The ‘cancel culture’ myth was always about censoring the center-to-left

Episode Summary  

For decades, the American far-right has been screeching constantly that its activists and politicians are being censored by “cancel culture.” It’s nonsense, of course, because almost invariably everyone who supposed canceled ends up with a huge media following and a very profitable victim narrative.

But the lies about mass censorship of reactionaries and conservatives aren’t just about manipulating the public into feeling sympathy for completely unsympathetic figures like Donald Trump. They’re also about power.

In the so-called marketplace of ideas, right-wing ideas lost decades ago. Among many other things, well-educated people know that race is a social construct, that transgender people have existed for centuries, and that America’s most-influential founders were not Christian nationalists. Reactionaries have failed to make their case, and this is the main reason they don’t get hired by universities. You can’t have a credible biology department if “creation science” is the mandated policy. Anthropologists pushing discredited “race science” are regarded as disturbed freaks, and rightfully so.

But instead of trying to come up with some better ideas, like they’d have to in an actual meritocracy, the American far right has decided to force them into the public square. This is what the cancel culture narrative is all about, establishing a false scenario to justify the gigantic censorship regime that the second Trump White House is establishing.

Outside of the United States, right-wing parties have been envying the success Republicans have had, and they are applying the lessons to their own countries. Unfortunately, the mainstream media in other countries have not learned anything from the mistakes of American journalists in falling for these deceptions.

Will the left in the United States and elsewhere ever be able to effectively counter these manipulations? And are the people at the top even aware of what’s going on? We discuss it on today’s episode with Adrian Daub, the author of a book on the subject called The Cancel Culture Panic. He’s also a professor of humanities at Stanford University and the host of the podcast “In Bed With the Right.”

The video of our December 3, 2024 discussion is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full page.

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Related Content

—Trump targets ‘improper ideology’ at Smithsonian museums

—How the Trump administration is attacking science and scholarly merit at the National Institutes of Health

—The forgotten history of how Republican college students invented canceling people

—Inside the right-wing plan to ‘seize control of the administrative state’

—University administrators are totally ill-equipped for Trump’s massive censorship regime

—Trump, Nietzsche, and the collapse of the Republican mind

—Inspired by Trump, reactionary comedians are the most popular media figures in the Republican party

—Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA are building a reactionary cult for young people, does anyone on the center-left care?

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

07:17 — Why 'cancel culture' rhetoric is more about affirmative action for illogical reactionary opinions

13:00 — Right-wing campus speakers are performance artists rather than academics

19:11 — Campus speech surveys rarely ask if people are afraid to disclose marginalized identities

22:39 — William F. Buckley Jr. and "God and Man at Yale"

28:12 — Insincere 'censorship' arguments as a hack of liberal epistemology

33:01 — Cancel culture narratives are about masking real power through fake populism

36:31 — Alan Bloom and "The Closing of the American Mind"

42:14 — Libertarianism and hierarchy in American politics

47:26 — Lies about cancel culture as permission structures for reactionary repression

57:39 — Conclusion

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So let's focus our discussion here at the beginning about the premise of your book. Lay that out for us real quickly, if you could, please.

ADRIAN DAUB: Yeah, so the idea is it's a story of or a history of the worry about cancel culture in U.S. media. And the argument is really threefold that one there is this longstanding discussion within the U.S. tends to start on the right, but then almost always makes its way to the center. That is that basically proposes that there is this rising tide of left wing liberalism or left wing censoriousness.

And that cancel culture is basically the latest iteration of that. My book tries to show with what data we have available, that's very likely overstated. That is to say, that's not to say that there aren't people who have bad things happen to them on college campuses or in media based on what they say.

It does mean that the picture, if you look closely is a lot less a lot less obvious and a lot less. Monolithic, then sort of narratives about cancel culture would make it seem right. That is to say, when you hear cancel culture, at least until recently, people would think, well, this is from the left.

This is from young people. This has to do with online spaces. This has to do with wokeness, right? And that it does exist. But it turns out that kind of occludes much larger swaths of, things that we might, call cancellation, but we usually don't. That come from, state legislatures from Ron DeSantis, what have you, right?

So that's the first part of the argument. The second part of the argument is that this debate really, unlike the earlier panic over political correctness, which [00:04:00] very much resembles, is something that didn't sort of get cooked up. In right wing spaces and then kind of jumped over this one traveled the opposite way it from the very beginning appeal to a kind of, I mean, some people might say reactionary centrist or, center right, kind of,

SHEFFIELD: I call it conservative liberalism.

DAUB: Yeah, exactly. Right. Like a, it started in the pages of the Atlantic and the New York times far more than it did on Breitbart or Fox News or whatever. And due to that fact, it sort of very quickly made its way across the globe and mostly as a print phenomenon, that is to say, before it's, not, it's a story about social media, but it's not a social, a story about social media that traveled through social media. It really is a story about social media that traveled.

From the New York Times to Le Figaro in France, or to Die Welt in Germany, or to The Times in the UK, right? It becomes a kind of story about print journalism, and for a print magazine. Journalism audience, which is also to say that this is not really a freak out among people that we might think of as low information or might be in a kind of, or we sort of classically think are in a media bubble.

These are people who are very interested, who are very well read, who consume media exactly the way, we're all supposed to consume media and none of us. Do any more right. By like picking up a paper in the morning. And yet I would argue that they're being fed something very close to disinformation when it comes to cancel culture stories.

And then the third point is that what this really enables is a, bunch of breaking down barriers. There is a, it's a libertarian story. In an age where kind of libertarianism is making common cause with something far more authoritarian. It is a, as I say, a center, right? Panic. At an age when, especially in Europe, the center right is becoming more and [00:06:00] more curious towards the far right or the populist right.

It is a panic for an age in which people not just on the right, but probably particularly on the right kind of have to, they wear two hats. They wear a hat, a populist hat and a institutionalist hat, right? On the one hand. Still have a residual respect for institutions that they nevertheless think have been degraded by You know the woke mind virus or whatever So it's it is this panic for an age in which A bunch of things that used to structure our politics rather clearly Are breaking down And it allows people to sort of not Have to make a decision.

It's a sort of yes. And kind of panic a place where you can you don't have to pick whether you're a populist or an institutionalist. You can just be both. You don't have to pick whether you're libertarian or whether you really want those wokesters put in their place by some good old fashioned government intervention.

You can do both, right? So it is a panic that catches a large segment of the population exactly where they're at. Where they would have to make some pretty troubling choices. Cancer culture is a way or yelling about cancer culture and about the young wokesters that promote it is a way to not have to make those choices.

Why 'cancel culture' rhetoric is more about affirmative action for illogical reactionary opinions

SHEFFIELD: I mean, you could call that a dual choice, but also you could call it hypocrisy. And I mean, that's that sort of, innate hypocrisy is, it is endemic ultimately to reactionary thought because it reactionary thought isn't full thinking. It is an epistemology, a self-centered epistemology in which things are, to quote Stephen Colbert, his character, ‘that things are true because I believe them.’ And and that was what he meant in the context of “truthiness.”

I mean, it's deeply ironic and unfortunate that [00:08:00] he was absolutely correctly describing what you're talking about here, and people on the left just thought it was a joke. But he was like, seriously describing the problem that we were up against, and nobody paid attention other than to think it was funny.

DAUB: I think that's right. I think that there is I know that in your work, you think a lot about the, what do you call the dual fundamentalisms of politics and faith, and I think that in some way, Cancel culture kind of, or the worry about cancel culture fits into that really nicely.

It's sort of the latest attempt to feign dynamism where there is none, right? There's the, this, language game always proposes there's this conservative position that's not being allowed expression and not expressing it is sort of hampering, the progress of science, of free inquiry, et cetera, et cetera.

But if you drill down, the conservative position really, Hasn't changed. Right? The ever evolving specter of the censorious left is sort of the correlate of the things you're supposedly no longer able to say but that are really never changing. Right? That, that basically, it, the newness of the threat.

It's supposed to lend novelty to ideas that if you drill down, we're, the same in 1995 or 1985, even. Right. Like,

I, was censored for saying the thing I wanted to say. What is the thing you wanted to say? Oh, it's basically the bell curve. And you're like, okay, wow. We're still doing this. Have you gotten new material?

Right. Like it is a way to re to rejuvenate material that is on the verge of going stale.

SHEFFIELD: Well, it is. Yeah. And it's it's like, and, but it is the only way that they can have their ideas even discussed at all, because I mean, that's, is the kind of root cause of this rhetorical technique is that they, and I can say this as a former religious [00:10:00] conservative and a former secular conservative myself, that, deep down all of them know. That their ideas are insupportable. They know that what they believe is not true. They know that, the, that they can have no, that they have no proof that the earth was created in 6, 000 years. They know that while they feel like that women are dumber than men they know that they don't really have any proof of that. And, like, and they know that when, when, they make, panics about transgender people. They know that there are basically no transgender athletes in the world. the, percentage, the number of people affected by a trans athlete, in their locker room is probably less than a hundred in the entire United States. They know that's true, but it's just, this is like, it is the ultimate kind of quota thinking. Like, that's the deep irony of their, posture is they want affirmative action for

DAUB: Yeah, exactly.

SHEFFIELD: Essentially what they're arguing is that our idea, we can't prove our ideas are true, so we're going to make them true politically through power of the state.

DAUB: Yeah, I think that's right. I think there is a tendency to, want, there's this picture, especially around college campuses that all ideas ought to be, heard and that there's a good in having every idea heard out on a college campus.

And like, it's one of those ideas that like has a kind of surface plausibility. You think like that, if there's something that's widely held in society, it ought to be, at least talked about on university campuses. So I don't have like a huge problem with that. At the same time, if you drill down to it, you think, well, no the university is in some way a huge selection machine, right?

There are certain things that they study and that they, that things that they don't study. There are there are questions that are open, that [00:12:00] scholars Open up for debate and then that, that you and I, when we're not in that field, might think like, this is crazy. Why are they debating this? What, are strings?

I'm sorry. And conversely things that you and I might find really interesting and that a specialist in that field might say like, oh, This is kind of settled. We've decided to, or we've even decided that the debate doesn't go anywhere and we Have moved on to other things, right? So universities are by and large selection machines when it comes to where they put their attention and scholarly inquiry and And again, like, as you say, like, the people who make these kind of bad faith attacks on the universities know that they just want their things to be in the mix, right?

And so they said, like, well, everything, all positions should be reflected on college campuses, and they don't believe that. I can easily,

SHEFFIELD: Well, and through their own behavior, they show they don't believe that.

DAUB: But even the ones that, let's say, sure, you have the Ron DeSantis of the world who are like, everything needs to be taught except for gender studies.

Like, well, okay, it feels like a mild inconsistency there, bucko.

Right-wing campus speakers are performance artists rather than academics

DAUB: But even the people who say like, who claim to take an absolutely libertarian stance on this, I think tend to not fully agree with that. Grapple with the fact that of course I could come up with a speaker invitation that they wouldn't want, right?

Of course we could bring someone we could organize an event right now at you know Any University in the United States where an administrator would say like I feel like someone's gonna get killed I feel like I don't see the value in this like is this supposed to be funny? Is this performance art that you're even inviting this person, right?

And, or where the framing is so off that, everyone's like, I don't feel like I need to go to this or support it. Right. There's a kind of, there's a, it's one of the, very frequently the cancel culture panic works when people who are not at certain institutions or in certain spaces apply a moral rigorism to them that crumbles.

Once it comes into contact with reality. Right. Where basically you can sort of say like, well, I believe all, it should always be like [00:14:00] this. And you think like, yeah, that would be nice. Like come visit an actual place where this work happens. And you realize that no, like you, there are there are trade offs with all these things.

There are, these are. Both universities and they are small communities, right? Like there are they are different stakeholders and their interests to be weighed against each other. There's a kind of, there's a kind of kind of, zero gravity element to a lot of these debates around quote, unquote, cancel culture.

Where there's really no interest in kind of the world of, And the institutions that we're all operating. And that's what I meant when I said that it has this anti institutional edge, but then when you scratch below the surface, even there, it very often. Is there is a deep institutionalism, my deep fascination with established hierarchies behind a lot of it.

Right. Think about the Claudine Gay fracas at, Harvard, where basically everyone decided that they suddenly cared a lot about plagiarism. Right. Who had like never thought about academic plagiarism and all the academics were like, ah, this is very complicated, actually probably shouldn't have done it, but it's, pretty complicated.

But of course all these people were like ultimately extremely credulous against like what Harvard is supposed to mean, right? So there is this kind of like disrespect for, institutions as they are currently constituted, but then a deep and often almost childlike faith in what a university should be, right?

The fact that it is. A bunch of individuals who are very smart and socially not very smart muddling through and a bunch of administrators who used to be chemistry professors, like three years ago, maybe not being like massively good at their jobs at all times. Like, that's the part that people are allergic to the fact that institutions are run by people for people and that they're messy, noisy and discordant entities.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it's also this critique. It [00:16:00] doesn't understand, the origins of the, idea of free speech. That the, that free speech was promoted as a principle, not. In and of itself, but for the, consequences that it produced. So in other words, like, so there was no, there, there's never been a jurisprudence of, well, we need to have, slander as, free speech that if I can't say 24 seven on Twitter, That, Donald Trump murders children in a pizza shop.

If I can't say that, then, there's no free speech in America. Like, or whatever might happen. Like, that's the thing, none of these people, they never want to apply their rules to themselves. Like let's say Jonathan Haidt, should, somebody have their free speech to say that Jonathan Haidt rapes children? And that they want to dedicate their life to promoting that, that principle and that idea is should that be given free speech? And what if it's not is do have we lost America? Forever if I can't say that Jonathan Hyde rapes babies. Of course not because it's not true and In the same way that you know Expecting it.

There's no difference from telling a I think these speakers that the right wing sets up, they're not there to actually promote inquiry, as you were saying, to, discuss ideas to, have a real legitimate debate. know what they're there is to troll and to deliberately offend. And as you said, there's any number of speakers, you could hire any, any number of, Marxist radicals out there that would say, we should burn this whole university

to the ground. This is an oppression and all the administrators should be killed. Like of, that's not the point of what these discussions are, but there's this just, I don't know. I mean, why do you think people seem to be so completely. unable to know what the history of, why we have free speech.

DAUB: over the [00:18:00] last 40 years, I mean, there's, really a multistage history here. Now, maybe it makes sense to go backwards rather than forwards, right? Over the last 40 years, we've had

this this specific attention paid to university campuses basically claiming that the first amendment is imperiled.

On them and very frequently this involved questions about minority populations as the subject of opinions, right? So this is where your somewhat drastic Jonathan Haidt example is kind of apropos because someone comes on a college campus and says, Leah Thomas should not be allowed in locker rooms.

That person is basically saying the Thomas is at least potentially a rapist, right? that is, slander ultimately, but we've been taught for 40 years that this is. Actually speech that we have to live with, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So, and it often is about black people, about Mexicans, about, about trans people, about gay people, right.

Like as subjects of conversation, not as the subjects of speech themselves. Right. They're, the objects that we talk

SHEFFIELD: Oh, not as, non

DAUB: Yeah. It's not participants. Exactly.

And, yeah. Right.

Campus speech surveys rarely ask if people are afraid to disclose marginalized identities

DAUB: And like, there's all these, there are all these interesting sort of surveys where people get asked, like, how free do you feel you're allowed, like, how free do you feel you're able to speak about homosexuality at work, right?

And they never asked, like, also, are you gay? Right. That feels like those are two separate kinds of censorship. One is self censorship. One is self censorship around someone else's identity. But they're clearly only interested in the latter and not in the former, right? So that's, been going on for quite some time, but what's been going on even longer, of course, is this selective focus on how speakers are treated on college campuses, right?

These kind of weirder anecdotes where like, the speakers was shouted at. Dartmouth in 1987. And now he's, now there's someone being shouted out at Harvard and, 2004, and then, it's a conservative [00:20:00] judge at Stanford in 2022. Right. There, there's been a, there's a huge infrastructure from mostly right wing foundations that, that really distribute these, make sure that like, if two dreadlock wearing, kids in, in, in in, Che Guevara t shirts, like disrupt the speaker, like you're going to hear about it.

It's going to be, it's going to be somewhere. It may not make it to the times, but it's going to make it onto, a campus watch or campus report or something or other. Right. And if you're lucky, maybe it'll make it even into the wall street journal. So that has been exist. That's existed for quite some time.

These foundations are some of them are started during World War Two. But I think the real infrastructure sort of came in the 60s and 70s. And then what's also been going on is this focus on on freedom of expression on college campuses at the exclusion of that, that, this really starts with Ronald Reagan.

that somehow in a strange way always seemed to involve a crackdown on student speech. You're like, okay, feels a little contradictory, but okay. But what I mean by that is, right, the 1960s has two things happening. There's student activism, great student activism. And there is a question About how universities are going to respond to that.

And it also brings in the, end of in loco parentis, right? The idea that universities that students are the charges of universities and universities have to some extent, parental rights over their students. And the funny thing is people started worrying about free expression on college campuses around that time.

Which is hilarious because right up to that time right up to that point in time, college students had no freedom of expression. There were, there, there were court precedents that said you could be forced by a university to go to prayer, for instance. Your attire could lead to expulsion. Right?

Things around sex, right? Like, these are all forms of self expression that, universities routinely policed. And yet The whole college campuses are imperiling freedom of expression really starts only once the college kids [00:22:00] actually sees the mic with the free speech movement at Berkeley and sort of say, like, stop bombing Vietnamese peasants, please.

Right? It's a very, it's a long. Kind of switcheroo that's been pulled on us, but it is it's a switcheroo. Nonetheless, it, it, directs attention. It creates these fables that give us a sense of like when campus speech matters and when it really doesn't, when, it maybe is actually smarter to crack down on it.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no. And well, and they certainly do. As we've said, are enjoying cracking down on

campus speech quite a bit.

William F. Buckley Jr. and "God and Man at Yale"

SHEFFIELD: But yeah, just to set back maybe a little bit, this what you were saying about, that center right parties in Europe are becoming increasingly discriminatory. Increasingly curious and interested in authoritarian right-wing parties.

That is kind of the story of the Republican party in the United States. Like this is one that played

out here first. And and obviously one person who kind of was the most pivotal pi pivotal in getting this started was William F. Buckley Jr. With his book, God and Man at Yale. It's, it is an absolutely loathsome book and I encourage everybody to read it, actually, like, if you think, like, it's, it is deeply unfortunate how there is a number of, left wing intellectuals who think that, Buckley was some sort of patron saint that has been thrown into the mud by the Trumpers and have no idea of who this man

actually was, but you, do talk about him quite a

bit.

DAUB: Yeah, I do. I mean, and I have to say that there are some Buckley texts that are It's that I can read with some profit, if not pleasure, but God and Maynard Yale is not one of them. My Lord, bad book, but it is.

SHEFFIELD: just tattletailing, Yeah,

DAUB: but it but in some way it models, I think. This is why I started with [00:24:00] it.

I mean, there are some earlier examples of this kind of genre, but so, granular and he has this myopia, right? Like he's clearly just going through like courses he took and fights he picked while at Yale and you think, Bill, I don't know, like, what does it mean for my weekend? do to do this?

I'm, sorry. You had a hard time at Yale. I'm not even sure you did, but like, it feels like you, you're just kind of making it my problem now and there is that of course is sort of the principle of a lot of stories about political correctness and cancel culture. This kind of loss of relation, a fact that like, or the loss of perspective, right?

That we end up with these stories where like, well, wait, why do I care about this? Like, okay. These two professors were mean to each other. Okay. This one student filed a complaint. Okay. Why does it matter? And Buckley, I think is one of the first to really pioneer this mode of paying obsessive attention to like, well, for listeners who haven't read it, right?

Like it'll be like, so there is a big Christian fellowship, but did you know that the guy who runs it is a Methodist and like this, and sure, there is a Catholic student union, but they're not very doctrinally sound and you're like, okay. It feels like. Like, this could have been a bunch of emails to these people.

If you're, if you have a bone to pick with the Christian Fellowship, like, Just join the listserv, I guess, harshly worded letter. Not sure. This is the book that, that needed to be written here. but but the, way these minuscule kind of relationships on campus, these kind of, yeah community dustups basically become amplified into this.

Diagnosis of what is true of, God and man really, it became, made, he popularized that. And I think it became absolutely became our number one way of relating to colleges, honestly, [00:26:00] intervening 70 years.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I did. And I mean, and I think of what, I mean, the other reason why the book is, important to look at is that he was actually honest about what he wanted to do. And that was not something that today's right does like, they will still claim to Elon Musk, probably the best example of that most prominent, it's claiming he's a free speech absolutist, but in fact, He throttles everybody else's tweets compared to his own. He has a list of, news websites that he hates and he down ranks their content. And and, then bans various people who, report critically on him. There, like several of these people are still banned permanently from Twitter.

Um,

DAUB: a mob on them. I mean, I don't know. Is this, that's literally what cancel culture is supposed to be professes to hate it. Allegedly.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So whereas, Buckley, in the book, and maybe you can talk about that, at the end of the book, he talks about what, it is that he wants. What did he want in the book?

DAUB: Yeah. So the book, I'm trying to remember exactly how he phrases it, but basic idea was that American society and universities had drifted apart and that in some way they had to be a reintegration. I don't quite remember whether he calls explicitly for the state to kind of intervene.

Then, but definitely it's, he wants to empower, what is happening right now, he wants to empower donors and the people who control the purse strings, thinks that the university really ought to be left to the stewardship of, yeah, of the adults, right. Of the, of the wealthy families who fund it.

I'm guessing that also means. It might mean state legislatures. We don't know cause he's only talking about Yale, which doesn't get, didn't get that much federal funding back then. So, but it is the people with the money control are supposed to control what an education is.

SHEFFIELD: [00:28:00] Yeah, but he, and he tells the donors, if they won't give you that control, then you should not give them any money. Like, you should cancel Yale University. Like, that's essentially what the point of the book is.

Insincere 'censorship' arguments as a hack of liberal epistemology

SHEFFIELD: And but at the same time, this, idea is deeply, it is deeply appealing to this kind of shallow, unphilosophical liberalism because in a way, saying, well, all voices should be heard, even ones that you disagree with, like it does, it fits into this, dollar store Voltaire that, that pretty much every journalist imagines themselves to be although I guess they would omit the dollar store part you know, like it, it fits into that self concept and, but ultimately what it is, a hack of their epistemology, I think, and they can't even see it.

DAUB: That's a really good point. There is a, right. Doesn't Corey Robin in that book, the reactionary mind make the point that like a lot of these reactionary movements. Are they use a lot. They use the tools of liberation against liberation. Basically, I think I forget how he puts it, idea that, they're using the tools fought for by student activists, for instance, in the 60s.

In order to roll back the advances of student activists in the 60s, basically, it's it's using the logic kind of insurgent logic people who have been disenfranchised in universities, in the media, in society, against people who've been traditionally sexist. Basically. disenfranchised in those places, right?

Which also, this is another big part of the cancer culture panic and this PC panic before it, which always involves positioning them as dominant, right? Like the idea that, wokesters now control the university, right? Like you can't be a man anymore on the university campus. You can't be straight on the university campus.

You can't be white on the university campuses. It's all dominated by, right? This [00:30:00] is another thing that, that Buckley, I think prefigured for us. That's maybe a little hard to even notice is there, that there's a bunch of sort of overlapping parse prototypes, right? Like where you take the part for the whole, right?

A lot of campus freak out texts, whether they're books or articles or whatever, focus on a tiny sliver of the curriculum, right? Historically, this has been history courses or English classes, maybe not even much more than that. Today, it'll be like African American studies, gender studies, but also probably still English.

I mean, there's a French person in there somewhere because that's always us. And then and then, likewise, it takes the humanities to stand in for the entire university. Right. talk about sort of like endlessly about the ideological blinders of kind of humanities departments.

And I'm like, well, we have a business school right here. I kind of feel like they have a couple of ideological priors too. Like no, no hate, but like, it feels like. There, you're like, I don't think capitalism is the way you guys, I think you're going to have a hard time getting hired by any business school in the country.

Sounds to me like there's a little bit of activism going on there too, but like, that's not what they yell about. They yell about, the women's studies prof goes on about the patriarchy then it's a focus on as with Buckley on our elite institutions, right? The same period that saw this kind of development of the campus freak out discourse also saw of course, a massive expansion of our state Institutions of our of, community colleges of, private colleges, et cetera, et cetera.

yet we still focus on sort of like the Ivy plus when it comes to any of these issues. Right. And then we're completely blind and often do not honestly give a collective crap at all about when things happen to, these important state university systems that educate. Much larger swaths of the population than your Yale, Princeton, Harvard, or Stanford, right?

[00:32:00] So this is another thing that, that I think that Buckley really pioneered for us, that like, it's not just that we have to pay attention to like small s**t that happens at universities. It's that we have to pay attention to small s**t that happens at a very select number of universities and then pretend that the university, right?

We have to yell about a course that a. Queer theorist at Duke is teaching in 1991 and act like that represents the university as though the most common university course in 1991 was probably Chem 101 or intro to psych or, astrology, astronomy for jocks or whatever it is like, these that have way more impact, right at Stanford, the top 10 courses don't even, there are no humanities courses in the top 10 enrolled courses as far as I know.

Right. And yet you're never going to hear about something that someone said. computer science class is always going to be, this adjunct who teaches four core, four people in his seminar, said something that, that someone didn't like.

Cancel culture narratives are about masking real power through fake populism

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it's also the focus on, the, Students or and usually a lot of these people who are the professors being attacked or like adjunct or, instructors, so they don't have tenure as well. But it's, to displace the attention from. Actual hierarchies and actual power wielders like that's, to go back to what you were saying about this, distinction of trying to be populist, but also be elitist at the same time, these, a college student complaining about, some course that they don't like, or a grade they didn't like organizing five or six other people with them, to yell at a speaker or whatever.

Those students have no power on the campus and have certainly have no power in the society. And, when you compare them to, let's say, well, the president of the United States or the world's richest person, like those people have nothing in comparison to what [00:34:00] Elon Musk or Donald Trump or any of these other people have.

DAUB: Yeah. And I mean, like, think also of these kinds of language games that have been with us for quite some time. I mean, it used to be the gay agenda and that now is the trans lobby, right? Like that are just basically these locutions. Yeah. People use to impute power where none exists, right? Like, Oh, well, the trans lobby put you up to this.

Like, are you kidding me with this? They and what army, right? Like would that it were so that there was a robust trans lobby in this country. There isn't right. The gay agenda was basically code for, gays are trying to our kids, but like, a thing you could utter.

And what it did was it suggested that people that. Over whom you were at that moment, lording power were actually had their boot on your neck, right? You didn't get to say the thing that you then said repeatedly and that a whole political party in this country agreed with you on, but you got to feel like the oppressed minority for a second, right?

There's since the 1990s, there's been of, shibboleth of like, Or this kind of meme of these days it's harder to come out as Republican on university campuses than it is to come out as gay. Right. I remember like going back in my research, a lot of my book is archivally based.

I found these things from like 1984 and five. I'm like, I'm going to go, I'm going to go ahead and disagree with you there. It feels like coming out as the party currently controlling all three branches of government. Might be, it might be slightly easier to align with them than a minority that's currently dying, a, a plague that government can't even bother to acknowledge.

Right. desire. To feel victimized when you're, in fact, gearing up often enough to victimize others is, is central, I think, to this discourse. And it is also, I mean, you know this better than I do, it is, I think, a place where the uniquely American extraction of this discourse comes out because I do think it is [00:36:00] ultimately.

A position pioneered by the Christian right right. The idea that you can become dominant and experience yourself as marginal. Nonetheless that is something that I think seeps into Republican politics, not so much through Reagan, but through the Christian right.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and talk radio

DAUB: Right. Right. That's true. Yeah. I guess I hadn't even thought about that. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: But that was who the audience of talk

radio was.

Alan Bloom and "The Closing of the American Mind"

SHEFFIELD: so, before we go back to the international aspect of this one other person who you do discuss who I think was probably, I don't think has, there has been anybody since who has made more of a intellectual or philosophical case for, on these matters is the political philosopher, Alan Bloom.

And Bloom, I think, and, me, I'm interested in your opinion, but I think that he was kind of the apotheosis of this argument. So why don't you tell the audience what, what he was talking about and what you

DAUB: Yeah. So Alan Bloom's closing of the American mind probably apogee of this, of, or it's the, it's, living in the shadow of bloom basically. And this has two reasons. One, he really. He really brings to a head the kind of neoconservative discontentment with the university, disaffection from the university in the book comes out in 1987.

He provides generations of talking points for, kind of how to Harumph about the campus. But the other thing that I think one has to grant him is it's just a very well written book. It's a very well written book, and it's a enjoyable book. Unlike Buckley, I think Bloom really knew write and had a was many ways of man.

think [00:38:00] has cemented its reputation, though, is that in some way, There isn't some way that the closing of the American mind that you can pick up at a bookstore today. And then there's the closing of the American mind that was. That was received and that was sort of percolated down in the culture.

And the book that he wrote, I think it's far more Socratic and far more ironic and far more self contradictory than what ended up becoming of it. Right. When, once he, the book became a mega bestseller, I forget exactly the numbers, but they're numbers that like no philosophy book since other than.

SHEFFIELD: Millions

DAUB: I mean, other than pretty or Jordan Peterson's, clean your room books. But you, but reception, a bunch of blooms, Let's say less Republican aligned or less culture war aligned opinions observations kind of dropped out. I mean, just to pick a random example, I'm pretty sure he goes after business schools and says like, this is not an education.

What is this? We shouldn't be doing this. No one ever talks about that. They're like, well, let's talk about black activists, right? So what the feminists, right? So there is, along with it. One has to say, like, it's not, I'm not saying like, oh, poor Alan Bloom. He was misunderstood. Like he.

He knew how to what to accentuate where right and definitely but is this funny thing where like it. It has a probably more credible claim than any of the campus freak out books that came out in its wake from Dinesh D'Souza's Liberal Education to, Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals to Charlie Sykes's book that he rewrites every two years with a new title and that where the university is still fucked and but got a lot, it's a lot more as a much better claim to, Actually being fairly liberal not sort of liberal the way we often understand it, but like he does seem to take a he does seem to take a kind of, he a [00:40:00] kind of both sides like he didn't mean to make anyone particularly happy with that book, but then the reception I would say a lot more. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and I'm sorry. It also, I think what's different from that book compared to its, imitators in the years after is that he wasn't intending to be Part of this larger message, like he was just writing something to get it

off his chest that he really believed. And he did actually, talk about how there was a need to, discuss and debate Marxism on the campus.

If I remember, it's been a

while since I read it, but like, like, so he, actually was sincere in his beliefs and he, whereas all these other books that subsequently came out and, Charlie Kirk and others

are, I mean, this is a genre that basically was

created after, the closing of the American mind came out and it was, but they were, these books were instrumental books.

His book was an intellectual book. I think maybe it might

DAUB: Well, it's possible, right? They, it could also have been both, right? Both a personal book a instrumental book right. Bloom was a Straussian and I do think that the Straussians are very interested in this idea of exotericism and esotericism, right? That there's a outward facing. Kind of way you communicate political ideas to the public.

And then there's the way you talk to the cognoscenti, you talk to the other people who have your, philosopher king background essentially. the book, I think always was supposed to have an institutional and a populist side to it. And I think that it's quite possible that that Boom did that deliberately, but you're absolutely right that some way it was, if you knew how to read you, you wouldn't have noticed back then, even that, like, it wasn't exactly the kind of, the instrumentality didn't exhaust what the book was and was doing, right? And absolutely right about that.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, [00:42:00] well, I mean, wasn't intending it like I remember reading something from him later that he was interviewed or something. And yet he was no, I had no idea that it would become a bestseller. And he just thought it was, you know, going to be an obscure book and that no one would ever read.

Libertarianism and hierarchy in American politics

SHEFFIELD: But I guess to some degree that does kind of, the. The post Coldwell area or post, lemme say that again. The post Cold War era. It is, in many ways the story of the dissolution of libertarianism, I think, and its disaffection within the larger Republican power structure of the coalition that they had during the Cold War, that it and people who had self-described as a libertarian never really were. But at the same time, there was, I mean, that's. There is a lot of people who have these impulses, but they're always, like that's kind of the debate in politics is, are they going to go for their more individual liberation, ideas, or are they going to go for their authority ideas?

Because libertarianism has both of these ideas, which is, that the people with the money should control society. That is, in many ways, the core of American libertarianism. But at the same time, there, there are liberationists Aspects of it. So, I mean, let's maybe get into that.

I mean, how do you think that's relevant to this cancel culture discussion?

DAUB: Yeah. I mean, I think it's, I think it cuts to of it. Right. I think Jason Stanley in his book fascism makes this point that like of how American libertarianism relates to hierarchy is a really interesting one on the one hand, right? There's a surface.

enmity or opposition any kind of hierarchies. But at the same time, there is, of course, often a so, subtle tendency to think that there's a natural order that will [00:44:00] emerge if the state and if society just kind of butt out a little bit, right? And money is one, Way of make that natural, to naturalize that, to sort of say like, is the people who have and the have nots that is natural, right?

Like if you think about Im Rand's idea about the, the makers and the takers, she doesn't sort of think that you become that in your life. It's basically, this is who you are. Like you, you reveal your inner core. And so there, there are. blunt kind of hierarchies of value behind the veneer of like, well, we should treat everyone the same.

Right. And I think that the cancer culture panic speaks to that. And this is why it was so easy to export. Right. On the one hand, it's saying. Are. Universities are hopelessly woke, our, our armed forces are no longer good, our corporations have been captured by DEI our politics has been poisoned by, left wing neo pronouns, whatever, like, is for they, them, Trump is for you kind of thing.

But if you look closely, of course, Cancel culture stories are not, as you say, usually about contingent faculty members. They're not usually about, about the freelancer who doesn't get asked to write again after a piece he wrote pissed off the wrong people. No, it's about people at the top of hierarchies.

You have to have, in order to be a good tragic cancel story, you have to start at a certain level. You have to be at a certain at a certain height in your own. In your own career in order to then fall from that meaning ultimately these are fables about how people with power and attention deserve power and attention, right?

They tend to kind of suppose that there is a natural hierarchy in our workplaces, in our society, at our universities that wokeness, identity politics, DEI, et cetera, seek to distort, right? So it's a very funny [00:46:00] thing.

SHEFFIELD: Meritocracy

DAUB: Right. a, funny. Way in which if you scratch just a little bit, you notice below the surface of these cancel stories that appear to be all about, well, everyone should just have the same fair shot.

A great deal of fealty and a great deal of credulity vis a vis. Established hierarchies, right? artists who got canceled, think of all the beautiful poems you could have written or the beautiful films you could have made, right? Like all the movies that Kevin Spacey didn't get to make whatever, right?

Like that, says like Kevin Spacey deserves to make movies, right? Like, and these other people who, whose lives were derailed by these me too men, right? Like don't deserve that necessarily. Right. It is their lot in life to have been derailed by these men. Right. And I think that's a really Once you notice that, you realize that like, yes, it is a libertarianism, but it is, as you say, it is exactly a kind of a result of the decomposition of a certain libertarianism where like suddenly, as as certain pressures come to bear, especially in this kind of alliance, through fusionism movement conservatism, I would say where it becomes clear that a, very clear, often biologized hierarchy behind these claims to yeah, to personal freedom for everyone.

Lies about cancel culture as permission structures for reactionary repression

SHEFFIELD: yeah, and that's kind of at the I do feel like that's That sense of crisis that these arguments tend to develop. They become the justification for right wing authoritarianism because, it's, this idea, well, they're going to silence you.

So we need to silence them first.

DAUB: no, exactly. I mean, thing. If you look at these books, we've been saying, like, there's this, book where we can go back to Buckley, but [00:48:00] really it starts with Bloom. Until sort of their books that have their books that have come out since my book came out that I had to order from Amazon because they're clearly they're relevant to this topic, they fall into two camps.

There are those that describe a. Well, if you, there's, a Buckley writes, right. Which says, as you say, like cancel Yale, right. Just flat out. And then there are these books that basically say like, there's a new McCarthyism coming from the left. It's like Stalinism. It's like Nazi Germany.

It's et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then at the end, they're like, here are my prescriptions. And they're like, Hire a few more conservatives, like, don't be so mean online, like, I'm sorry, kind of feels like if you genuinely believe your premise that this is a new Stalinism, then you're not telling me all your prescriptions because surely hire two more conservators on the faculty can't be it, right?

Like, sure, you also want it. Want a job for yourself, fair play to you, but that cannot be all right. And then it, what you Ron DeSantis saying like, well, obviously what we need to do is crack down on college campuses. And then you often have the same author saying, well, well, that's not what I was saying at all.

It's like, well, No, but like, if you're saying that it's, that this, that it's this kind of a crisis, right? This bad, like Stalinism, right? Like, you think that some kind of repressive measures are justified in order right?

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. These people are going to make a dictatorship. You've got to stop them.

DAUB: Yeah, like, okay, like the, what's the, like what's the next sentence? And like, it's very interesting that very few of them, very few of them ever go there, but it's perfectly obvious what what the next steps would be. And. The books kind of don't have to spell it out because politicians will do it for him because, especially I think after, Reagan is sort of still on the Buckley [00:50:00] line.

Reagan. I feel like Reagan yeah,

but he perfected even as president, I think perfected the art of. Expressing moral disapproval by just not by just taking money away from you right like by starving you right basically government cuts are a form of saying who we value in our society, and who we don't it feels like that version of conservatism is kind of dying now.

I think that, Trump's promise wasn't to defund certain things. Trump's promise is to fund the suppression of certain things. And that's, I think that's what's coming. And that's what's already happening in Florida. It's not about, for years, state legislatures could say like, Oh, well, our all our students learn at our state university is Eskimo poetry.

And, all this PC nonsense, let's cut their funding, right? That was the obvious thing. I don't think that's sufficient anymore. I think I don't think that's what they call for anymore. It is now more than that. It is. Let's. See some heads roll. Let's throw some people out. Let's throw, make it easier to remove students.

Let's tell them what to teach. Right. and I

SHEFFIELD: And faculty tenure. That's another one of their

things. Yeah. now with these people who have been writing these books, though, like in your observation, what do they have to say about Ron DeSantis? Are they, concerned about

DAUB: So it, it depends. There are the only, these books are written very quickly and they're not written they're, Not always very up on things, right? they tend to not take cognizance of what, what's actually happening on the ground. One thing that I've definitely noticed is that the more sort of liberal coded among them will say, well, that's bad too.

And they'll often have as a habit as like a chapter for unlike cancel culture from the right. Right. But then the entire book will be about left wing cancel culture. And so you're like, Oh, so you're saying that Ron DeSantis. Okay. So this also [00:52:00] happens to sometimes exist on the right. But really the problem are the kids with the blue hair and the they, them pronouns, like, okay, feels like that's still quite distortive.

So you do get that. And then you get people, I would say, like Chris Rufo, who very clearly

SHEFFIELD: yeah, Mm hmm.

DAUB: are leading and are pushing it. Right. So, so I think there of a split, but I think I have yet to see someone genuinely grapple with the fact that they might well, have made this happen, might have allowed this to happen, might have promoted the talking points that people like Ron DeSantis can now use to, yeah, to basically synchronize education in the state of Florida.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, and it's, and maybe let's end here with that. I'm just, in, in my observation from outside the academy, it seems like that almost nobody in there is aware of what's coming for them.

And they think that well, if we, if I just keep my head down and focus on my work, then I'll be fine. And they have no idea that, There is nothing that you can do that will make them not come for you, unless you're completely on their program. Like, unless you agree with them,

they will come for you. And I think a lot of faculty and administrators they think that these right wing reactionary radicals

can be mollified somehow.

DAUB: right. It's this, and it is exactly the logic of these moral panics, right? That people think, oh, gee, if only our students hadn't said that slogan, only that teacher hadn't said that, right? It's like, no, there are millions of college teachers in the United States. There are tens of millions of college students in the United States.

Someone's going to say something that they don't like, right? after the election and after Trump won, there was this [00:54:00] article that went around like about like, liberal colleges and college instructors who said about Trump after the election.

And the examples are so few and far between. And you're like, Like, you can tell that they were like, desperately trying to find these. Right. And

SHEFFIELD: And of course you could have written one with just

as many people, maybe even more, that were

saying positive

DAUB: yeah, exactly.

SHEFFIELD: They never bother with

DAUB: Yeah. or yeah, I mean, like, and also like the absence of a story would itself be a story. Right. But it is this interesting thing where. Where, there is, and I think you're absolutely right among certain, especially administrators, this that if we do the right thing and say the right thing these attacks will pass us by.

Right. Right. and I it's a little problem they are, right. Because they still, I think, picture themselves in the faculty lounge debating a colleague where this may well be true, right. Like, people have, individuals have, Have limited energy. They might literally just like not bother with you.

Okay. But those of us who know how lives of Tik TOK work, I think it's very credit that right. Lives of Tik TOK is a content mill. It will find something. It will find an LGBT person somewhere. All you have to do is be LGBT in public and you could be in lives on lives of Tik TOK. That is the point, right?

SHEFFIELD: you

DAUB: think about, what it would take for a. Forget a university, say a department for department to be able to exert control over and make sure that no one says anything untoward in all your classes, all the invited speakers who have, by the way, free speech, very important, right?

Add faculty meetings at this, at that, right? Without anyone ever. Pushing that out to, to an interested party. Like it's, fantastical, right? my my to this is if they want to find it, they'll find it. Say what you're going to say and yeah, hope [00:56:00] cross your fingers and hope it doesn't happen.

But like, it is not. It is deliberately not something that is that is dependent on left wing accesses. It creates the perception of left wing access, whether it exists or not. It's not to say that there aren't ever left wing accesses, but this machine works whether there are or not. keffiyeh wearing blue haired students can hide in their dorms for two months.

We're still going to get stories, right? Like they're going to find these.

SHEFFIELD: will. And like, and even like, Bret Weinstein, his exit strip, tale of being of why he quit as a professor at Evergreen State in Oregon, the story that people were told about it was a lie. Like, the students did not do anything against him. They were protesting a a racist incident on the campus.

It was nothing to do with him. But, that was not what you were told. And so, yeah, your point is exactly right about this. And, faculty and administrators need to understand, you are facing a movement that wants

the university to not

DAUB: Yeah. Or not in the shape that it does right now. Exactly. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that they want it to be a religious propaganda meal and, and all you can, just look at what they're doing in Oklahoma with forcing the, but the Bible in the classroom or Louisiana forcing the 10 commandments, even on the college.

Like they're going to put the mandate, the 10 commandments in university classrooms. In every university, state university in Louisiana, this is what you're up against. And if you can't stand up for yourself, well,

why are you

DAUB: Yeah.

Conclusion and final thoughts

SHEFFIELD: well, all right. It's I hope people will get up, with that. And so, and part of that is going to be reading your

book, Adrian, hopefully. So for

DAUB: do. Yeah. And write to me if you agree, disagree. I'm always to have that you didn't see [00:58:00] in there. Have questions. I'd love to hear from you.

SHEFFIELD: Okay. Awesome. And so for people who want to keep up with your things that you're doing what's what tell, us,

Your social media handles and other

DAUB: Yeah. So I'm off Twitter now or X I'm on blue sky at adriandaub dot whatever it is, like blue sky dot social or whatever it's called. But yeah, you'll be able to me. I'm under my own name with a picture of me. I also have a sub stack, although currently I'm on a kick writing about cars rather than about politics.

This was my. This was my attempt to not go crazy over in the fall of 2024. Yeah. And then please check out my podcasts especially in bed with the right. I think it's going to be very, salient and very relevant to listeners of this podcast, which I host with more at Donagan and where we very much hope to have you on soon, Matt.

I think it's it's a wonderful, it's, A difficult time, but it's also a wonderful time for like us doing this kind of work. Because it's, it, it feels like, um, people are becoming sensitized and people are becoming. I'm becoming savvy to a lot of these dynamics that, during the years so far have been a little bit slumbering or because of being consigned to marginality.

And I think in a very dark time. It's been real lifeline to have. The podcast have the Patreon have our discord and just be able to talk with other people and be like, am I crazy for thinking that? And then they're like, no, that's definitely there. So, I really that people can can connect with me on those channels.

SHEFFIELD: Okay. Sounds good. Uh, thanks for being here.

DAUB: Thank you.

SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody joining us for the discussion, and you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show, where you can get the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And my thanks to everybody who is supporting us on Patreon or on Substack.

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