Quo Vadis GOP?

[Jacob]

There doesn't have to be an equivalency.  When you're attacked on two fronts, one of the fronts can be a whole lot more dangerous than the other, but that doesn't mean that you can just leave the other front unmanned.

How would you say you divide your effort? 50-50 between fighting wokism and fighting the reactionaries? Or are you putting more effort into one of the fronts?

[DGuller]

There doesn't have to be an equivalency.  When you're attacked on two fronts, one of the fronts can be a whole lot more dangerous than the other, but that doesn't mean that you can just leave the other front unmanned.

How would you say you divide your effort? 50-50 between fighting wokism and fighting the reactionaries? Or are you putting more effort into one of the fronts?

I'm never in a position where I have to allocate my efforts, at any given time I either face one or the other, but never both at the same time.  And in any case, one soldier rarely serves multiple fronts at the same time, and just because someone guards the lesser front doesn't mean that they don't consider the larger front unimportant.

[The Minsky Moment]

Wokism is a bogeyman, it has no institutional power.  What branch of government is under its sway?  But the hard right has the Speaker of the House by the balls, its hands on the throat of the Supreme Court, and is in striking distance of the White House.  3 strikes, democracy is out.

Wokism can barely make itself felt in the faculty lounge, but Orbanism is a real possibility in the USA in the very near future.  There is no equivalency.

There are forms of institutional power other than the government, such as academia and journalism.

I addressed that.  Wokism is far overrated in its influence on both, especially in journalism.  And neither of those institutions has the power and impact of the big 3 branches.

[The Minsky Moment]

DG check out the posts just above re Desantis.  Even in academia, where the woke hordes have their greatest supposed power, it's far more likely that a prof will get fired for failing to satisfy the right wing ideological purity test than for getting someone's pronouns mixed up

[viper37]

Wokism is a bogeyman, it has no institutional power.  What branch of government is under its sway?  But the hard right has the Speaker of the House by the balls, its hands on the throat of the Supreme Court, and is in striking distance of the White House.  3 strikes, democracy is out.

Wokism can barely make itself felt in the faculty lounge, but Orbanism is a real possibility in the USA in the very near future.  There is no equivalency.

There are forms of institutional power other than the government, such as academia and journalism.

I addressed that.  Wokism is far overrated in its influence on both, especially in journalism.  And neither of those institutions has the power and impact of the big 3 branches.

Depends where you live.  It is certainly overrated as a threat in Florida and Texas.  I have much more fear from Conservative book burnings.  Elsewhere is relative.

[Admiral Yi]

I addressed that.  Wokism is far overrated in its influence on both, especially in journalism.  And neither of those institutions has the power and impact of the big 3 branches.

I challenged you on your assertion that wokeism has *no* institutional power.

[DGuller]

DG check out the posts just above re Desantis.  Even in academia, where the woke hordes have their greatest supposed power, it's far more likely that a prof will get fired for failing to satisfy the right wing ideological purity test than for getting someone's pronouns mixed up

I've said this plenty of times before, but I'll say it again: the chilling effect of free speech suppression is not measured by the bodycount, it's measured by the amount of speech suppressed.  Sometimes the chilling effect is so effective and so credible that you don't actually have to set a lot of examples to make everyone comply.

I would guess that in the Soviet Union, not a whole lot of people got executed for telling Stalin to suck his own dick.  That doesn't mean that Soviet citizens were free to tell Stalin to suck his own dick.  An alternative explanation could be that they understood that it would be a dangerous thing to do even without seeing other people being executed for telling Stalin to suck his own dick, and they decided self-censor instead.

[Josquius]

Except we aren't talking about consequences for insulting the leader here. That sort of thing lies far more down the republican authoritarian path.
We are talking about simply not being a dick to people for being LGBT, black, women, etc...
And no, this isn't just for one time failing to use the right pronoun or whatever. It's going out of your way to be a serious dick.
I see no problem with this being understood to be a norm of behaviour.

[Admiral Yi]

We are talking about simply not being a dick to people for being LGBT, black, women, etc...
And no, this isn't just for one time failing to use the right pronoun or whatever. It's going out of your way to be a serious dick.
I see no problem with this being understood to be a norm of behaviour.

a serious dick according to who?

[The Larch]

[garbon]

Rather than just look at our standard re-hash, I went in search of other sources. I thought the following were interesting to look at.

Research done about American awareness and attitudes toward cancel culture ahead of the 2020 election:
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/05/19/americans-and-cancel-culture-where-some-see-calls-for-accountability-others-see-censorship-punishment/

Right wing take on cancel culture:
https://www.thebulwark.com/our-nasty-stupid-frivolous-cancel-culture-fights-that-were-lucky-enough-to-have/

Two people debating cancel culture:
https://reason.com/2020/08/04/whats-the-best-way-to-protect-free-speech-ken-white-and-greg-lukianoff-debate-cancel-culture/

On that last one, I think this bit best aligns with my thinking:

Greg asserts that free speech culture "gave us the First Amendment in the 18th century" and "kept free speech alive." That culture has always been more aspirational than actual. The free speech culture that produced the First Amendment also promptly produced the Alien and Sedition Acts. The dawn of the modern age and mass media gave us broad justifications for censorship of political speech, cultural repression, and suppression of minority views and values.

Though Americans support free speech in the abstract, that support often breaks down when we are confronted with specific examples of speech we don't like. The history of the First Amendment is a history of Americans struggling mightily against other Americans trying to silence them. If free speech is in our national DNA, so is censorship.

That's a fundamental flaw in the current popular cancel culture narrative. It suggests, expressly or implicitly, that America enjoyed some golden age of cultural tolerance for speech. But did we? Did we really? If so, when was it? I submit that there was never such an age, and that unpopular views have always met with social and economic repercussions in America.

We can strive to do better, but we shouldn't distort history by claiming that people now are more censorious than they were before. We can argue, for instance, that Americans should be able to express disapproval of gay marriage without losing their jobs—but that shouldn't lead us to suggest that America was previously a safe place to express pro-gay views, when it manifestly was not.

Why does this matter? It matters because the loudest voices condemning cancel culture in America are not people of good faith like Greg. The loudest voices are using the issue as a cynical political wedge from the right to attack the left.

They're the same voices who try to get people fired for speech when that speech is offensive to them, when that speech comes from the left. The "golden era" concept—the suggestion that there was a better time for social tolerance of speech in America, and it's now been spoiled by millennials and progressives—is not just wrong, it's nakedly partisan, and it's part of the same effort to make free speech culture into a political weapon.

...

So, for instance, if you're concerned that widespread condemnation of a professor's column chills speech, you might ask at the same time whether the professor's description of student activists as a "terrorist organization" was also chilling. More speech is free speech, entitled to the same legal and cultural protection as the speech to which it responds. A philosophy that criticizes one to the exclusion of the other will not convince Americans.

[The Brain]

I think the argument that things were bad before therefore it's OK if things are bad today is fairly weak.

[Josquius]

We are talking about simply not being a dick to people for being LGBT, black, women, etc...
And no, this isn't just for one time failing to use the right pronoun or whatever. It's going out of your way to be a serious dick.
I see no problem with this being understood to be a norm of behaviour.

a serious dick according to who?

The typical empathy of a regular functional human adult.

[garbon]

I think the argument that things were bad before therefore it's OK if things are bad today is fairly weak.

But that's not what he said.

[garbon]

I also saw this:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1532673X221087601

From a quick look seems they were looking at connection between free speech support and cancel culture rhetoric by partisan affiliation through use of vignettes where they alternated antifa and proud boys.