "let's not over punish kids for being kids". And yes I include college "kids" in this discourse. And I extend this to the criminal justice system as well. A 14 year old saying something extremely stupid, not well thought out and impulsive to another 14 year old is...very 14 year old. It's like adults don't seem to remember that teens will say intentionally needling things to each other (and on social media) just because they know they aren't supposed to. I'm thinking specifically that incident with the Frat bros from Oklahoma State who were caught singing a song that included the N word. Given (I think correctly) we've made uttering the N word something extremely touchy, some sort of punishment I feel like was warranted. But expulsion? Punishment did not fit the crime.
I'll say too, this is why I eye roll a bit about college kids trying to shut down or cancel free speech. It's not that I don't think this isn't a real thing. But college kids trying to be this sort of thing has been a thing since the 60s. I know, because I remember protesting the Iraq War. I did it because I truly believed it in it, but if I'm real with myself there was a bit of a rush to think I'm able to be a 60s protestor. There is a romanticism now attached to this period (somewhat correctly in my view) that I think informs a lot of this stuff. In other words, a lot of student protest trying to "cancel" speech is in part a bit cosplaying and looking for 15 minutes of fame. As Matt pointed out or sort noted noted in his post, the real issue is that too many college administrations overreacted in 2019/2020 and seem to be self-correcting and trying not to bow to a "Heckler's veto".
Part of this seems to be the growing resistance to vulnerability. Vulnerability is risk and risk is dangerous. When the social media ecosystem overweights risk for everything for clicks you get a feedback loop where people are on hyper alert for “toxic” behavior that they need to separate themselves from or risk bing challenged or hurt.
I think this is also why relationships are suffering from friendships to romantic relationships. People are encouraged to prioritize “mental health” over “toxicity”. While both of these things are important, I think they have become politically and socially coded to an almost farcical extreme.
I don’t have any solutions here but it’s not a good situation we find ourselves in at the moment.
As someone who participated in a few of the 60s protest against the Vietnam war, I'd say you deserve more credit for protesting the Iraq war. One, the latter was a lot more popular than the Vietnam war (especially later on). Two, unlike the 60s kids, you weren't at risk of being drafted and going over there yourself. Once the draft ended, it's amazing how much the protests against Vietnam dried up.
To be fair, the war itself was kind of winding down as the draft was winding down...if it was simply the prospect of getting drafted that motivated opposition to war, you’d think there’d have been a lot more protests against WWII and Korea.
When someone can be selective, they'll nitpick. Right now the feds are loosening the rules on past drug use to fill positions. A decade ago it seemed like you needed a degree to work as a barista but that's changed.
For the most part it's just not going to be worth scouring someone's entire social media history* (even if AI made it possible), especially if it makes your job harder.
I'm curious about "middle management/hr/dei/administrative drones" in the private sector. They are made out to be incredibly harmful, why are they not either getting removed or seeing their companies out-competed by rivals who don't have these practices...perhaps something to do with monopoly power, where these folks protect some of America's hyper-profitable corporations from greater regulatory scrutiny?
Looking at say, social media companies, regulatory appeasement has clearly been a major factor in their moderation policies. And then at the small business end of things you get stuff like the state harassing the shit out of that guy who doesn't want to bake cakes for gay weddings.
The challenge you get to particularly with the cake thing, is that you really do start intersecting with civil rights law. There's a legitimate corporate need to police discrimination. The problem is that basically all of the incentives and the academic ideology of the people in the HR industry tilt the scales towards these incredibly vast, all encompassing interpretations of what might be discriminatory, with almost no regard for the value of maintaining a wide range of acceptable thought.
For most f500 companies I’m familiar with, they are mostly a checkbox in terms of compliance. They run internal trainings that are annoying similar to things like security training to not click on links in suspicious emails. They might get involved in general hiring practices and the like, but on average are just overhead on the side. They get to produce reports and track metrics and the company maybe behaves slightly more inclusively on the margin (probably a good thing) but doesn’t usually substantially change anything. There are outliers, but from what I gather pretty much everyone goes about doing their own thing unless there is a top-down managment incentive.
I don't know if it's monopoly power as much as really high margins. You don't hear about any of this stuff coming from grocery stores. Or I haven't. High margins allow bad managers to hide.
HR and DEI at most large private firms are pretty economically rational as regulatory compliance and reputation management measures. Most companies want to avoid anti-discrimination lawsuits and maintain a public image that their customers and employees (weighted by how much they care about particular issues) like.
The higher your company’s visibility is, the more you’ll care about reputational issues; the higher your average employee comp and profits, the higher the potential payouts from lawsuits are. Overall, the size and activeness of HR and DEI functions tends to scale with those variables.
Younger folks seem to value it? My impression is they like to feel like "something" is being done with no real concern for what that something is.
But you actually just gave me an idea - I'm going to gently suggest disbanding our (rather redundant) departmental-level DEI committee (started in summer 2020, of course) and see how a few people respond.
That’s an interesting but NB that’s not what I was actually talking about. Faculty-led dei is one thing, full-time job bureaucracy quite another. Suggest to your colleagues that maybe your university doesn’t need 40-80* full time DEI bureaucrats (all basically hired in the last five years), often being paid better than themselves, and see how they respond, esp if you suggest eg taking that serious amount of money and shifting it to scholarships for marginalized students ?
(*The 40-80 figure comes from university of Virginia, ymmv)
Oh yeah, I hear you - an audit showed we're spending something like $6m directly on DEI efforts. That being said, the Dean recently just defended it in a meeting as saying they've "only" hired one person at the college level to focus on DEI, so...no big deal? (Despite the fact if you multiply it over all the colleges and other units, it adds up!)
Oh, and the creation of the DEI committee wasn't faculty driven. Briefly, in summer 2020, a lot of bored grad students started having zoom meetings and decided a bunch of things needed to be changed. Funny though, once they could get back in the lab, their follow-through was pretty anemic and they left it to the faculty to do "something". I don't think any of us are particularly interested, and even the one faculty member who I thought was (and has been chairing the committee) said she doesn't want to do it anymore (whether she thinks it should still exist, I don't know yet).
Talked to a few people about winding down the DEI committee. Feedback I got included "wait, we still have that?", "it's probably time", and "it will look bad if we don't have one, but it doesn't have to meet very often". 😂
This just reads as a very solid argument for voting Ron DeSantis in the 2022 primary and general to improve the mental wellbeing of mostly liberal-leaning white collar professionals. Not the top reason I would give for that vote, but I understand that everyone has their own top issue.
This is basically every industry. Matt's whole point was that this "I am the victim" shit is basically identical to what the post-liberal people do with the directionality reversed, and about as poorly-rooted in evidence.
The ones that seem to come closest to actually being politically charged and terrible due to post-liberal leftist agitation are the legacy media and some very narrow bits of Silicon Valley, collectively employing a few hundred thousand people.
Every other sector is either relatively accepting to all, or way more likely to "cancel" you for being gay. Easily 90% of the workforce is employed in places where the people doing the cancelling at the NYT would immediately be fired and marched out of the office for trying anything similar.
It's important to remember that a huge fraction of the nat-right assholes peddling this vision of the world regard a world in which no one is getting canceled for being gay as an attack against themselves, lol.
Work in Finance as well. Agree that the more extremely left wing culture that (apparently) permeates non-profit world doesn't seem to extend to the Finance world. But the "cussing is frowned" upon comment? What are you talking about? Do you know how much swearing I've heard every day of my working life in finance; in the workplace and from clients? I'm honestly baffled to read this. I'll give the benefit of the doubt and say maybe you've worked for only one company and the culture of this company is very buttoned up and is run by some George HW Bush style leader, but this definitely is not the more common experience as far as I can tell.
I'm not sure that academia has these problems to anything like the extent we saw at the NYT over the last few years.
On that one, I think the conservatives have only themselves to blame; they've play-acted at being anti-intellectual since the end of Goldwater's campaign, been hostile to academia and even basic science, pushed their kids away from academic careers, and are now surprised that academics are almost all somewhere between centrist and outright leftist.
When it comes to "cancel culture" in universities, the student bodies are the heart of the problem but even there *most* schools are managing their idiocy well.
Even the legacy media and Silicon Valley seem to be fighting its way back from the brink and starting to out-maneuver the would-be cancellers these days.
I can share anecdotes and some datapoints after work, but it's almost certainly worse in top 100 academia than it is at the NYT, which employs Ross Douthat and does honest reporting most of the time.
Ehh, color me doubtful. The vast majority of the real issues of which I'm aware are coming from left coast state schools and dyed-in-the-wool lefty liberal arts colleges, at which half a percent of the population is educated.
Nonetheless, Texas, Florida and North Carolina are pushing laws to end tenure; insert boards of governors into curriculum development; ban faculty from asking about "politically relevant topics" in hiring and promotion; put faculty up for review by the state every four years; and submit research to the legislature for review.
Whatever the direction the causal relationships, the fact that professors tend to be left of center has been blown so far out of proportion by right-wing media that Republican lawmakers have decided to attack their state university systems (which are huge economic engines in those states) rather than let them be "woke". In fact, in Texas, the Lt. Governor literally said that "teaching CRT" will be grounds for termination under the new law.
Matt is, of course, right that the over-reaction to "cancel culture" is dumb, fear-based and untethered from reality. But fear of that over-reaction is is based in reality as Republicans increasingly feel justified in using state power to attack institutions that get on the wrong side of right-wing media.
In other words, it doesn't really matter how bad actual problems in actual organizations are. All that matters anymore is how vulnerable an organization is to political interference because, unlike social media campaigns, laws are enforceable.
What, did you think the US still has more than a teeny-weeny handful of genuine conservative politicians on the right side of the aisle?
In addition to social media sucking, the other major structural factor driving this insanity is gerrymandering. To end gerrymandering is to stop giving the 10% of the GOP electorate which is batshit insane structurally unbreakable control over the 70% of the party's politicians for whom the primary election is the only meaningful one.
The same is somewhat true on the left, but let's face it, the post-liberal left is a much smaller portion of the Democratic Party than the religious or reactionary right is of the GOP, and more effectively marginalized.
Unfortunately, now that social media and gerrymandering have unleashed these sorts of "muscular, pro-state power" reactionaries on us, I have no idea how to put them back in the box.
Maybe if we could muzzle the post-liberal left the center and center-left could win enough elections to put it to bed, or at least to enact a nationwide gerrymandering prohibition that would marginalize the worst offenders within their party, but that's very much a chicken-and-egg problem.
I would agree that university administrations sometimes let this stuff get out of control, but I would also suggest that perhaps the experience of attending Portland State has colored your perceptions as to how often that occurs?
A strong fish can swim upstream and clever blogger who can write 3,000 words of interesting prose a day has less to fear from cancellation than a journeyman at the New York Times.
Many highly intelligent, well credentialed people struggle and even fail early in their careers. The United States turns out 55,000 PhDs per year. They can’t all become professors, and an assistant professorship at the University of West Georgia is kind of meh. There inevitably must be a filtering process to determine which PhDs get the cool gigs and there is no ideologically unbiased way to determine whose social science dissertation was best.
Three out of four sociology PhDs will never get a tenure track job, and there aren’t many jobs in industry for sociologists. This creates overwhelming pressure to kiss up to the professors on hiring committees, thereby empowering group think. Early career selection doesn’t get much attention in the discourse. When Yglesias left Vox to escape group think, that was news. When a young PhD ends up working as a paralegal, that’s life.
From a pure career standpoint, I don’t think this reasoning holds up— there are big funding pools specifically allocated to support right or libertarian-leaning thought and, because of the academy’s political demographics, they’re much less competitive than funds for mainstream scholarship are. (Remember—most leftier academics also fail to get tenure).
I think the more relevant issue for most is wanting social and intellectual acceptance from their colleagues. Unfortunately, there’s not really a procedural shortcut for this— they need to actually do the work of convincing others that their thinking is a meaningful positive contribution.
honest question: how many sociology/anthropology/women’s studies PhDs work at the Heritage Foundation and Cato. From what I know, those places are much likelier to hire lawyers and economists.
To add yet more pushback. The problem of “cancel culture” doesn’t just affect the conservatives that might like to work at the heritage foundation. It also affect the far more numerous liberals and progressive (and conservatives!)who want to have the academic freedom to allow their research to take them where it will, ie who are academics/scholars/scientists first and opinionated citizens second!
Lastly, working in a think tank isn’t actually the same kind of job as being a professor. Many professors want to teach, and esp to have grad students etc. it’s not apples to apples. Moreover, those who complain of insufficient tolerance and constraint on the ability to pursue truth for its own sake in academia are hardly going to be happy working in an explicitly politicized/partisan “think tank”!
It seems that I might just be wrong about the relative scales here— thanks for the pushback.
(This seems like a good situation for the conservative influence buyers, though— if they’re not as supply constrained as I thought, they can pretty easily get more conservative scholarship and discourse by spending more.)
Creating postdoctoral fellowships or faculty positions where donors exercise at least some degree of control over hiring is actually quite possible, though— back when I was an undergrad, the Israel lobby set up a postdoc at my institution with the fairly clear purpose of opposing the influence of one faculty member in our history department. This isn’t enough to take over academia entirely— intellectuals have been a left-leaning group in the West since the 18th century for what are probably very hard to change reasons— but it does give rich conservatives a way to make sure their perspective is heard on campus. (This might also require some pipeline efforts to recruit grad students etc)
> Creating postdoctoral fellowships or faculty positions
I'm getting all sorts of great ideas from the comments today! We should reach out to local-area conservatives and say "worried about the liberalization of college campuses? Fund this fellowship to push back!" (only half joking! 😂)
P. 26 of this document seems to show that nearly every academic field ends up with at least about half of their PhDs employed in a tenure track position. That does sound high to me so I might be misreading some things. But it also says about 70% in post-secondary academic employment, and every field other than communications has a majority of their post-secondary academic employment on the tenure track.
That’s insane. Will have to go into later but it’s just so wildly radically different from my “lived experience” that it’s extremely hard for me to believe a priori. However I’ll read it later. I do hope it’s right but I’m extremely skeptical.
P.S it also doesn’t seem to square with the basic fact that in just about every university non tt instruvtors outnumber tt instructors. Sometimes many many times over!
the thing that jumps out is it’s just for “humanities” PhDs, and the n is only 5000 and change. That’s only 1/10 of all PhDs, so there can be funny business in who they included
Page 26 shows about 2/3 going in tenured/tenure-track positions, commensurate with other fields.
I agree, this goes against everything I had assumed! But the numbers all look legit at first read, so now I'd be curious to read anecdotes from anyone who's been on the humanities faculty job market.
I gave you one. I’ll add more. In my field last year there were , in all of North America, about 7-10 tt jobs (depending on your definition). Most had 200-250 applicants each. To simplify, let’s assume total over lap in the candidates and also go with the lower ball park of 200. Let’s also take the maximal figure of jobs, say 10, (btw this was considered a very *good* year in terms of number of openings so I’d add that this figure is again rather maximalist). it suggests 1 in 20 got a job *this year*. Again, this is the optimistic estimate. Of course some who didn’t this year will try again next year and some will succeed, but there will also be fresh competition from new PhDs…. At the end of the day this suggests to me ultimate success rate of maybe 10 or 15% at best (possibly far lower) but in any case nowhere near 50% or two thirds.
P.S.
Note that this estimate is of those phd who actually went on the job market and applied for those jobs. Many don’t even bother and at least some of them don’t try not because of lack of interest but because they are dismayed by the abysmal prospects.
I think page 26 is also looking at "early career people working in academia" while page 22 is about people who got their PhD in a given year. Those are slightly different pools (in particular, people who stick it out in academia will probably be counted for 10 years in the page 26 numbers, but people who "only" go two or three years adjuncting are counted less, while all are counted equally in the page 22 numbers).
Page 10 shows about 5000-6000 PhD graduates each year, while page 23 shows over 3000 academic job openings each year. There are ~175k faculty overall (page 28), suggesting a 1.7% turnover rate, which seems low if anything.
and many of those openings will go to laterals! if you were a well regarded student at an AAU university, there’s a good chance some third tier school will hire you. otherwise, hope you enjoy copy editing.
It is odd to write a newsletter on the topic of whether the power of cancel culture is overstated, and then only include examples of people who survived cancelation attempts.
In particular, every counterexample cited involves a senior person who was already established in their field. One of the most harmful effects of cancel culture is the impact it has on people just starting out. They do not have the option to start a substack to pay the bills. So they either fall in line, or choose a different profession.
That was exactly my thought as well - that Matt has skewed his case by not looking at examples of people who did not come through intact. Take, for example, the case of Richard Taylor (https://www.thefire.org/news/teaching-history-not-permitted-st-johns-bulldozes-academic-freedom-punishes-professor-posing). Isn't it legitimate for professors at university - especially those who do not have the protection of tenure - to be concerned about something similar happening to them? And Taylor is hardly a unique example, either - plenty of others out there.
I feel that unless Matt acknowledges that some people have suffered genuinely bad consequences because of this kind of left-wing censoriousness, then his arguments are really useless. He does kind of pay lip service to the possibility ("I don't think those fears are entirely unwarranted"), but the entire rhetoric of the piece is that Jennifer Doleac's and Bari Weiss's and Joe Rogan's ability to ride out criticism shows that there isn't much to worry about. But when the people of Heterodox Academy complain about the dangers and the chilling effect on discourse, they are not creating straw men: the dangers are real, the chilling effect is also real, and there are plenty of real-life examples like that of Taylor to prove it.
Taking everything into account, the fearmongers of Heterodox Academy and the like seem to have the better side of the argument than Matt does.
I feel like people who use that example always do so in order to decry rightwing actions will defending "cancel culture" from the left, as if the people who are worried about this are just a bunch of cranks who are upset they can't say awful things about transgender people without losing their jobs. But a lot of us are worried about the underlying principle itself, and are equally disgusted by what happened to Kaepernick as we are about what happens to individuals in academia who suffer consequences for not toeing the progressive line.
"But a lot of us are worried about the underlying principle itself, and are equally disgusted by...."
Cool! Then we're in agreement. Making people unhirable for their political views (when those views have no relation to the qualifications for the job) is wrong, no matter what those views may be.
"...people who use that example always do so in order to ... [defend] "cancel culture" from the left..."
Uh, nope! I think you may have overgeneralized with that "always".
I agree completely with you, and I'd go even farther, because "(when those views have no relation to the qualifications for the job)" is a big loophole I would remove. Everytime you hear about someone fired over their political views, there's always some weaselword statement from the company about how they were somehow the face of the company or they represent the company or something, and thus firing them for something they did on their own time is acceptable. But a quarterback is generally considered the face of the football team, and it was BS to fire Kapernick for anything not related to his performance as a quarterback, just like that guy who got fired from Apple for writing a book people didn't like.
I would add that in addition to the people who suffered bad consequences, it impacts the whole climate. The cancellation crowd does not need a 100% hit rate to achieve their goals.
The people at Heterodox Academy don't seem to complain about Ron DeSantis's attacks on academia in Florida. My concern is that a lot of people seem to want to make this about a specific political faction, and the impulse to censor is not necessarily linked to your view on the appropriate level of government involvement in the economy.
"Whatever the truth of these competing claims, a few lessons can be drawn from this incident." This is a remarkably milquetoast statement compared to what the Heterodox Academy says about the woke left. I don't think you can even begin to compare them.
So now we've moved on from "they don't complain about Ron DeSantis" to "they don't complain about Ron DeSantis in the way I would like them to" ...
Actually, Heterodox Academy is typically pretty measured in the language it uses about the "woke left" (horrible phrase) as well. How about this for complaints against both the right and the left with very similar language aimed at both sides?
St. John's University, not St. John's College by the way (had to click into the links/scroll a bit to get past The Fire's careless naming. Don't follow them, but if they're not aware of my alma mater, then their scope is too limited to understand academia.(!)
I think part of his point is that illustrating an article like this with examples of successful cancelations is like illustrating an article about how much safer flying is than driving with examples of famous plane crashes.
Maybe one takeaway is to encourage those who are big enough to survive to take the risks to protect the rest ( and to tell people who think they're not quite big enough to survive that they probably are?)
Matt is big enough to survive. But that survival took the form of leaving and going to a situation where he is a lone voice (plus Milan!) with no influence over an organization.
Weiss is trying to build something much larger which could have influence, as the Heterodox Academy is doing also. I wish them the best.
Yes. Firing a tenured professor still takes some oomph, thankfully. But simply not inviting them, not giving them grants and awards, etc, is much easier. And that can derail a career quite effectively. Certainly to the point where your job is much less enjoyable.
Thank you for the nuanced article. This is honestly my big beef with the Weisses and Rogans of the world. You can shout, "I'M BEING CANCELLED!!!1!1!!!" at the top of your lungs (online, that is) and you'll get a rush of supporters... and end up not losing your job or leveraging it into another high-paying one. These people are literally given a platform to broadcast their views in MSM outlets! That's not cancellation!
I guess for the rest of us who lean left and have questions about these sorts of hot button topics, it really comes down to (a) arguing in good faith (and while MY almost always does even when I disagree with him, there are plenty of others in this space who do not) and (b) recognizing that the Christopher Rufos of the world are leveraging all of this to ACTUALLY CANCEL left wing thinkers by, you know, getting them fired or taking over a left wing college and installing their cronies. It's why I can't take Bari Weiss seriously... she got her start by demanding professors get fired by taking a pro-Palestine stance!
I always thought Scott Alexanders take on this was pretty good(https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/23/can-things-be-both-popular-and-silenced/). He makes many points but I think some of the relevant claims are that celebrities who have controversial stances may do well and gather support but that doesn't mean your average citizen with average rhetorical abilities can express the same opinions and not suffer real consequences or reputational harm. And also, every popular dissident movement right or left gets suppressed. It wouldn't get suppressed if it wasn't popular. Scott Alexander mentions Gandhi and various labor movements. What you care about when trying to determine whether a view is (in his terms) silenced is not the absolute number of people who support a position but the number who publicly support it relative to the number who support it but refuse to publicly admit it.
Someone above mentioned their aunt or grandma complaining about cancel culture and how she can't say things anymore and the commenter being kind of skeptical that this was a real problem for her in her day-to-day life. I started writing about local government in my suburb of Milwaukee last year and one of the things I did not expect to write about as much as I do is education. The last two school board elections have been really contentious. I feel like I'm getting a ground-level view of a community polarizing itself in real time. And part of the dynamic (not the whole dynamic) is that people who offer what I think is pretty milquetoast pushback against certain (I'll say progressive) policies are pretty quickly tarred on social media as white supremacists, extremists, or racists (honestly by a relative few very left-leaning people).
And you talk to these people, and they are pretty normal engineers, fathers of three, in the community for 20 years, whatever. And so what happens is a guy like that runs for the school board, gets tarred, worries that his employment might be in danger if there's a bunch of things on the internet calling him a racist, and so the next time he doesn't run. And not only does he refuse to run, but all the people who agree with him, or worry about the state of the school district, and have respectable, semi-high status jobs see that happen and they refuse to run too or even speak out. And so the next cycle people run who oppose some of these policies and they are also pretty normal people but are a little less articulate and have just marginally less to lose or are dispositionally less agreeable and unworried by the attacks. And they get tarred. And this scares off them and a bunch of other people, and the next time maybe the only people you get to run are even more unhinged or extreme.
I was aware that this dynamic existed in the abstract but watching it play out is both interesting and sad to behold. It's not so much that everyday people are getting cancelled left and right it's that they're cancelling themselves.
100% this. This is absolutely the more important issue and indeed, good people are being driven away from local roles that allow our communities to function.
I personally wouldn't run for school board for these reasons, although I'd be far less concerned about left wing activists (in my experience, only the most extreme will fail to respond to reasonable arguments, and those people can be ignored) than right wingers (who may legitimately have been radicalized by Fox News or worse and may come to your house with a weapon).
Not where I live, which is both liberal and has comparatively few gun owners, but there are places where I would be legit afraid to run as a liberal for public office lest someone show up at my door with a gun, try and harm family members or pets, or vandalize/destroy my property.
I'm not a huge Bari Weiss fan, but anyone bringing up her college protest activities makes me much less inclined to engage with anything else they say.
I do the same when anyone brings up their opponent's prior support for the Iraq war, old stance on gay marriage, or pretty much any other wrong-think or bad actions from the past. I don't have the energy or inclination to sort out the truth behind whatever past transgression you're using to distract from the issue at hand and it annoys me that you did that.
Also, I don't care if you think someone is a hypocrite or is arguing in bad faith. None of us are any good at nailing down intent and motivation and trying to do so is a fool's errand.
So while I agree with a lot of what you've posted here, you did a great job of alienating me by throwing in gratuitous ad hominem and talk about bad faith. Just tell me what you think is wrong with what they said or did (like you did with Chris Rufo).
I'm not sure my criticism of Bari Weiss should be considered "ad hominem." But if you think critiquing stances taken years ago that have never been apologized for is unfair (particularly when the behavior relates to trying to get someone fired for their speech, something Weiss claims to be against), then I'd point to her current spotlight on one unhappy parent making claims about trans care in Missouri in the face of mountains of evidence and testimony provided by dozens of parents, doctors, and nurses. There are legitimate discussions to have about trans care, but her "investigating" barely scratched the surface of a pretty complex issue and merely fanned the flames of the culture war.
I wouldn't say the criticism is unfair, just that it isn't productive and that for me it somewhat poisons the rest of your argument.
I'm advocating for more substantive criticism around the actual point of disagreement and less focus on distractions like prior bad acts and general attacks on character. While I'm human and have to constantly fight this tendency in myself, your comment about Weiss somewhat triggered me because I find it so annoying when I'm following an interesting discussion. The "this person is terrible because of a, b, and c" just adds clutter and a bunch of gratuitous negative energy. For me it's waste heat with no light.
My view is that we've gotten rusty at trying to understand each other and at the art of persuasion and we'd be better off if we focused more on those things rather than signaling support for our team or clawing at the integrity of people who disagree with us.
I guess where I would disagree is, I can't think of a reasonable argument Weiss has made in good faith, and therefore it's hard for me to consider her someone worthy of engaging with, except that she continues to have a large platform.
Maybe as a counter example, I'd offer up Freddie DeBoer. I find a lot of his behavior distasteful (harassing people in comment sections who disagree with him, particularly women) and his writing style is fairly tedious. But occasionally someone in these comments links to one of his pieces, and even when I disagree, his arguments are at least nuanced and have a foundation in evidence. Point is, I don't dismiss his arguments simply because he comes across as arrogant, whereas Weiss (and others) make their arrogance central to their entire persona, and mere disagreement with them equates to silencing. Which is laughable and should be treated as such.
I subscribe to DeBoer's free substack and I often find his writing interesting, but I've never checked out his comments section. His openness about his mental health struggles probably makes me more inclined to cut him slack on some of his distasteful behavior. Perhaps more than I should.
With Weiss, I just don't understand how you can feel so confident claiming she always argues in bad faith. Doesn't that require you to see inside her head? It sounds like you strongly disagree with her political views and feel she's hypocritical about free speech. Fair enough. I'm not making a case that you must or even should engage with her or her arguments. Also, I too find the "I'm being silenced" bit laughable and try to ignore it. It's just more annoying noise.
I'm only suggesting that you'd be more persuasive if you avoided the character attacks, tuned out the noise, and kept the focus on the specific things you disagree with (like you did with your point on the J.K. Rowling series).
You’re right some people have leveraged being canceled into a career. No doubt that is true. But for every one of those they are many examples of people’s lives being maliciously destroyed over bullshit. You make not contact with that reality.
Yes Chris Rufo is one that has turned this into a career for himself and is now a political activist. Kinda like Nicole Hannah Jones. But don’t conflate success using the political process as canceling. RDS won an election by a wide margin. He then has political power. A Governor removing members of the opposite party and inserting the own peeps is just how things work. The arrogance of the left is crazy. Oh we got our ass kicked in the election but we expect all of our people to keep their posts.
Perhaps it would be better to call it a "culture of dishonesty", rather than cancel culture.
The same kind of theocratic culture of dishonesty, prioritizing "reading the room" and "allyship", as led those in the Catholic Church who knew better to hold their tongue rather than speak up about the unacknowledged sex abuse scandal, or that led calcified Brezhnev era Soviet nomenklatura to hold their tongue about the obvious need to reform the parts of the system and abandon parts of the ideology that weren't working, etc, etc.
I think this is kind of right, but I think it's important to take seriously that the dishonest folks might ALSO be right. The Soviet system was about to collapse. The abuse revelations have been devastating to the Catholic Church, costing them a ton of money and a ton of parishioners--it might not be collapsing, but it is certainly in long-term decline.
That doesn't make it right; people should live their lives with honesty and face challenges head on. But the hard truth is that you might be part of a system that is on the verge of failing, and the truth might be the last push that collapses the rotten structure around you. It's hard to blame people for correctly intuiting that being inside a building while it collapses is not very fun.
Yes, I think closing ranks like that and being unwilling to speak honestly in a self-critical is often a dynamic that happens in groups or institutions that, rightly feels embattled and under attack, and they think they are doing what's necessary to protect the institution or cause they support by stifling even valid criticism. The Catholic Church, from increasingly secularization and declining membership. The Soviet Union, under stranglimg sanctions from the West for most of its existence. Progressives, because by their very nature progressive causes are out at the vanguard, opposed by many who like things the way they are and oppose change..... But dishonesty backfires and corrodes the cause or institution from within.
Just a quick note on this article: I think it is right on, but I think an important way to understand the phenomenon is kind of baked in, unnoticed, to the discussion of economics (and the mention of sociology and psychology).
Cancel culture is a little bit of truth and a lot of advertising bombast, and you find that across a lot of disciplines and situations. But a lot of academic work--across all disciplines, honestly, but public-facing work, especially--is subject to this kind of critique because the work itself very often is a little bit of highly-questionable truth wrapped in a ton of bombast. This burst into public view a bit more with the replication crisis, but the truth is that you see it everywhere.
I don't know how you solve this problem, because it is deeply, deeply baked into the incentive structure of academia at ten different levels. People need "significant" research to get published. They need to get published to get, and keep, their jobs. But people also want to feel like they are doing things of real importance in the world, and sadly most people just don't feel like teaching is an activity of real social significance (even though I would argue that it is the most socially significant thing that a lot of academics do, and really valuable) because we have tended to devalue that activity for a variety of cultural and ideological and market reasons. Also, it feels fun to have your work cited in the press or discussed in public. To make that happen, you have to really (over)sell the significance of your conclusions.
I strongly suspect that there is also an underlying problem, which is just that we, as humans, want to Know Things with more empirical certainty or rigor than is actually possible in the infinitely complex system that is reality. A lot of "empirical" research, when you really scratch it, is only a step or two better than having a system for figuring out roulette wheels. That doesn't make it worthless, and you really CAN, in some circumstances, figure out roulette wheels. Humans are cool that way. But MOST of the guys claiming they have figured out roulette wheels at your local casino are just losing a lot of money. Humility is your friend, here.
But bottom line is that I think the impulse to oversell what you can "know" based on research like that done by Doleac and other academics in these types of policy spaces creates simultaneously a huge incentive to fight bitterly over the conclusions AND plenty of fodder for the battle, because you can just argue until the cows come home over methods when you are actually talking about very tiny effect sizes or high-complexity systems where you can always add or subtract another variable to change the conclusions or the analysis.
It's research as theology, with a similar outcome, and I'm not sure how you solve the problem, honestly, because incentives are a thing, but it is a problem that we are really struggling with as a society.
JCW, do you think it’s weird that you just wrote (as do many of us), what amounts to a one or two page essay just for fun?
I got my bachelors degree, mostly online because I was in the military. I got to see my fellow students writing, and it was atrocious.
But here you are throwing together several paragraphs that clearly gets across a point, probably while you were eating breakfast.
Sorry, I know it was off target… But it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. People who comment on slow boring tend to be excellent writers and communicators. Maybe this is normal for white collar people, but I live and work in a blue collar world. Our engineers struggle with simple technical writing sometimes.
I have a Ph.D. in a writing-intensive discipline, so I'm definitely a weirdo who likes to write. I think this fits, interestingly, with being a Slow Boring reader. I basically get all my news through reading and a very few podcasts because I hate hate hate TV news and YouTube, et al, with a passion. It feels way too slow and non-dense for me.
OMG dude. I feel the exact same way. Watching news on TV is torture. I can digest multiple in depth articles in the same time it takes to watch 30-minutes of TV news which barely skirts the surface of any issue.
You might not be an outlier in your world, but my side hobby of reading and commenting is certainly extremely rare in mine.
Ok, but how does this explain recent trends? The sense that the disocurse in general and academia in particular is far less tolerant and more fearful than two decades ago? Do you suggests that it’s not? That “cancel culture” was always there (or not there) to the same extent, or do you acknowledge a likely change? If the latter, how to explain it? “Publish or perish” has been around for 50 years or more, far predating the “cancel culture” crisis of the last decade. What gives ?
I think the key thing is that *different* things now cause people to be ostracized than in the past. 30 years ago it was considered a scandal for a public facing person to be gay, for example.
Not in academia, it wasn’t… more seriously though- the ostracizing of gays was really really bad. I don’t accept the defeatist attitude that we must be resign to some form of unjust and harmful oppression in our society, and that the best we can hope for is for the small blanket being shifting to and fro. Society *has* become better and can become better still, and we should aim for no less.
I mean, it seems pretty unavoidable that if gay people stop being ostracized and become accepted, then homophobes will start to become ostracized. It’s hard to see how you can be fully accepting and supportive of both a group and people who hate that group.
False equivalence. Opposing intolerance isn’t intolerant, quite the contrary. However what OP seems to me to be saying is that we should expect a more or less static level of genuine intolerance/oppression in our society merely with the target shifting. I disagree. We have become an overall more tolerant and open society and can and should become more tolerant still. If there has been setback or regression in certain areas we should fight vigorously to rectify it, not be resigned to accept it as inevitable.
I agree about tolerance, but having grown up in a conservative religious community (evangelical Christian), I can say with confidence that you are wrong about this being a false equivalence.
From the standpoint of the people whose previous intolerance was condoned by society, the shift to opposing intolerance is absolutely, 100% perceived as a shift of intolerance in their direction. They understand--correctly--that if I say, "intolerance of gay people is a 'bad' thing that we should endeavor to end in our society," that I am saying that THEY engage in bad behavior and that my goal is to CHANGE their behavior, or at least to eliminate it through attrition. Your whole thing of "we are more tolerant today and should endeavor to become even more tolerant tomorrow" is a direct attack. After all, it logically follows that they 1) are "wrong," and maybe even "bad," in their intolerance and 2) should have less social / cultural / political power tomorrow than they have today.
It's never enough to say, "listen, I'm very tolerant, and I welcome everyone, so as long as you go practice your ugly bigotry over in the corner and not hurt anyone else, we're all good here. You are free to eat sh!t and die as you please, so long as you do not bother anyone else." People aren't stupid. They correctly understand that following those instructions will hasten the demise of their own movement.
Don't get me wrong: I welcome that demise. But it's silly to act like there are no stakes here.
I think there are a couple of issues. I am about to dash off and take a midterm, but I'll try to comment later. In general, though, I think that it has to do with the combination of two factors: relative visibility for academics is up (it's easier to spread your ideas), but competition for the jobs is also way up (because relative decline in birth rates is squeezing college undergraduate population even as relative increase in working lifetime means that people hang in the jobs for longer before retirement).
TBH, I take issue with the premise: I don't think you can reasonably argue that the discourse in general and academia in particular is less tolerant today and more fearful than two decades ago. Even a cursory Mark 1 Eyeball screen of the faculty lists at every institution I have attended or worked at suggests that it was much easier twenty years ago to flatly discriminate against disfavored groups in any particular institution than it is today. I base this on the simple observation that the older faculty in departments tend, on average, to be much more homogenous than the newer faculty.
In some sense, honestly, I think this explains some of the perception of rising intolerance. People are in the room to b!tch today who twenty years ago simply could not do that because they literally were not in the conversation to begin with. I don't think that's the whole story, but I think it is a significant part of it.
Addendum edit: I think "the room" has more people both because of social media and because of gains in hiring diversity. And I think it also conforms to my earlier comment, which is that in some sense "the room" has simultaneously expanded (social media) AND shrunk (shrinking undergrad enrollment and job pool) at more or less the precise moment, producing some predictably ugly outcomes in line with the incentives you would predict under those circumstances.
I also find it interesting how this rhetoric is now so common among people who have absolutely zero public profile. Not to get all my-uncle-at-Thanksgiving, but my aunt was recently complaining about all the things she's not "allowed" to say. I pushed back a little on what she meant by that - she owns her own business, she's not online at all, her social circle is pretty aligned with her politically. Who exactly is not allowing her to say things? Basically what she conceded she means is her kids get mad at her (and I should be clear, they still have a close relationship and see her often). But there's this broader language out there about cancellation that allows her to put an age-old phenomenon of kids disagreeing with their parents politically in this language of persecution and fear.
I am not a psychologist so take this with a grain of salt, but grievance politics seem pretty seductive regardless of political affiliation. People seem to sleep better at night thinking they're targets than to think they do any targeting themselves.
100%. I see it in all kinds of areas of life too. People like to complain that their lives/jobs/relationships/etc. are all awful, as if it's some kind of competition of badness. When I hang out in my social circle, it's almost like everyone is working extremely hard to prove that THEIR job is the one that sucks the most or that THEIR struggle is the greatest. And this is amongst incredibly successful young professionals (competing or achieving partner at large law firms, etc.) who are actively choosing to have these jobs that require all these hours, and whose resumes mean that they could incredibly easily find other jobs that don't come with all downsides that they're currently competing to prove are so oppressive. I just find it bizarre how people in America in 2023 can spend so much time acting like life is so terrible and struggle so mightily to recognize that we're living at inarguably the greatest time to exist in the history of humanity. It's an odd quirk of human psychology.
My facebook feed is full of college acquaintances with two working parents with six figure jobs, massive exurban houses, and one kid complaining about how torturous and awful being a parent is. Its wild watching people who have by an metric "won" the American Dream publicly beg for pity.
You couldn't get me to publicly complain about my kids at gunpoint.
And then people wonder why so many women want to forego having kids! If you give the impression that having kids is a big life-ruining bummer, then you don’t get to be surprised Pikachu when the general reaction is “not for me, thanks!”
I’m childfree, but I chose to be childfree long before social media was a gleam in Zuck’s eye, and for personal reasons. I don’t get people who actually plan to have kids, and want to have kids, and then complain that they are miserable because they got what they wanted. (Sometimes it’s because the child is difficult or they have a spouse who is not helpful, but other times I think they just like to complain.)
I wonder how the kids feel knowing that they are a millstone around their parents’ necks? It can’t be good for the ol’ self esteem.
Absolutely. My wife and I had our first kid early relative to our social cohort of college educated urban libs, so I luckily missed seeing all that when we decided to start trying, otherwise it might have scared me off of it for a while!
And the bummer is that you can't really counter those posts without coming across like an asshole. If you talk about how great having kids is, it gets perceived as bragging to people who struggle with infertility, or a value judgement against childfree people, or you come off like that freak "pro-natalist" couple that have invaded my twitter feed.
I wish there was a way to tell people that contrary to the popular posts you may see about "mommy needs more wine because my uncontrollable little shits have ruined my life", actually having kids is pretty great if it's something you may want to do, especially if you're in a double income, high-ish earning and stable household.
I think having money and stability - as well as both partners being “all in” - are important to having a happy family. Not in a “the poors should not have kids” sense but “when you are exhausted, it can make all the difference to be able to get DoorDash rather than have to cook from scratch” or “Being able to pay for a dog walker means we can keep our dog rather than rehome him” sense. Being able to throw at least some money at problems helps. As does knowing you can afford to pay for a decent daycare rather than some unlicensed under-the-table one. And the stable relationship goes without saying.
A lot of the instances where mommy really DOES need more wine because she truly IS miserable come from some combination of threadbare finances, an absent or unsupportive partner, no family or other outside help (aka “village”) whatsoever, not treating mental health issues before having that kid, and, unfortunately, having a very high-needs child.
The clear majority of child-related posts that I see are from people showing off how cute their kids are, or describing cute things they said or did. Only a little bit about complaining. That includes a lot of professionals, but not all. I guess we're just in different subcultures.
It's the modern American version of the hair shirt. Your suffering sanctifies you, justifies your current rewards, and ensures your future entrance into the holy kingdom.
I'm so glad that I've aged out of/self-selected out of social circles like this. Being performatively miserable is exhausting!
As Ezra says: "Everyone is the victim of their own story"
Truly! Just look at the average lawn now compared to the most expensive of lawns in the 1700s. The wealth disparity will start to look very obvious.
"In the future, everyone will be a victim for 15 minutes."
Ok that made me laugh
So it will be cut down to 15 minutes instead of all the time?
if only we added Nietszsche to the high school curriculum, normies could reject slave morality and channel their inner ubermensh. your mileage may vary.
IMHO, high school curricula don't have enough philosophy, period.
For sure. Everyone is constantly looking for reasons why they good and valuable. Left, right and everything in between. Grievance politics signals all your problems are external, not internal.
I think on the right especially, there is a massive reluctance to face up to policy failures like the Bush Doctrine, wholesale opposition to Obamacare, over reliance on supply side ideology. Politicians on the right for the most part don’t want to change their actual policy positions, so focusing on cancel culture and grievance politics becomes appealing. Its not failed policy, its your domestic political partners ruining everything. What is more problematic is that in our free society, there is precious little acceptable use of government power to dominate domestic opponents or force changes in culture. So once right wingers win on culture war campaigns, their base expects them to then dominate factions within the USA. And we get things like Jan 6 and retribution against Disney for legitimate policy dissent
A lot of Boomers and older people in general think that their ideas should be given great deference by younger people. A lot of younger people disagree. It doesn't help the Boomer case that they are quite wealthy and yet seem (as an aggregate) to be miserly and ungracious towards their own children.
Do you have any reason to believe the latter? Pretty much every Boomer parent I know seems pretty generous with their (adult) children, within reason.
I’m not sure how to assess that statement in the interpersonal sense, but it is true that Boomers (on aggregate) have consistently voted for baskets of policy preferences that enhanced their own wealth while leaving their children worse off (capital gains and income tax cuts, erroneously austere response to 2008 financial crisis, defunding public universities, NIMBY opposition to home and transit construction, infrastructure underinvestment, refusing to use state power to bring healthcare costs to heel, dilatory response to rising CO2 emissions, etc).
My guess is that the average Boomer parent is reasonably generous toward their children in the ordinary interpersonal sense but voted for policies that were bad for their material interests without fully understanding that that’s what they were doing.
There were no referenda on these in which Boomers could state their explicit preference, so we can't say for sure that Boomers support capital gains and income tax cuts etc.
What we do know is that the Boomer generation voted almost 50/50 Biden vs Trump (maybe a tad bit more for Trump), so when we claim things like "Boomers support X" we're at most about half right, because half of Boomers likely support "not X."
The Boomers are more Republican than their parents and their children.
Younger generations tend to identify more as "independent" than older ones, though I really have no idea what that means. Putting the independents aside, we see these breakdowns for %R/%D (with % independent in parentheses):
Gen X: 30%/27% (44%)
Boomer: 35%/32% (33%)
Silent: 39%/35% (26%)
In terms of actual party identification, there's not really a significant difference among these generations, basically a three percentage point advantage to the Republicans. Millenials and Gen Z do tilt more Democratic though (yay!) but are 52% "independent."
I suspect the Boomers were just as Democratic/liberal as the Millenials/Gen Z when they were that age. Getting somewhat more conservative when you get older, though, is not really a feature of the Boomer generation per se.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/319068/party-identification-in-the-united-states-by-generation/
I was referring to an interpersonal sense. I see what you mean in the aggregate, but a) pinning all of that on Boomers feels a bit overly simplistic, and b) employing the phrase "miserly and ungracious" in a political sense feels so tangential as to be functionally meaningless. That's just not how people think about politics.
Re: point a-- to be clear, #NotAllBoomers, etc
Re: point b-- I find your response here interesting, because it feels perfectly natural to me to think about politics in those terms. (Indeed, I would predict that a Likert personality scale measuring general miserliness and ungraciousness-- especially toward those outside one's immediate ingroup-- would strongly correlate with preferences for the policies I listed above. Indeed dark triad personality trait assessments and low honesty-humility factor scores, which capture similar psychometric variables, have been found to pretty strongly correlate with conservative beliefs.)
Genuinely curious about where that difference in intuitions comes from.
(Also, researchers found these assessments way back in 2010. Would suspect that the rise of Trump-- who practices a sort of identity politics for assholes-- just further intensified the relevant set of correlations. Politics is personality writ large.)
Do boomers think their ideas should be given deference to a greater degree than recent college graduates do? Hard to settle empirically and probably a lot of variation among individuals.
Yeah, it seems to me that EVERYONE wants deference to their views. If anything, Boomers are more accustomed to live-and-let-live approach. My boomer parents have friends and associates across the political spectrum in a way that would be very unusual for my social set.
The thing about Boomers is that there's a lot of 'em. They've been part of the dominant cultural/economic/political force their whole lives, they certainly aren't used to not being given deference.
Generally, the rule was you give some deference to your elders because they've been through stuff you haven't. That's deference though, not obedience.
Not sure when we moved to generation cohorts though. That seems weird.
A lot of Boomers seem to feel like they like hierarchical structures and respect for the old now that they are old, but probably didn't show it as much when they were young.
I've heard it said that the reputation for Boomers being a "never trust authority" generation was set by a few long-haired outliers and that actually the cohort was as well-behaved as any other.
Most boomers were boring suburbanites like everyone else. Even the ones who were or are alleged “hippies turned conservative yuppies” might have been “hippies” in the sense that they grew out their hair, wore paisley velvet pants, and saw Jefferson Airplane live while smoking a joint. Hardly indicative of core beliefs.
I’d agree with this for myself. I regularly “self-censor” on Twitter and real life about trans issues. I consider myself extremely supportive of important rights, like workplace protections, etc. But as a cis woman, I do not want to share a locker room with someone who has a penis. I feel strongly about this, and I also don’t think it’s important enough to trans rights that it should be a front-and-center issue.
But the thing is, I am totally free to express these opinions anywhere. I choose not to, not because I fear for my job, but because I think it would hurt some people’s feelings and they might decide not to be friends with me anymore. Which of course, would also be their right. They aren’t obligated to respect my opinions. If they came out as Trump supporters, I would probably stop being friends with them.
"I choose not to…because I think it would hurt some people’s feelings and they might decide not to be friends with me anymore.... If they came out as Trump supporters, I would probably stop being friends with them. "
Yikes! Can I encourage you, maybe, to not make your extension of friendship so conditional on political views?
You can do whatever you want, but the reality is you have standards for your friendship, even if they are different from mine. That’s my whole point. I spend a significant amount of my free time and money on Democratic causes, and that’s only because of Trump. This is a core value for me, and completely my prerogative. I chose only to associate myself with knitters, that would be valid as well.
I live in one of the bluest areas of the country. Maybe if I didn’t, I would have more conservative friends, and the choice would be more difficult. But happily for me, it’s not.
It's weird to think of disagreement as a *skill*, but... maybe it kind of is?
It absolutely is. The ability to constructively disagree, hold your own ideas up to criticism, dispassionately argue from different sides, etc. etc. are 100% trainable skills we need to do vastly more to cultivate. Instead, in our zero-tolerance, anti-fighting/anti-bullying/conflict averse/maximum fragility paradigm, the only conflict resolution skill we teach is how to make appeals to authority.
You wrote: "some Gen Z and younger Millennial folks think anyone who disagrees with them is truly evil."
As a boomer, I was taught: "Do not blame on evil intent that which is more likely due to mere ignorance or incompetence."
Hanlon's razor
Don't forget how often disagreement was physical in the past. It's a net benefit that strong emotions are now more often left in the verbal domain (though the are plenty of people who lament it).
I think we also more charitable to our past selves since we understood our intentions, something we can't afford to others. Our lashing out at our parents probably looked pretty bad from the outside.
I'm not sure if 2000s family political fights were less psychotic than the late 2010s, but they were definitely less all-encompassing. Most of all, the word I'd use to describe the latter is "exhausting". Wake up every morning, pick up your Dread Screen to scroll some doom and see what latest stupid shit we needed to start paying attention to. Every damn day for years and years.
Oh my gosh yes. When Biden won, or at least when he was inaugurated, I made a conscious decision to not start (and continue) my day paying attention to what the latest outrage was --- and I'm much happier and saner for it.
I have a couple relatives who just kept on keeping on, and their constant sense of urgency and angst about every bad act by every batshit crazy right winger everywhere is just dragging on them.
On the other side, my wife's parents are the only close family I have truly on the other side of the political spectrum, and they too can't seem to turn the volume down. It has really had a negative affect on our relationship because my wife and I just don't want to engage with it
For the love of God, could we ever considering ending our habit of such absurd over-emphasis on these generational labels as if they explain anything? All things equal, a Millennial born in 1992 is going to have more in common with an early Gen Z person than they are with a fellow millennial born in 1982 (three years vs. ten years). And yet the shorthand society uses to describe age cohorts would imply otherwise. I get that shared generational experiences count for something. Probably a lot! But the particular way we've decided to slice and dice these generations is meaninglessly vague and often flat out innaccurate. They're just too broad. We'd be better of saying "Us early 80s babies blah blah blah" or "We late 60s babies blah blah blah." These synthetic generation boundaries (Boomer, Xer, Millennial, etc) are a sloppy intellectual scam for the vast majority of discussions.
Rant over.
Strauss and Howe have a lot to answer for.
You just made me google. Damn. Even more made-out-of-whole-cloth than I realized.
Took the words right out of my mouth. I swear every time I see someone like Michael Wilbon yell about "Millennials", my first thought is "old man yells at a cloud".
Super like
I feel like there's two parallel phenomenon involved here, there's the kind of direct, whipped up outrage people like Matt experience regularly on Twitter that I think this article is right on about. Twitter is not really life. 99.9% of the time, online outrage can simply be ignored as the impotent whining of an overamplified minority.
The second version is more pernicious. This is the one where your personal ability to disregard bad faith criticism is secondary to the whims of the middle management/hr/dei/administrative drones that have real power over your employment prospects. A growing subset of corporate, government and non-profit institutions maintain fully ideologically captured layers of bureaucracy who's entire purpose seems to be to sheild the entity from criticism on Twitter. Some of these people are academically inflected true believers, a larger subset are simply cowards looking for easy answers, but none have the incentive to stand up for an individual's attempts at boldness.
Most people can't make more money by ditching the HR department and moving to substack
I don’t know I think the old fashioned don’t talk about politics, sex, money or religion in mixed company shields people from this incredibly well. I’m sort of woke and I don’t know many people who share my convictions about a lot of stuff and they have no problem keeping a job and privately referring to kids as retards or saying trans people have fear of better options.
I work in teaching and it seems to me we’re much more vulnerable to attack from the right than the left. Even before the current round of culture war stuff we heard how parents will scour your social media for drinking or swimsuit pictures and how these private expressions of self off hours are harmful to youths for uhhh reasons.
Yes, the phenomenon where people live in fear for their careers if they fail to aggressively sanitize their private life as it appears on social media is a seriously problematic manifestation of "cancel culture"/HR brain.
I'm inclined to wonder, though, of perhaps, in order to re-establish and once again have the benefits of a public national mass culture, with broad consensus and more unity on many issues like we have in the pre-internet mass media days that we haven't seen since the 90s, we need to stuff the social media genie back in its bottle a bit, and and find a way to articulate and enforce public consensus on big issues, as was done then (there was still plenty of alternative culture, it just wasn't always in everyone else's face). Things seemed to work better that way, than in our current excessively fragmented culture -- the pendulum may have swung too far.
Of course, there's no going back in a literal or reactionary way, but rather, instructive lessons we might be able to learn from what worked in our past that could be useful in shaping the future.
I think you’re right about the first bit, the need to seriously gut social media, but I think the answer is that the internet doesn’t need a town square at all. This place is fine and would be better without Twitter. There will be other places for other folks, which will be more comfortable without Twitter, and that’s fine. I struggle to find anything Twitter has made better.
We simply aren’t built/evolved to stare at irritating or disturbing “wrong” opinions from others all day long and remain equanimous about them. The answer isn’t a monoculture, IMO, so much as some room to breathe.
"I struggle to find anything Twitter has made better."
I'm always sort of amazed at how people say that Twitter has made them miserable. Why would you read things that make you miserable? Just read things that you want to read. I find Matt's tweets fun and often educational; I enjoy reading them and ignore the replies. I learn *tons* of things from smart people on Twitter. Jason Furman on fighting inflation. Mick Ryan on how to assess the coming Ukrainian offensive. Eric Topol on COVID and medical research in general. Etc a thousand times.
Maybe if Twitter didn't exist they would spread their thinking through an equally accessible format but for now that's what they use and I'm grateful for it.
What suggests to you that I'm on Twitter? I read occasional Tweets from about 5 people without an account and that's it.
Without Twitter and all of its downsides, they would absolutely use something else, and that something else would likely work better if there were a regulatory bar to recreating Twitter.
My inclination is that that's an impossibility. Short of a Butlerian Jihad the trend in technology is towards greater and greater visibility into the private lives of our neighbors and greater documentation of our past behaviors. The imperative needs to be a culture that is less punitive towards disparate cultural values and behaviors.
The one possibility I see is this. (I think I saw this idea first from Lars Doucet.) with the rise of generative AI, social media will become flooded with bots. Everyone will be so sick of bots that they will retreat from social media to locations where it is clear that everyone is a real person you know (eg, group texts among friends).
The Internet is also about to get flooded with ai generated porn of every attractive human on earth that is indistinguishable from an actual recording.
Not going to happen if we can all see everything. Better to inflict enough anti-trust action on the big boys to shatter the web into a million little communities. The ideologues will infiltrate one another and scream about what they see like they always have, but the bulk of humanity won’t have to give a damn as it does now.
I think the evidence is very strong that the public has great appetite for people who go into other communities and highlight their "crazy." E.g. Libs of TikTok and such.
I don't think you can create different online communities that are really separate from each other.
The problem is that network effects are a huge factor in the internet. If you shut down Twitter, another new site will take its place and you’ll have to shut down that new site too.
A huge perk of social media sites is the idea that most people you know have an account on it. So people will naturally consolidate into large platforms.
I don't think I disagree, so much as I have to retreat to my libertarian priors about whether the state can actually force people back into their silos by taking a sledgehammer to the bullhorns of twitter/facebook/tiktok.
I want the system to be sufficiently liberal/pluralistic for people to feel comfortable self selecting into the cultures/discourses that actually impact their lives directly, which means reducing the power of the state imposed monoculture, not empowering it to smash it's competitors.
I don’t really think that’s so much the case.
Like there’s something about Twitter that’s inherently conflict oriented. My other social platforms are just like recipes, running, dogs and Taylor Swift and then there’s Twitter which is oriented around outrage and scorched earth.
Back to work in a moment but I want to distill my point down to one thing:
What you're describing is the status quo for all of human history, completely innate to what we are. It cannot be done away with, hopes for a "cultural solution" of some kind are sheerest fantasy with no empirical support whatsoever. We are barely-evolved clan primates, the vast majority of us need a clan and will craft one for ourselves if denied the real thing.
Pluralism and democracy put this particular facet of human nature on the back burner; it became possible to segment political and social views from the rest of one's life, aided significantly by a publicly-supported monoculture. As that monoculture has died out under the influence of leveling technological progress, the ability of our pluralistic institutions to prevent us from reverting to the mean has come under stress.
The American 1940/s-1990's monoculture is not really desirable for most folks now that we've had a taste of freedom from it, and could not be recreated even if it were, so I am firmly convinced that the only way out is to reengineer the digital public square into a bunch of discrete meeting rooms and give us all some breathing room in which the issues over which we're bickering can fade and become less salient.
What you seem to expect is that people are going to change their very nature in response to technological change, to become more tolerant and accepting. I would argue that expecting such change to happen in the span of less than a generation is unrealistic and we need a policy solution that will take the pressure off.
To a certain extent, “try to avoid arguing about politics at work” is a social norm that gets you most of the way there in a lot of for-profit private sector workplaces.
I work with a mixed-political affiliations team at my current job and try to restrict my commentary on politics to work-relevant and relatively value-neutral descriptions and predictions of events. My colleagues aren’t always quite as good about it, but they lean in that direction too. All of us know that we’re unlikely to change each other’s deep fundamental assumptions by arguing at work, and we all have strong economic incentives to communicate and cooperate well; feuding or even just being rude to each other would just be a dumb waste of time.
Of course, this works because our financial incentives are well-aligned, we’re all reasonably smart, and we all take a fairly mercenary approach to our work. This is probably much harder at more mission-focused orgs or among teams of workers not well set up to catch upside from good performance.
First of all. Thank you for teaching. (I’m a veteran and people always say this to me… But honestly, I think there’s a lot of occupations, including teach him, which deserves this respect. So I acknowledge it is awkward and kind of nerdy to say, but thank you anyway.)
I pay attention to my local Idaho news. And Idaho being Idaho is probably a outlier, but you are definitely right that you’re more likely to be tempted to be canceled for being woke on the left. Then you are on the right as a teacher.
I’m not sure what grade do you teach, but do other students try and cancel their fellow students? This is something that I sort of seen. I don’t know if cancellation is the right term, but out shouting and out crying their fellow students.
I think one Idaho case is pretty emblematic of what happens on the normie people side, and its the one that got a freshman diversity class literally cancelled.
The rumor was that a professor had mistreated a student for disagreeing. The actual story was that a student had (inelegantly) disagreed and the other students jumped down her throat. The professor stopped class early and them called the student to make sure she was fine.
I know a lot of professors. Its a career enriched with crotchety assholes who love to argue, but even the rest will see usually disagreement as engagement, not a threat. But other students... they are a lot less flexible and students care way more how they think. Its awful to be on the receiving end of group opprobrium from your peers, and knowing the loudmouths may be a minority does not help.
I’ve taught mostly 2&3 and people are weird when it comes to what they think is racist.
Bullying has always occurred and we haven’t cured it but I don’t think they have the ability to really play that up anymore than they did 20 years ago.
which direction you're vulnerable from is entirely a product of where you live. teachers unions in blue cities don't give a flying piece of fudge what right of center parents think, but in the suburbs those folks have much more cultural cachet.
I don’t know I live in a D+20 city and basically I’ve never once felt pressure from the left.
I’ve been teaching for 10 years so well before the current round of culture wars and my whole career from teacher prep onwards I’ve always felt pressure to be as ‘Apple pie’ as possible.
Interesting. That's definitely not the case in Chicago where the CTU is openly hostile to parents on the right.
HR/middle management/administrative drones being incredibly small "c' conservative is a pretty long standing practice. HR is there to protect the company, not the employee. What you're describing is not now, what's new is the social media component.
I really don't think you can talk about the phenomenon of HR/middle management being overly afraid of Twitter mobs without acknowledging that a whole lot of these same people/parts of companies are implicated in some pretty gross cover ups of awful behavior. Those NDAs that Weinstein made his victims sign, heck the NDAs Trump has made basically all his employees sign all had to be stamped with approval by some HR flack. Heck we're likely to see many more shoes drop in this JPMorgan/Epstein story.
The easy "c" conservative thing to do has always been "sweep under the rug and hope no one notices". With social media that's much more difficult and likely has meant some overreaction the other way (I saw a troubling racially insensitive Facebook post from 12 years ago and it should be taken into consideration when contemplating renewing your contract).
It's a bit wild how you took something you don't like and just labeled it conservative. Not everything falls in categories of liberal/conservative. I think your other points were quite valid. But just like Bari Weiss isn't a small "p" progressive for being a bit of an iconoclast, neither are HR groups conservative for taking the easy way out. Otherwise your describing almost every liberal org in the country as being conservative for taking the easy way out and having liberal beliefs.
When I see the phrase "small-c conservative", I assume that the comment refers to personal or institutional behavior. If I run a business the conservative approach to any scandal is to downplay it, buy off a victim behind closed doors, and sweep it under the rug. Not because it's politically conservative but because it's the most likely to avoid or mitigate major negative outcomes, which is the dictionary definition of conservative in this context.
I don't think that its a good descriptor.
Let me suggest an analogy from the opposite direction to illustrate my point. The Intercept had an article about progressive groups struggle to overcome internal group dynamics that distract from their core mission. You might say that was little "p" progressive because instead of sweeping it under the table, they are constantly trying to address issues. But I wouldn't call it progressive, because to me, its almost the exact same kind of "purity" search as what I see in "real conservatives" in kicking out "RINOs." If I came in and described the Freedom caucus as being "little p" progressive when they are trash talking RINOs about not adhering to the true vision of conservatism, you'd (correctly) say that was nonsense. I see the same thing here.
Hard, hard disagree.
This is an extraordinarily common turn of phrase, used by a huge number of people I know.
My (politically conservative) father refers to his attitude on a bunch of personal issues as "small-c conservative," my right-leaning mom describes herself as a "conservative driver," my very, very liberal sister says she has a very "conservative teaching philosophy." I was talking with some similarly liberal/center-left friends and referred to my wife's and my saving habits as "maybe even overly conservative" literally last Monday evening without a scrap of misunderstanding, and another buddy who's pretty much a circa-2016 Bernie-head has said he's "very conservative" in managing his direct reports at work.
None of these uses have anything to do with or imply anything about politics.
I would agree with this! I think the difference is that you read his description the way he wrote it below "as risk averse" while I read it as sweep it under the rug. Those are very different things (to me) and I agree the first is "small c" conservative, I wouldn't say the latter is for the reasons I laid out above. Quite possible that I'm reading it wrong though.
I think you're misunderstanding my usage of small "c" conservative. This I guess is the problem of using the term conservative interchangeably as a political term and a term about human behavior. I was definitely going for the latter. If you want me to say that HR/administrative/middle management is very risk adverse, I'm fine with saying that instead.
Now that large "C" Conservatives aren't at all small "c" conservative and are instead trying to end small "l" liberal democracy, they get mad when you remind them of the origin of their name.
As I replied to David R., I didn't read it as "risk averse," I read it as "sweep it under the rug." To me those are different and the former is "small 'c' conservative," while the latter is not. Or perhaps I just misunderstood and read more into your comment than was there - that happens too.
damn tho posting racist stuff on fb at 3 years old might be a red flag tho
Exactly. I thought it was a bit sketchy that she is going to casting sessions at 13, but posting racist stuff on Facebook at age 3 is even worse.
In general, I'm definitely on the side of "let's not over punish kids for being kids". And yes I include college "kids" in this discourse. And I extend this to the criminal justice system as well. A 14 year old saying something extremely stupid, not well thought out and impulsive to another 14 year old is...very 14 year old. It's like adults don't seem to remember that teens will say intentionally needling things to each other (and on social media) just because they know they aren't supposed to. I'm thinking specifically that incident with the Frat bros from Oklahoma State who were caught singing a song that included the N word. Given (I think correctly) we've made uttering the N word something extremely touchy, some sort of punishment I feel like was warranted. But expulsion? Punishment did not fit the crime.
I'll say too, this is why I eye roll a bit about college kids trying to shut down or cancel free speech. It's not that I don't think this isn't a real thing. But college kids trying to be this sort of thing has been a thing since the 60s. I know, because I remember protesting the Iraq War. I did it because I truly believed it in it, but if I'm real with myself there was a bit of a rush to think I'm able to be a 60s protestor. There is a romanticism now attached to this period (somewhat correctly in my view) that I think informs a lot of this stuff. In other words, a lot of student protest trying to "cancel" speech is in part a bit cosplaying and looking for 15 minutes of fame. As Matt pointed out or sort noted noted in his post, the real issue is that too many college administrations overreacted in 2019/2020 and seem to be self-correcting and trying not to bow to a "Heckler's veto".
Part of this seems to be the growing resistance to vulnerability. Vulnerability is risk and risk is dangerous. When the social media ecosystem overweights risk for everything for clicks you get a feedback loop where people are on hyper alert for “toxic” behavior that they need to separate themselves from or risk bing challenged or hurt.
I think this is also why relationships are suffering from friendships to romantic relationships. People are encouraged to prioritize “mental health” over “toxicity”. While both of these things are important, I think they have become politically and socially coded to an almost farcical extreme.
I don’t have any solutions here but it’s not a good situation we find ourselves in at the moment.
It's amazing how much of undergrad student culture basically boils down to cosplaying the 60s.
As someone who participated in a few of the 60s protest against the Vietnam war, I'd say you deserve more credit for protesting the Iraq war. One, the latter was a lot more popular than the Vietnam war (especially later on). Two, unlike the 60s kids, you weren't at risk of being drafted and going over there yourself. Once the draft ended, it's amazing how much the protests against Vietnam dried up.
To be fair, the war itself was kind of winding down as the draft was winding down...if it was simply the prospect of getting drafted that motivated opposition to war, you’d think there’d have been a lot more protests against WWII and Korea.
When someone can be selective, they'll nitpick. Right now the feds are loosening the rules on past drug use to fill positions. A decade ago it seemed like you needed a degree to work as a barista but that's changed.
For the most part it's just not going to be worth scouring someone's entire social media history* (even if AI made it possible), especially if it makes your job harder.
*Not applicable to authoritarian governments.
I'm curious about "middle management/hr/dei/administrative drones" in the private sector. They are made out to be incredibly harmful, why are they not either getting removed or seeing their companies out-competed by rivals who don't have these practices...perhaps something to do with monopoly power, where these folks protect some of America's hyper-profitable corporations from greater regulatory scrutiny?
Looking at say, social media companies, regulatory appeasement has clearly been a major factor in their moderation policies. And then at the small business end of things you get stuff like the state harassing the shit out of that guy who doesn't want to bake cakes for gay weddings.
The challenge you get to particularly with the cake thing, is that you really do start intersecting with civil rights law. There's a legitimate corporate need to police discrimination. The problem is that basically all of the incentives and the academic ideology of the people in the HR industry tilt the scales towards these incredibly vast, all encompassing interpretations of what might be discriminatory, with almost no regard for the value of maintaining a wide range of acceptable thought.
For most f500 companies I’m familiar with, they are mostly a checkbox in terms of compliance. They run internal trainings that are annoying similar to things like security training to not click on links in suspicious emails. They might get involved in general hiring practices and the like, but on average are just overhead on the side. They get to produce reports and track metrics and the company maybe behaves slightly more inclusively on the margin (probably a good thing) but doesn’t usually substantially change anything. There are outliers, but from what I gather pretty much everyone goes about doing their own thing unless there is a top-down managment incentive.
I don't know if it's monopoly power as much as really high margins. You don't hear about any of this stuff coming from grocery stores. Or I haven't. High margins allow bad managers to hide.
High margins or (more commonly) a funding environment that allows for heavy losses.
I think it's a very open question whether these sorts of resource sinks will survive the end of the VC money cannon era.
I would not lament their demise.
HR and DEI at most large private firms are pretty economically rational as regulatory compliance and reputation management measures. Most companies want to avoid anti-discrimination lawsuits and maintain a public image that their customers and employees (weighted by how much they care about particular issues) like.
The higher your company’s visibility is, the more you’ll care about reputational issues; the higher your average employee comp and profits, the higher the potential payouts from lawsuits are. Overall, the size and activeness of HR and DEI functions tends to scale with those variables.
Do a lot of employees actually like dei though? Ie the actual bureaucracy? Never heard such an idea. Any data or even anecdata to support that?
Younger folks seem to value it? My impression is they like to feel like "something" is being done with no real concern for what that something is.
But you actually just gave me an idea - I'm going to gently suggest disbanding our (rather redundant) departmental-level DEI committee (started in summer 2020, of course) and see how a few people respond.
That’s an interesting but NB that’s not what I was actually talking about. Faculty-led dei is one thing, full-time job bureaucracy quite another. Suggest to your colleagues that maybe your university doesn’t need 40-80* full time DEI bureaucrats (all basically hired in the last five years), often being paid better than themselves, and see how they respond, esp if you suggest eg taking that serious amount of money and shifting it to scholarships for marginalized students ?
(*The 40-80 figure comes from university of Virginia, ymmv)
Oh yeah, I hear you - an audit showed we're spending something like $6m directly on DEI efforts. That being said, the Dean recently just defended it in a meeting as saying they've "only" hired one person at the college level to focus on DEI, so...no big deal? (Despite the fact if you multiply it over all the colleges and other units, it adds up!)
Oh, and the creation of the DEI committee wasn't faculty driven. Briefly, in summer 2020, a lot of bored grad students started having zoom meetings and decided a bunch of things needed to be changed. Funny though, once they could get back in the lab, their follow-through was pretty anemic and they left it to the faculty to do "something". I don't think any of us are particularly interested, and even the one faculty member who I thought was (and has been chairing the committee) said she doesn't want to do it anymore (whether she thinks it should still exist, I don't know yet).
I think it's mostly of the "don't be the first to stop clapping" type.
Talked to a few people about winding down the DEI committee. Feedback I got included "wait, we still have that?", "it's probably time", and "it will look bad if we don't have one, but it doesn't have to meet very often". 😂
This just reads as a very solid argument for voting Ron DeSantis in the 2022 primary and general to improve the mental wellbeing of mostly liberal-leaning white collar professionals. Not the top reason I would give for that vote, but I understand that everyone has their own top issue.
This is basically every industry. Matt's whole point was that this "I am the victim" shit is basically identical to what the post-liberal people do with the directionality reversed, and about as poorly-rooted in evidence.
The ones that seem to come closest to actually being politically charged and terrible due to post-liberal leftist agitation are the legacy media and some very narrow bits of Silicon Valley, collectively employing a few hundred thousand people.
Every other sector is either relatively accepting to all, or way more likely to "cancel" you for being gay. Easily 90% of the workforce is employed in places where the people doing the cancelling at the NYT would immediately be fired and marched out of the office for trying anything similar.
It's important to remember that a huge fraction of the nat-right assholes peddling this vision of the world regard a world in which no one is getting canceled for being gay as an attack against themselves, lol.
Work in Finance as well. Agree that the more extremely left wing culture that (apparently) permeates non-profit world doesn't seem to extend to the Finance world. But the "cussing is frowned" upon comment? What are you talking about? Do you know how much swearing I've heard every day of my working life in finance; in the workplace and from clients? I'm honestly baffled to read this. I'll give the benefit of the doubt and say maybe you've worked for only one company and the culture of this company is very buttoned up and is run by some George HW Bush style leader, but this definitely is not the more common experience as far as I can tell.
Yeah, midtown Manhattan on my side. Clients are more NW north of $20MM types. Explains a lot of the difference I'm guessing.
I'm not sure that academia has these problems to anything like the extent we saw at the NYT over the last few years.
On that one, I think the conservatives have only themselves to blame; they've play-acted at being anti-intellectual since the end of Goldwater's campaign, been hostile to academia and even basic science, pushed their kids away from academic careers, and are now surprised that academics are almost all somewhere between centrist and outright leftist.
When it comes to "cancel culture" in universities, the student bodies are the heart of the problem but even there *most* schools are managing their idiocy well.
Even the legacy media and Silicon Valley seem to be fighting its way back from the brink and starting to out-maneuver the would-be cancellers these days.
Tempest in a teapot if ever there was one.
I can share anecdotes and some datapoints after work, but it's almost certainly worse in top 100 academia than it is at the NYT, which employs Ross Douthat and does honest reporting most of the time.
Ehh, color me doubtful. The vast majority of the real issues of which I'm aware are coming from left coast state schools and dyed-in-the-wool lefty liberal arts colleges, at which half a percent of the population is educated.
Nonetheless, Texas, Florida and North Carolina are pushing laws to end tenure; insert boards of governors into curriculum development; ban faculty from asking about "politically relevant topics" in hiring and promotion; put faculty up for review by the state every four years; and submit research to the legislature for review.
Whatever the direction the causal relationships, the fact that professors tend to be left of center has been blown so far out of proportion by right-wing media that Republican lawmakers have decided to attack their state university systems (which are huge economic engines in those states) rather than let them be "woke". In fact, in Texas, the Lt. Governor literally said that "teaching CRT" will be grounds for termination under the new law.
Matt is, of course, right that the over-reaction to "cancel culture" is dumb, fear-based and untethered from reality. But fear of that over-reaction is is based in reality as Republicans increasingly feel justified in using state power to attack institutions that get on the wrong side of right-wing media.
In other words, it doesn't really matter how bad actual problems in actual organizations are. All that matters anymore is how vulnerable an organization is to political interference because, unlike social media campaigns, laws are enforceable.
What, did you think the US still has more than a teeny-weeny handful of genuine conservative politicians on the right side of the aisle?
In addition to social media sucking, the other major structural factor driving this insanity is gerrymandering. To end gerrymandering is to stop giving the 10% of the GOP electorate which is batshit insane structurally unbreakable control over the 70% of the party's politicians for whom the primary election is the only meaningful one.
The same is somewhat true on the left, but let's face it, the post-liberal left is a much smaller portion of the Democratic Party than the religious or reactionary right is of the GOP, and more effectively marginalized.
Unfortunately, now that social media and gerrymandering have unleashed these sorts of "muscular, pro-state power" reactionaries on us, I have no idea how to put them back in the box.
Maybe if we could muzzle the post-liberal left the center and center-left could win enough elections to put it to bed, or at least to enact a nationwide gerrymandering prohibition that would marginalize the worst offenders within their party, but that's very much a chicken-and-egg problem.
I would agree that university administrations sometimes let this stuff get out of control, but I would also suggest that perhaps the experience of attending Portland State has colored your perceptions as to how often that occurs?
Engineering; same deal. Treat others respectfully. All this other stuff, ain't nobody got time for that.
It is finance tho? What else would you call it
Banking?
A strong fish can swim upstream and clever blogger who can write 3,000 words of interesting prose a day has less to fear from cancellation than a journeyman at the New York Times.
Many highly intelligent, well credentialed people struggle and even fail early in their careers. The United States turns out 55,000 PhDs per year. They can’t all become professors, and an assistant professorship at the University of West Georgia is kind of meh. There inevitably must be a filtering process to determine which PhDs get the cool gigs and there is no ideologically unbiased way to determine whose social science dissertation was best.
Three out of four sociology PhDs will never get a tenure track job, and there aren’t many jobs in industry for sociologists. This creates overwhelming pressure to kiss up to the professors on hiring committees, thereby empowering group think. Early career selection doesn’t get much attention in the discourse. When Yglesias left Vox to escape group think, that was news. When a young PhD ends up working as a paralegal, that’s life.
Well damnit. You pointed out what I did in my comment. The real cancellation culture is actually gate keeping.
From a pure career standpoint, I don’t think this reasoning holds up— there are big funding pools specifically allocated to support right or libertarian-leaning thought and, because of the academy’s political demographics, they’re much less competitive than funds for mainstream scholarship are. (Remember—most leftier academics also fail to get tenure).
I think the more relevant issue for most is wanting social and intellectual acceptance from their colleagues. Unfortunately, there’s not really a procedural shortcut for this— they need to actually do the work of convincing others that their thinking is a meaningful positive contribution.
honest question: how many sociology/anthropology/women’s studies PhDs work at the Heritage Foundation and Cato. From what I know, those places are much likelier to hire lawyers and economists.
To add yet more pushback. The problem of “cancel culture” doesn’t just affect the conservatives that might like to work at the heritage foundation. It also affect the far more numerous liberals and progressive (and conservatives!)who want to have the academic freedom to allow their research to take them where it will, ie who are academics/scholars/scientists first and opinionated citizens second!
Lastly, working in a think tank isn’t actually the same kind of job as being a professor. Many professors want to teach, and esp to have grad students etc. it’s not apples to apples. Moreover, those who complain of insufficient tolerance and constraint on the ability to pursue truth for its own sake in academia are hardly going to be happy working in an explicitly politicized/partisan “think tank”!
It seems that I might just be wrong about the relative scales here— thanks for the pushback.
(This seems like a good situation for the conservative influence buyers, though— if they’re not as supply constrained as I thought, they can pretty easily get more conservative scholarship and discourse by spending more.)
Creating postdoctoral fellowships or faculty positions where donors exercise at least some degree of control over hiring is actually quite possible, though— back when I was an undergrad, the Israel lobby set up a postdoc at my institution with the fairly clear purpose of opposing the influence of one faculty member in our history department. This isn’t enough to take over academia entirely— intellectuals have been a left-leaning group in the West since the 18th century for what are probably very hard to change reasons— but it does give rich conservatives a way to make sure their perspective is heard on campus. (This might also require some pipeline efforts to recruit grad students etc)
> Creating postdoctoral fellowships or faculty positions
I'm getting all sorts of great ideas from the comments today! We should reach out to local-area conservatives and say "worried about the liberalization of college campuses? Fund this fellowship to push back!" (only half joking! 😂)
Yes. Precisely. And if 1 of 4 sociologists gets a TT job that’s literally an order of magnitude better than I thought !
P. 26 of this document seems to show that nearly every academic field ends up with at least about half of their PhDs employed in a tenure track position. That does sound high to me so I might be misreading some things. But it also says about 70% in post-secondary academic employment, and every field other than communications has a majority of their post-secondary academic employment on the tenure track.
https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/publication/downloads/2022_Humanities-Indicators_Graduate-Education-Workforce.pdf
That’s insane. Will have to go into later but it’s just so wildly radically different from my “lived experience” that it’s extremely hard for me to believe a priori. However I’ll read it later. I do hope it’s right but I’m extremely skeptical.
P.S it also doesn’t seem to square with the basic fact that in just about every university non tt instruvtors outnumber tt instructors. Sometimes many many times over!
the thing that jumps out is it’s just for “humanities” PhDs, and the n is only 5000 and change. That’s only 1/10 of all PhDs, so there can be funny business in who they included
Page 26 shows about 2/3 going in tenured/tenure-track positions, commensurate with other fields.
I agree, this goes against everything I had assumed! But the numbers all look legit at first read, so now I'd be curious to read anecdotes from anyone who's been on the humanities faculty job market.
I gave you one. I’ll add more. In my field last year there were , in all of North America, about 7-10 tt jobs (depending on your definition). Most had 200-250 applicants each. To simplify, let’s assume total over lap in the candidates and also go with the lower ball park of 200. Let’s also take the maximal figure of jobs, say 10, (btw this was considered a very *good* year in terms of number of openings so I’d add that this figure is again rather maximalist). it suggests 1 in 20 got a job *this year*. Again, this is the optimistic estimate. Of course some who didn’t this year will try again next year and some will succeed, but there will also be fresh competition from new PhDs…. At the end of the day this suggests to me ultimate success rate of maybe 10 or 15% at best (possibly far lower) but in any case nowhere near 50% or two thirds.
P.S.
Note that this estimate is of those phd who actually went on the job market and applied for those jobs. Many don’t even bother and at least some of them don’t try not because of lack of interest but because they are dismayed by the abysmal prospects.
oops, I'm being dumb.
edit: In my defense, I'm "watching" student presentations right now (it's not my class - honest!).
so page 26 says the majority of PhDs who got offers in academia were tenure track, but page 22 says only about half had any kind of job offer
I think page 26 is also looking at "early career people working in academia" while page 22 is about people who got their PhD in a given year. Those are slightly different pools (in particular, people who stick it out in academia will probably be counted for 10 years in the page 26 numbers, but people who "only" go two or three years adjuncting are counted less, while all are counted equally in the page 22 numbers).
Page 10 shows about 5000-6000 PhD graduates each year, while page 23 shows over 3000 academic job openings each year. There are ~175k faculty overall (page 28), suggesting a 1.7% turnover rate, which seems low if anything.
and many of those openings will go to laterals! if you were a well regarded student at an AAU university, there’s a good chance some third tier school will hire you. otherwise, hope you enjoy copy editing.
It is odd to write a newsletter on the topic of whether the power of cancel culture is overstated, and then only include examples of people who survived cancelation attempts.
In particular, every counterexample cited involves a senior person who was already established in their field. One of the most harmful effects of cancel culture is the impact it has on people just starting out. They do not have the option to start a substack to pay the bills. So they either fall in line, or choose a different profession.
"and then only include examples of people who survived cancelation attempts."
People never pay attention to the times when you *don't* post the graphic of the WWII fighter riddled with bullet-holes.
I see what you did there.
"I see what you did there."
People never pay attention to the times when they do *not* see what I did there.
That was exactly my thought as well - that Matt has skewed his case by not looking at examples of people who did not come through intact. Take, for example, the case of Richard Taylor (https://www.thefire.org/news/teaching-history-not-permitted-st-johns-bulldozes-academic-freedom-punishes-professor-posing). Isn't it legitimate for professors at university - especially those who do not have the protection of tenure - to be concerned about something similar happening to them? And Taylor is hardly a unique example, either - plenty of others out there.
I feel that unless Matt acknowledges that some people have suffered genuinely bad consequences because of this kind of left-wing censoriousness, then his arguments are really useless. He does kind of pay lip service to the possibility ("I don't think those fears are entirely unwarranted"), but the entire rhetoric of the piece is that Jennifer Doleac's and Bari Weiss's and Joe Rogan's ability to ride out criticism shows that there isn't much to worry about. But when the people of Heterodox Academy complain about the dangers and the chilling effect on discourse, they are not creating straw men: the dangers are real, the chilling effect is also real, and there are plenty of real-life examples like that of Taylor to prove it.
Taking everything into account, the fearmongers of Heterodox Academy and the like seem to have the better side of the argument than Matt does.
"I feel that unless Matt acknowledges that some people have suffered genuinely bad consequences...."
Agreed. And first on the list of people whose careers were destroyed by cancelation over their political views is Colin Kaepernick.
I feel like people who use that example always do so in order to decry rightwing actions will defending "cancel culture" from the left, as if the people who are worried about this are just a bunch of cranks who are upset they can't say awful things about transgender people without losing their jobs. But a lot of us are worried about the underlying principle itself, and are equally disgusted by what happened to Kaepernick as we are about what happens to individuals in academia who suffer consequences for not toeing the progressive line.
"But a lot of us are worried about the underlying principle itself, and are equally disgusted by...."
Cool! Then we're in agreement. Making people unhirable for their political views (when those views have no relation to the qualifications for the job) is wrong, no matter what those views may be.
"...people who use that example always do so in order to ... [defend] "cancel culture" from the left..."
Uh, nope! I think you may have overgeneralized with that "always".
I agree completely with you, and I'd go even farther, because "(when those views have no relation to the qualifications for the job)" is a big loophole I would remove. Everytime you hear about someone fired over their political views, there's always some weaselword statement from the company about how they were somehow the face of the company or they represent the company or something, and thus firing them for something they did on their own time is acceptable. But a quarterback is generally considered the face of the football team, and it was BS to fire Kapernick for anything not related to his performance as a quarterback, just like that guy who got fired from Apple for writing a book people didn't like.
I fully agree. You expressed it better than I.
I would add that in addition to the people who suffered bad consequences, it impacts the whole climate. The cancellation crowd does not need a 100% hit rate to achieve their goals.
The people at Heterodox Academy don't seem to complain about Ron DeSantis's attacks on academia in Florida. My concern is that a lot of people seem to want to make this about a specific political faction, and the impulse to censor is not necessarily linked to your view on the appropriate level of government involvement in the economy.
"The people at Heterodox Academy don't seem to complain about Ron DeSantis's attacks on academia in Florida."
10 seconds of searching on the Heterodox Academy's website would have been enough to prove you wrong.
https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/i-got-cut-from-the-ap-african-american-studies-curriculum/
"Whatever the truth of these competing claims, a few lessons can be drawn from this incident." This is a remarkably milquetoast statement compared to what the Heterodox Academy says about the woke left. I don't think you can even begin to compare them.
So now we've moved on from "they don't complain about Ron DeSantis" to "they don't complain about Ron DeSantis in the way I would like them to" ...
Actually, Heterodox Academy is typically pretty measured in the language it uses about the "woke left" (horrible phrase) as well. How about this for complaints against both the right and the left with very similar language aimed at both sides?
https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/the-channeling-of-the-american-mind/
I would barely call this complaining at all. Did you read the article? It's incredibly milquetoast.
St. John's University, not St. John's College by the way (had to click into the links/scroll a bit to get past The Fire's careless naming. Don't follow them, but if they're not aware of my alma mater, then their scope is too limited to understand academia.(!)
I think part of his point is that illustrating an article like this with examples of successful cancelations is like illustrating an article about how much safer flying is than driving with examples of famous plane crashes.
Maybe one takeaway is to encourage those who are big enough to survive to take the risks to protect the rest ( and to tell people who think they're not quite big enough to survive that they probably are?)
Matt is big enough to survive. But that survival took the form of leaving and going to a situation where he is a lone voice (plus Milan!) with no influence over an organization.
Weiss is trying to build something much larger which could have influence, as the Heterodox Academy is doing also. I wish them the best.
It seems to me that the biggest example of these has to do when speakers are coming to college campuses.
Yes. Firing a tenured professor still takes some oomph, thankfully. But simply not inviting them, not giving them grants and awards, etc, is much easier. And that can derail a career quite effectively. Certainly to the point where your job is much less enjoyable.
gghg
It’s likely this was deliberate for the exact reason the article states: to avoid further inflaming cases that are already damaging.
First
Milan is cancelled!!!
So annoying now that you have to scroll through all of the blue-check comments before you can get to the good ones.
Among equals
degen behaviour
Wait, aren't you done with finals? Why were you up at 6 AM on the Monday after the end of finals?!? That's a prime sleep-until-noon day.
Finals are next week; this week is reading week
Ah, sorry, I misunderstood your post on Friday!
Probably still up from the night before
Thank you for the nuanced article. This is honestly my big beef with the Weisses and Rogans of the world. You can shout, "I'M BEING CANCELLED!!!1!1!!!" at the top of your lungs (online, that is) and you'll get a rush of supporters... and end up not losing your job or leveraging it into another high-paying one. These people are literally given a platform to broadcast their views in MSM outlets! That's not cancellation!
I guess for the rest of us who lean left and have questions about these sorts of hot button topics, it really comes down to (a) arguing in good faith (and while MY almost always does even when I disagree with him, there are plenty of others in this space who do not) and (b) recognizing that the Christopher Rufos of the world are leveraging all of this to ACTUALLY CANCEL left wing thinkers by, you know, getting them fired or taking over a left wing college and installing their cronies. It's why I can't take Bari Weiss seriously... she got her start by demanding professors get fired by taking a pro-Palestine stance!
I always thought Scott Alexanders take on this was pretty good(https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/23/can-things-be-both-popular-and-silenced/). He makes many points but I think some of the relevant claims are that celebrities who have controversial stances may do well and gather support but that doesn't mean your average citizen with average rhetorical abilities can express the same opinions and not suffer real consequences or reputational harm. And also, every popular dissident movement right or left gets suppressed. It wouldn't get suppressed if it wasn't popular. Scott Alexander mentions Gandhi and various labor movements. What you care about when trying to determine whether a view is (in his terms) silenced is not the absolute number of people who support a position but the number who publicly support it relative to the number who support it but refuse to publicly admit it.
Someone above mentioned their aunt or grandma complaining about cancel culture and how she can't say things anymore and the commenter being kind of skeptical that this was a real problem for her in her day-to-day life. I started writing about local government in my suburb of Milwaukee last year and one of the things I did not expect to write about as much as I do is education. The last two school board elections have been really contentious. I feel like I'm getting a ground-level view of a community polarizing itself in real time. And part of the dynamic (not the whole dynamic) is that people who offer what I think is pretty milquetoast pushback against certain (I'll say progressive) policies are pretty quickly tarred on social media as white supremacists, extremists, or racists (honestly by a relative few very left-leaning people).
And you talk to these people, and they are pretty normal engineers, fathers of three, in the community for 20 years, whatever. And so what happens is a guy like that runs for the school board, gets tarred, worries that his employment might be in danger if there's a bunch of things on the internet calling him a racist, and so the next time he doesn't run. And not only does he refuse to run, but all the people who agree with him, or worry about the state of the school district, and have respectable, semi-high status jobs see that happen and they refuse to run too or even speak out. And so the next cycle people run who oppose some of these policies and they are also pretty normal people but are a little less articulate and have just marginally less to lose or are dispositionally less agreeable and unworried by the attacks. And they get tarred. And this scares off them and a bunch of other people, and the next time maybe the only people you get to run are even more unhinged or extreme.
I was aware that this dynamic existed in the abstract but watching it play out is both interesting and sad to behold. It's not so much that everyday people are getting cancelled left and right it's that they're cancelling themselves.
100% this. This is absolutely the more important issue and indeed, good people are being driven away from local roles that allow our communities to function.
I personally wouldn't run for school board for these reasons, although I'd be far less concerned about left wing activists (in my experience, only the most extreme will fail to respond to reasonable arguments, and those people can be ignored) than right wingers (who may legitimately have been radicalized by Fox News or worse and may come to your house with a weapon).
Not where I live, which is both liberal and has comparatively few gun owners, but there are places where I would be legit afraid to run as a liberal for public office lest someone show up at my door with a gun, try and harm family members or pets, or vandalize/destroy my property.
I'm not a huge Bari Weiss fan, but anyone bringing up her college protest activities makes me much less inclined to engage with anything else they say.
I do the same when anyone brings up their opponent's prior support for the Iraq war, old stance on gay marriage, or pretty much any other wrong-think or bad actions from the past. I don't have the energy or inclination to sort out the truth behind whatever past transgression you're using to distract from the issue at hand and it annoys me that you did that.
Also, I don't care if you think someone is a hypocrite or is arguing in bad faith. None of us are any good at nailing down intent and motivation and trying to do so is a fool's errand.
So while I agree with a lot of what you've posted here, you did a great job of alienating me by throwing in gratuitous ad hominem and talk about bad faith. Just tell me what you think is wrong with what they said or did (like you did with Chris Rufo).
I'm not sure my criticism of Bari Weiss should be considered "ad hominem." But if you think critiquing stances taken years ago that have never been apologized for is unfair (particularly when the behavior relates to trying to get someone fired for their speech, something Weiss claims to be against), then I'd point to her current spotlight on one unhappy parent making claims about trans care in Missouri in the face of mountains of evidence and testimony provided by dozens of parents, doctors, and nurses. There are legitimate discussions to have about trans care, but her "investigating" barely scratched the surface of a pretty complex issue and merely fanned the flames of the culture war.
> mountains of evidence and testimony provided by dozens of parents, doctors, and nurses
I have followed this case pretty closely, and I don't recall any testimony from any doctors or nurses. Did I miss that?
I wouldn't say the criticism is unfair, just that it isn't productive and that for me it somewhat poisons the rest of your argument.
I'm advocating for more substantive criticism around the actual point of disagreement and less focus on distractions like prior bad acts and general attacks on character. While I'm human and have to constantly fight this tendency in myself, your comment about Weiss somewhat triggered me because I find it so annoying when I'm following an interesting discussion. The "this person is terrible because of a, b, and c" just adds clutter and a bunch of gratuitous negative energy. For me it's waste heat with no light.
My view is that we've gotten rusty at trying to understand each other and at the art of persuasion and we'd be better off if we focused more on those things rather than signaling support for our team or clawing at the integrity of people who disagree with us.
I guess where I would disagree is, I can't think of a reasonable argument Weiss has made in good faith, and therefore it's hard for me to consider her someone worthy of engaging with, except that she continues to have a large platform.
Maybe as a counter example, I'd offer up Freddie DeBoer. I find a lot of his behavior distasteful (harassing people in comment sections who disagree with him, particularly women) and his writing style is fairly tedious. But occasionally someone in these comments links to one of his pieces, and even when I disagree, his arguments are at least nuanced and have a foundation in evidence. Point is, I don't dismiss his arguments simply because he comes across as arrogant, whereas Weiss (and others) make their arrogance central to their entire persona, and mere disagreement with them equates to silencing. Which is laughable and should be treated as such.
I subscribe to DeBoer's free substack and I often find his writing interesting, but I've never checked out his comments section. His openness about his mental health struggles probably makes me more inclined to cut him slack on some of his distasteful behavior. Perhaps more than I should.
With Weiss, I just don't understand how you can feel so confident claiming she always argues in bad faith. Doesn't that require you to see inside her head? It sounds like you strongly disagree with her political views and feel she's hypocritical about free speech. Fair enough. I'm not making a case that you must or even should engage with her or her arguments. Also, I too find the "I'm being silenced" bit laughable and try to ignore it. It's just more annoying noise.
I'm only suggesting that you'd be more persuasive if you avoided the character attacks, tuned out the noise, and kept the focus on the specific things you disagree with (like you did with your point on the J.K. Rowling series).
"I'm being silenced...!" they cry, as they slowly watch their views tick up into the tens of milions.
You’re right some people have leveraged being canceled into a career. No doubt that is true. But for every one of those they are many examples of people’s lives being maliciously destroyed over bullshit. You make not contact with that reality.
Yes Chris Rufo is one that has turned this into a career for himself and is now a political activist. Kinda like Nicole Hannah Jones. But don’t conflate success using the political process as canceling. RDS won an election by a wide margin. He then has political power. A Governor removing members of the opposite party and inserting the own peeps is just how things work. The arrogance of the left is crazy. Oh we got our ass kicked in the election but we expect all of our people to keep their posts.
Perhaps it would be better to call it a "culture of dishonesty", rather than cancel culture.
The same kind of theocratic culture of dishonesty, prioritizing "reading the room" and "allyship", as led those in the Catholic Church who knew better to hold their tongue rather than speak up about the unacknowledged sex abuse scandal, or that led calcified Brezhnev era Soviet nomenklatura to hold their tongue about the obvious need to reform the parts of the system and abandon parts of the ideology that weren't working, etc, etc.
I think this is kind of right, but I think it's important to take seriously that the dishonest folks might ALSO be right. The Soviet system was about to collapse. The abuse revelations have been devastating to the Catholic Church, costing them a ton of money and a ton of parishioners--it might not be collapsing, but it is certainly in long-term decline.
That doesn't make it right; people should live their lives with honesty and face challenges head on. But the hard truth is that you might be part of a system that is on the verge of failing, and the truth might be the last push that collapses the rotten structure around you. It's hard to blame people for correctly intuiting that being inside a building while it collapses is not very fun.
Yes, I think closing ranks like that and being unwilling to speak honestly in a self-critical is often a dynamic that happens in groups or institutions that, rightly feels embattled and under attack, and they think they are doing what's necessary to protect the institution or cause they support by stifling even valid criticism. The Catholic Church, from increasingly secularization and declining membership. The Soviet Union, under stranglimg sanctions from the West for most of its existence. Progressives, because by their very nature progressive causes are out at the vanguard, opposed by many who like things the way they are and oppose change..... But dishonesty backfires and corrodes the cause or institution from within.
Just a quick note on this article: I think it is right on, but I think an important way to understand the phenomenon is kind of baked in, unnoticed, to the discussion of economics (and the mention of sociology and psychology).
Cancel culture is a little bit of truth and a lot of advertising bombast, and you find that across a lot of disciplines and situations. But a lot of academic work--across all disciplines, honestly, but public-facing work, especially--is subject to this kind of critique because the work itself very often is a little bit of highly-questionable truth wrapped in a ton of bombast. This burst into public view a bit more with the replication crisis, but the truth is that you see it everywhere.
I don't know how you solve this problem, because it is deeply, deeply baked into the incentive structure of academia at ten different levels. People need "significant" research to get published. They need to get published to get, and keep, their jobs. But people also want to feel like they are doing things of real importance in the world, and sadly most people just don't feel like teaching is an activity of real social significance (even though I would argue that it is the most socially significant thing that a lot of academics do, and really valuable) because we have tended to devalue that activity for a variety of cultural and ideological and market reasons. Also, it feels fun to have your work cited in the press or discussed in public. To make that happen, you have to really (over)sell the significance of your conclusions.
I strongly suspect that there is also an underlying problem, which is just that we, as humans, want to Know Things with more empirical certainty or rigor than is actually possible in the infinitely complex system that is reality. A lot of "empirical" research, when you really scratch it, is only a step or two better than having a system for figuring out roulette wheels. That doesn't make it worthless, and you really CAN, in some circumstances, figure out roulette wheels. Humans are cool that way. But MOST of the guys claiming they have figured out roulette wheels at your local casino are just losing a lot of money. Humility is your friend, here.
But bottom line is that I think the impulse to oversell what you can "know" based on research like that done by Doleac and other academics in these types of policy spaces creates simultaneously a huge incentive to fight bitterly over the conclusions AND plenty of fodder for the battle, because you can just argue until the cows come home over methods when you are actually talking about very tiny effect sizes or high-complexity systems where you can always add or subtract another variable to change the conclusions or the analysis.
It's research as theology, with a similar outcome, and I'm not sure how you solve the problem, honestly, because incentives are a thing, but it is a problem that we are really struggling with as a society.
JCW, do you think it’s weird that you just wrote (as do many of us), what amounts to a one or two page essay just for fun?
I got my bachelors degree, mostly online because I was in the military. I got to see my fellow students writing, and it was atrocious.
But here you are throwing together several paragraphs that clearly gets across a point, probably while you were eating breakfast.
Sorry, I know it was off target… But it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. People who comment on slow boring tend to be excellent writers and communicators. Maybe this is normal for white collar people, but I live and work in a blue collar world. Our engineers struggle with simple technical writing sometimes.
Carry on. Sorry to go off on a tangent.
Thanks! I take this as a compliment.
I have a Ph.D. in a writing-intensive discipline, so I'm definitely a weirdo who likes to write. I think this fits, interestingly, with being a Slow Boring reader. I basically get all my news through reading and a very few podcasts because I hate hate hate TV news and YouTube, et al, with a passion. It feels way too slow and non-dense for me.
OMG dude. I feel the exact same way. Watching news on TV is torture. I can digest multiple in depth articles in the same time it takes to watch 30-minutes of TV news which barely skirts the surface of any issue.
You might not be an outlier in your world, but my side hobby of reading and commenting is certainly extremely rare in mine.
Ok, but how does this explain recent trends? The sense that the disocurse in general and academia in particular is far less tolerant and more fearful than two decades ago? Do you suggests that it’s not? That “cancel culture” was always there (or not there) to the same extent, or do you acknowledge a likely change? If the latter, how to explain it? “Publish or perish” has been around for 50 years or more, far predating the “cancel culture” crisis of the last decade. What gives ?
I think the key thing is that *different* things now cause people to be ostracized than in the past. 30 years ago it was considered a scandal for a public facing person to be gay, for example.
Not in academia, it wasn’t… more seriously though- the ostracizing of gays was really really bad. I don’t accept the defeatist attitude that we must be resign to some form of unjust and harmful oppression in our society, and that the best we can hope for is for the small blanket being shifting to and fro. Society *has* become better and can become better still, and we should aim for no less.
I mean, it seems pretty unavoidable that if gay people stop being ostracized and become accepted, then homophobes will start to become ostracized. It’s hard to see how you can be fully accepting and supportive of both a group and people who hate that group.
False equivalence. Opposing intolerance isn’t intolerant, quite the contrary. However what OP seems to me to be saying is that we should expect a more or less static level of genuine intolerance/oppression in our society merely with the target shifting. I disagree. We have become an overall more tolerant and open society and can and should become more tolerant still. If there has been setback or regression in certain areas we should fight vigorously to rectify it, not be resigned to accept it as inevitable.
I agree about tolerance, but having grown up in a conservative religious community (evangelical Christian), I can say with confidence that you are wrong about this being a false equivalence.
From the standpoint of the people whose previous intolerance was condoned by society, the shift to opposing intolerance is absolutely, 100% perceived as a shift of intolerance in their direction. They understand--correctly--that if I say, "intolerance of gay people is a 'bad' thing that we should endeavor to end in our society," that I am saying that THEY engage in bad behavior and that my goal is to CHANGE their behavior, or at least to eliminate it through attrition. Your whole thing of "we are more tolerant today and should endeavor to become even more tolerant tomorrow" is a direct attack. After all, it logically follows that they 1) are "wrong," and maybe even "bad," in their intolerance and 2) should have less social / cultural / political power tomorrow than they have today.
It's never enough to say, "listen, I'm very tolerant, and I welcome everyone, so as long as you go practice your ugly bigotry over in the corner and not hurt anyone else, we're all good here. You are free to eat sh!t and die as you please, so long as you do not bother anyone else." People aren't stupid. They correctly understand that following those instructions will hasten the demise of their own movement.
Don't get me wrong: I welcome that demise. But it's silly to act like there are no stakes here.
Depends which part of academia.
I think there are a couple of issues. I am about to dash off and take a midterm, but I'll try to comment later. In general, though, I think that it has to do with the combination of two factors: relative visibility for academics is up (it's easier to spread your ideas), but competition for the jobs is also way up (because relative decline in birth rates is squeezing college undergraduate population even as relative increase in working lifetime means that people hang in the jobs for longer before retirement).
Don't forget the end of mandatory retirement age for professors.
TBH, I take issue with the premise: I don't think you can reasonably argue that the discourse in general and academia in particular is less tolerant today and more fearful than two decades ago. Even a cursory Mark 1 Eyeball screen of the faculty lists at every institution I have attended or worked at suggests that it was much easier twenty years ago to flatly discriminate against disfavored groups in any particular institution than it is today. I base this on the simple observation that the older faculty in departments tend, on average, to be much more homogenous than the newer faculty.
In some sense, honestly, I think this explains some of the perception of rising intolerance. People are in the room to b!tch today who twenty years ago simply could not do that because they literally were not in the conversation to begin with. I don't think that's the whole story, but I think it is a significant part of it.
Addendum edit: I think "the room" has more people both because of social media and because of gains in hiring diversity. And I think it also conforms to my earlier comment, which is that in some sense "the room" has simultaneously expanded (social media) AND shrunk (shrinking undergrad enrollment and job pool) at more or less the precise moment, producing some predictably ugly outcomes in line with the incentives you would predict under those circumstances.