Recall, if you can bear to, the summer of 2020, when we were all stuck at home watching the world’s most powerful country losing its mind. During a space of a few weeks, the following things happened:
New York Times opinion editor James Bennet was forced to step down after running an editorial from a senator arguing that the Federal Government needed to intervene to stop the spreading disorder. Journalists from the paper posted on social media that this put black colleagues ‘in danger’.
Rev Daniel Patrick Moloney, a chaplain at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, resigned after saying that George Floyd’s life was not virtuous and that his death wasn’t caused by racism.
Californian man Emmanuel Cafferty lost his job as a lorry driver because some people believed that by cracking his knuckles he was secretly making a white power ‘OK’ sign. The fact that he’s Mexican-American didn’t dissuade his pursuers.
University of California professor Gordon Klein was suspended for refusing to mark black students more leniently.
Tiffany Riley, a headteacher in Vermont, lost her job after writing: ‘I firmly believe that Black Lives Matter, but I DO NOT agree with the coercive measures taken to get to this point across; some of which are falsified in an attempt to prove a point. While I want to get behind BLM, I do not think people should be made to feel they have to choose black race over human race.’ This was ‘tone deaf’, apparently.
CrossFit CEO Greg Glassman had to step down after dismissing the idea that racism was a ‘public health issue’ during a period of lockdown, questioning the wisdom of mass gatherings during a pandemic, and asking why the company should be making statements about George Floyd’s death.
Broadcaster Grant Napear was forced to resign after tweeting ‘ALL LIVES MATTER’, when asked his opinion of BLM.
Professor Greg Patton was investigated and forced to ‘step away’ from his job teaching Chinese because he spoke a word in that language which sounded like a certain racial slur.
Political analyst David Shor lost his job for showing data suggesting that riots would hurt the Democrats in elections; this was also ‘tone deaf’, apparently.
Howard Uhlig, a distinguished professor of macroeconomics, also lost his job, as editor of the Journal of Political Economy, after questioning the wisdom of defunding the police - several thousand deaths later, it’s fair to say he won the argument.
Michael Korenberg lost his position on the board of the University of British Columbia for liking tweets by Dinesh D’Souza and Ann Coulter.
Lt. William Kelly lost his job as a police officer after donating $25 to Kyle Rittenhouse’s defence fund; Rittenhouse was later cleared.
Midfielder Aleksandar Katai, a player for LA Galaxy, was released by the club after posts his wife made about BLM protesters.
Even in Britain, a number of people lost their jobs over the summer, including Manx radio host Stu Peters who questioned the idea of white privilege and said that ‘all lives matter’.
Five years later and much has changed, with America’s cultural revolution reaching a sort of Thermidorian Reaction, or perhaps something darker. Indeed, following the murder of Charlie Kirk in Utah last week, the Guardian anticipated the Trump regime’s response by citing a quirky, little-known period in European history: 1930s Germany. If all you have is antifascism, then everything will look like a Hitler.
Just as predictably, I turn to my favourite historical analogy, the world of late antiquity and the first culture war between pagans and Christians. After decades of social revolution spurred by the new religion, an emperor came to power pledging to bring Rome back to the old gods; Donald Trump might not be the perfect match for Julian the Apostate, a learned and thoughtful man, although the intellectual vice-president might be, and if history truly repeated it would be Robert Kennedy Junior reversing the cultural revolution of his uncle.
Julian’s counter-revolution couldn’t be achieved without removing Christians from elite positions. Most important was the job of countering Nazarene influence in education, where the new faith had gained such dominance that ageing followers of the old religion feared that their children were being indoctrinated.
Julian removed the immunities, or tax exemptions, that his uncle Constantine had granted Christian preachers; he reserved the right to control education appointments and banned Christian schools from teaching the classics, believing that they were using the pagan writers to undermine the old faith: ‘If they want to learn literature, they have Luke and Mark: Let them go back to their churches and expound on them.’ This had the secondary effect of leaving Christian-schooled children with an inadequate education, so incentivising parents to take their kids elsewhere. He also oversaw a two-tier system of justice, punishing Christians harshly for the slightest offence against pagans, while turning a blind eye to similar violence committed against them.
He didn’t need to ban Christianity outright, which would have been impractical and alarming; outright persecution had only seemed to strengthen the faith by giving it a series of martyrs. Instead, he could just put his finger on the scales enough so that strong social incentives were in place to make it harder to be a Christian in public life. It was a top-down reaction to a new faith which had grown dominant in most institutions, and had enjoyed the unfair advantage of state patronage.
In the past few decades our own culture war has followed a similar path. The new religion has been spread and enforced by a mixture of legal enforcement and social pressure, the former coming in the form of civil rights laws outlined by Christopher Caldwell in The Age of Entitlement, which placed a hand on the scales of politics in the workplace. It also became established through a form of social shaming that has come to be name ‘cancel culture’, the use of public humiliation and punishment-firings as a means of ideological conformity. Caldwell recalled the case of Al Campanis, a baseball manager who lost his job in 1987 over ‘racially insensitive’ comments, as the first stirrings of what would become known as political correctness in the early 1990s.
Political correctness was in essence two things, although it was hard to know where one ended and the other began: on the one hand, a desire to use more sensitive and ‘inclusive’ language’; and at the same time, a more authoritarian urge to enforce the correct thoughts. The two worked together; after all, if people lack the language to articulate heretical beliefs, how could they express or even think them? When antediluvian reactionaries complained that ‘you can’t say anything these days’, this dual meaning allowed the politically correct to retreat to the defensive motte of ‘it’s just politeness’.
As Caldwell observed, political correctness disappeared from the discourse not because it lost but because it won; it helped push the political imbalance in academia from the 1990s, which by the early 2010s had left some university departments entirely devoid of dissenting voices (there were other factors, not least the failure of academic salaries to match house price inflation). This imbalance helped spur the second, more dramatic burst of political correctness that came to be called the Great Awokening, and which exploded in 2013 and 2014.
The new radicalism also reflected demographic changes among both students and faculty: men are more likely to favour free speech over ‘safety’, so as academia became more female-dominated, it also grew less tolerant. White men in particular are the most supportive of free speech, and a more diverse student body had less time for such stale, male and pale ideas as articulated by the dead white men of English-speaking liberalism (many of whom, among them David Hume and Thomas Jefferson, would be among the primary targets of progressive damnatio memoriae campaigns). Even this fact couldn’t be expressed without censure, because of progressivism’s immense taboo about average group differences.
It was extremely effective. As Rob Henderson wrote ‘At its peak, cancel culture functioned as a sophisticated enforcement system. The tactic was simple: make examples of high-profile figures to frighten everyone else into silence…. The fear was clearest among the highly educated. A 2019 Cato/YouGov survey found that 25 per cent of those with a high school education worried about job risks over their politics. The figure rose to 34 per cent for university graduates and an astonishing 44 per cent for those with postgraduate degrees. The higher your education, the better you understood the rules of the game and the cost of breaking them.’
Many people who should have known better supported the basic nobility of the cause - until they were cancelled. During the mid-2010s a number of celebrities and commentators approvingly shared a cartoon which featured a character explaining that ‘the right to free speech means the government can’t arrest you for what you say’, but ‘if you’re yelled at, boycotted, have your show cancelled, or get banned from an internet community, your free speech rights aren’t being violated. It’s just that the people listening think that you’re an asshole, and they’re showing you the door.’
The atmosphere of intolerance spread beyond American campuses, and by the end of the decade there were dozens, hundreds of Campanis, not just in the US but across the wider Roman Empire English-speaking world. This reached a nadir in the summer of 2020, and the hysteria following George Floyd’s death, when countless people lost their jobs for the slightest deviations from orthodoxy.
Cancel culture, as Eric Kaufmann showed in his book Taboo, was not popular with either the American or British public, except with two key demographics: those who identified as ‘very liberal’ (ie illiberal progressives and socialists), and, more alarmingly, the young: in both Britain and the US, just over two-thirds of people aged 18-25 supported Google sacking James Damore for his note pointing out that women were less likely to be software engineers in part for biological reasons. Just 35 per cent of older Americans agreed, and only 25 per cent of their British equivalents. Damore was almost certainly correct, and I don’t doubt that the people who fired him were fully aware of the science.
This generational turn against traditional liberalism alarmed many people, and gave a sense that something must be wrong in the education system, but no one is entirely sure about the mechanism. Is the political imbalance among academics and school teachers indoctrinating the young, or is it the very essence of university, where young people are removed from family life and local community and develop a sort of class-cohort identity, the driver? Whatever the cause, this is the same issue which troubled middle-aged Romans in the fourth century.
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