Do a little dance
When I began writing about privilege call-outs and purity-politics sanctimony, in the early 2000s/2010s, I had a vague sense that these things were bad for the causes they ostensibly promoted. I was, am, a Democrat. I saw what I was doing as cultural commentary, not urgent antifascist activism, and was observing a phenomenon around me that seemed politically counterproductive but also just annoying, and it was the “annoying” part I was more interested in.
Then Trump got the nomination, in 2016, and I thought, crap. The political bit was as I thought but much worse. A candidate who allowed people who (rightly or wrongly) felt silenced to live vicariously. I have defined cancel culture as being the thing where everyone, including people who are not politicians, is held to / holding themselves to the standards to which one holds politicians. (Any skeletons in the closet? Any bad tweets from a decade ago? Any hints of not being relatable?) Well! Here was an actual top-level politician saying to hell with all that. I didn’t vote for him, to put it mildly. I also see how he capitalized on a moment.
The cultural mood I had hoped, but also feared, for my own idiosyncratic book-publishing reasons, had crested circa 2015, was in fact just picking up steam. Ways of communicating I’d witnessed in niche environments i.e. blog-comment or newspaper-comment threads were now happening on a different scale on social media. #MeToo and “shitty media men” gave way to the 2020 race reckonings and girlboss downfalls and Karen videos.
There were people (who were they? journalists? social media personalities?) on the hunt for trace amounts of transphobia, for inadvertent misgenderings, for people liking a tweet by someone who had the wrong or ‘wrong’ views on this topic.
One sensed that there were also actual bigots out there (and were there ever!!), but tremendous energies kept being channelled towards making people who were rather obvious non-bigots feel bad about themselves and make public statements to that effect only to be told that their apologies were inadequate.
Anyway, when I was asked to sign the Harper’s letter (SORRY I cannot believe I’m bringing this up again and would not absent good reasons) I saw that this was about progressive sanctimony as left illiberalism facilitating a more-dangerous right-wing Trumpian illiberalism and was like yes, this is what I think, I will sign. No I didn’t know who (apart from a handful of names that sounded like serious people but not necessarily famous ones) would be on it.
Anyway, I STILL think the sensibility of the long 2010s explains some of how Trump happened. And it’s precisely because I’m not happy about it, either that I don’t cower when the folks of Bluesky (of whom some appear to be anime avatar keyboard warrior bot variety, but others are definitely real people, some of whom I otherwise like and respect) insist that all the fuss about ‘those Oberlin kids complaining about culturally appropriative sandwiches’ should have been directed at INCIPIENT FASCISM and isn’t it really that Harper’s letter crowd whodunit where Trump is concerned and also Bari Weiss Bari Weiss Bari Weiss BARI WEISS??? I do think it matters why Trump happened and am not about to apologize for having had the wrong priorities back in the day when I don’t think I did. I mean also I’m not an activist, that was not the sort of intervention I was doing to begin with, but while there are things I’d phrase differently for unrelated reasons, I don’t think I was wrong, so I’m not going to mea culpa here on command!
Two things. One: I don’t think the annoyances of the 2010s, aka my then-pet-topic, or one of them, are, singlehandedly, why Trump. I would like to see a truce of sorts according to which Team Sanctimony and Team Liberal ‘Antiwoke’ could agree that we are neither of us as responsible as, you know, the people who either are or are supporting the Trump administration.
Two: Insofar as I feel like I have a responsibility to speak out about things in the States at the moment (let me not be grand and pretentious about this, nobody cares what I think, but I have some platform, but, in Canada, but, I’m also American), I see it as being about the Trump administration. I don’t belong to some kind of ‘set’ or ‘crowd’ of whom I’m keeper. There was never this thing, there were a bunch of disparate people who agreed in 2020 with a letter, who were all up to different things prior to and have gone in all manner of directions after the fact. We never, like, met. I don’t believe I have any kind of ethical obligation to know what everyone on an open letter I also signed, or wrote for a publication I’ve written for, or liked the same tweet I did in 2014, has been up to since.
Do the many people incessantly dropping her name in my mentions imagine I have a direct line to Bari Weiss? It’s my sense that no they don’t think this.
I used to think what was happening was, these are people mad at BW and, understanding her to be An Important and me not to be, they direct their letters of complaint to someone they get BW-ish vibes from, but who seems more approachable/baitable.
Now I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s that they want to see me dance.
The idea that no-one in America voted for Obama, witnessed the rise of the illiberal left, and wound up voting for Trump is definitely false. I know three people off the top of my head who did exactly that. I admit it’s confusing, but that’s one reason the whole “heterodox” sphere came into existence - to grapple with the strange times we were in.
For what it's worth, as one of the people who joked about the Oberlin bahn mi thing yesterday, I neither insist that you should've instead spent any time sounding the alarm about INCIPIENT FASCISM nor care about your signing the Harper's Letter or whatever connection you may or may not have to Bari Weiss or any other people who have made heterodoxism a key part of their personal brand as professional 'comentators on culture.'
Marie Le Conte wrote a piece a year ago
(https://youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/the-one-where-we-realise-we-dont)
that wrestles with this same question of what role Online Wokescoldery played in the rise of Trump. I think you and her both describe a pattern of behavior that clearly did manifest and clearly did make unpleasant the lives of some number of people.
What I continue to find unconvincing is the leap from 'some really annoying online lefties decided to brigade people for funsies in the name of doing a social justice' to 'this resulted in a non-negligible number of people who were otherwise neutral or even negative toward Trump to embrace him instead.'
Look, I'm a huge believer in negative polarization, it is absolutely one of the most salient drivers of politics and culture today. But by far the most voluminous and vicious of this type of behavior happened on... Tumblr, where everyone involved was, ah, not a regular person. As ever, the vast majority of people victimized by anti-social leftists are... themselves leftists, or at least not-conservative enough to be in similar spaces and care about that sort of dogpiling. It's much more difficult - and usually judged not worth the effort - for the Too Online to cyberbully someone who isn't online in some significant way, and conservatives don't care about what the commies think about them anyway.
I see parallels to the Russian attempts at social engineering with respect to the 2016 election. Sure, it actually happened, they did throw a bunch of stuff against the wall. But I just don't see any real evidence that this moved any significant number of people toward Trump, as opposed to just providing ammo for those already anti-woke.