Disingenuousness is one defining feature of Republican Party politics. One among many. Including such diverse elements as Othering, the patented Hissy Fit, racism, undermining popular sovereignty, and now flat-out lying. One would say Donald Trump raised lying to an art form except there was no artfulness to it. His party of supplicants nonetheless followed their Dear Leader.
The Right’s creation of wedge issues to further exacerbate the country’s political and cultural divide is now so commonplace that one could teach a course in how its false narratives combine the various features above to keep political tensions in the country at low-boil.
Theoretical foundations of GOP cancel culture
Paul Rosenburg took on “cancel culture” last week at Salon, sketching out the people and elements of American life Republicans work at canceling while promoting weeks-long narratives about imagined cancelings on the Left.
You know who is really canceled? Rosenburg begins. “George Floyd is canceled. Breonna Taylor is canceled. Ma’Khia Bryant is canceled. Andrew Brown Jr. is canceled. They are the true victims in America’s longest-running culture war. Anyone who tells you different is just gaslighting. You want ‘cancel culture’? America is plagued with cancel culture.”
Donald Trump, former president known for the phrase “You’re fired,” had a parade of people he wanted canceled. He called them out via his now-canceled Twitter account: NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, and a list of corporations from “AT&T, Apple and Macy’s to newspapers like the Dallas Morning News and the Arizona Republic to liberal commentators like Paul Krugman and Touré and even conservatives like Karl Rove, Rich Lowry, Charles Krauthammer and Jonah Goldberg.”
The cancel culture narrative provides “a shared cookie-cutter framework to both fuel and give shape to that panic — which is in fact a genuine cultural panic about the white right’s loss of power to impose its worldview, and resulting judgments, on others.”
That the phrase is vague makes it more all-purpose. “‘Cancel culture,’ ‘woke’ and ‘identity politics’ are talismanic for the Right, Rosenburg explains. And meaningless. “For conservatives, that meaninglessness is a feature, not a bug. Those words mean whatever a right-wing accuser needs them to mean in the moment.”
While conservative pundits rail that the Left’s criticism of the Right’s positions are somehow violations of the First Amendment, the Right’s “efforts to cancel democracy at the ballot box (with 361 bills in 47 states as of March 24) and in the streets (81 anti-protest bills in 34 states as of April 21) are deadly serious threats to American democracy” and assaults by the Right against a string of post-Civil War amendments.
College campuses such as the University of Wisconsin are special targets. Campus Reform and its publisher, the conservative Leadership Institute will book controversial speakers knowing their views will generate protests as surely as the sun rises in the east. Republican legislators then use the protests to propose cuts to state university budgets and programs, Georgetown political scientist Donald Moynihan observed in a New York Times op-ed.
“Having created the narrative of the intolerant liberal campus as a problem, conservative politicians could propose a solution,” Moynihan continued. “They could make a case for why their policing of speech on campus was actually protecting free speech. They effectively persuaded many that politicians should be trusted to monitor speech on campus, more than the people who lived on campus and have historically done a pretty good job of protecting speech.”
But none of this matched reality. “Wisconsin has a long history of protest and counter-protest on campus, some of it quite violent. The idea that students had suddenly become aggressive seemed clearly wrong to me,” Moynihan recalled. “These terms I kept hearing just did not fit with my experience with the students I engaged with. The gap between my lived experience on campus and what was being portrayed in the media was large.”
At the same time, “I looked around the world and saw a very disturbing trend: Authoritarian governments in places like Hungary, Turkey and China were policing speech on campus as part of their effort to stifle dissent, using many of the same tools that U.S. state legislatures are adopting,” Moynihan said. “For example, a bill in Florida encourages students to record and monitor their professors to expose their views. What could be more chilling to speech in the classroom? This is the same tool that China uses to control universities: Student informers report any dissent against the party.”
Then there is canceling of voters at the ballot box. One week ago, former NC Republican Party executive director Dallas Woodhouse wrote in the conservative Carolina Journal that with the state gaining a seat in Congress next year “… GOP redistricting leaders will consider approving a new map designed to elect a 10 Republicans and four Democrats beginning in 2022.” And why not gerrymander “with almost surgical precision” for another 10 years? The NC GOP ran out the clock in court for the last 10. Courts finally forced new lines in the last election. Voters sent eight Republicans and five Democrats to Congress after years of a map drawn to yield 10 and three. Trump in 2020 won the state 49.9% to 48.6%, virtually the same balance as in 2016 and Romney in 2012.
Rosenburg offers more examples, including newly proposed crimes intended to cancel street protest and decriminalize, well, hitting protesters with cars, as I mentioned here.
“All this is simply accepted as normal now, but it’s prima facie evidence of a concerted conservative cancel-culture effort to stifle the voices of key Democratic constituencies.” he concludes. “It’s visible in the broad reach of voter suppression efforts, of protest suppression efforts and curriculum suppression efforts as well.”
Naturally, this is all the Left’s fault. Even if the Right goes full-on fascist.
Update: Added a.m. Holland tweet.