The cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel Live! by ABC, in response to comments made by the Chair of the FDC, is an example of government coercion. The pressure put on ABC by Brendan Carr, and Donald Trump’s celebration of Kimmel’s departure were classic authoritarian manoeuvres and, given the central importance of the First Amendment in US Culture, deeply un-American.
My former colleague Suzanne Nossell, erstwhile CEO at PEN America, wrote a Los Angeles Times op-ed lamenting the “dark turn of American democracy.”
Some of us warned that this would happen. In response, I posted the following:
I must say this feels like a hideous “I told you so” moment. Progressive free speech campaigners spent the last few years listening to our allies in social justice movement trot out mantras like “freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences” or “it’s not my job to educate you” and sharing that annoying xkcd comic about ‘showing you the door’ somehow not being a kind of censorship.
Well, now we are belatedly realising that freedom of speech does mean freedom from consequences. It means the freedom to speak offensively without being sacked. It means, and always did mean, the freedom to listen to offensive (radical, fringe, dissident) people as well. Only now do we remember.
When I was at PEN I noticed that those who had lived under dictators we never so glib about free speech. They understood that one could not equivocate. They never participated in the decadent sophistry over why it was OK to cancel the shock jocks, or why it was OK to refuse to debate people you disagreed with, or why it was OK to boycott the PEN gala because some Israelis were invited.
Political commentator and statistician Nate Silver echoes that rant:
Progressive cancel culture vultures. What did y’all think cancellation meant? Did you not realize the very tools and techniques you championed could be turned against you? Do you even have the object permanence of a goldfish?
He also draws a pertinent comparison between the current febrile political atmosphere, and that of the discourse immediately post 9/11, which marked “a transition into a darker timeline for the United States after the triumph of winning the Cold War. The political climate was as conservative as any I experienced in my lifetime.” He reminds us that even the Dixie Chicks were ‘cancelled’, before the pendulum swung in the other direction and the social justice left acquired an enthusiasm for cancel culture. He adds:
“Here’s one perhaps novel observation, though. I’ve detected that liberals who came of age politically during the post-9/11 years — so roughly people in their 40s now — tended to be more wary about progressive cancel culture when it reached its apex in approximately 2020. In part, that may be because they remember when it was conservatives who were doing the canceling after 9/11. What goes around in politics tends to come around.”
We might observe at this point that if the ‘pendulum’ metaphor I deployed above is correct, then at some point in the next few years, we might hope for another swing back towards liberalism, pluralism and human rights. However, we should remember that political pendulums (‘pendula’?) do not swing back due to the laws of physics but because activists do the work to persuade their citizens. Freedom of expression is the first and most important tool for this task. Those who expressed skepticism at its usefulness should recant, and begin talking to the “deplorables” they need to persuade.