The Bluesky-ization of the American left

I remember walking through a bookstore in college and seeing an issue of Foreign Affairs with the headline “The Palestinian H-bomb”. I was curious, so I picked it up off the rack and gave it a quick read. The article — written during the days of the Second Intifada — argued that there was no practical way to stop suicide bombers, so as long as the Palestinians were able to keep recruiting a steady stream of people willing to give up their lives to take out a few Israelis, there was really no way for Israel to stop them.

It sounded plausible, and I recall being pretty convinced of the thesis at the time. But it turned out to be wrong. Just a few years after that article was written, suicide terror in Israel subsided to a low level:

What happened? Palestinian recruitment for suicide terror might have flagged, but from what I’ve read, the main reason was that Israel built a big fence around the West Bank and implemented a bunch of other security measures that made it very difficult for suicide bombers to get through. What looked for a while like an invincible weapon turned out to just be another temporary advantage.

I think about this when I think about cancel culture.

Back in 2018, Bari Weiss got dogpiled on Twitter for an anodyne liberal tweet. Weiss congratulated Olympic skater Mirai Nagasu on pulling off a difficult move, quoting a line from the musical Hamilton about immigrants being great:

Weiss was viciously attacked for this tweet by thousands of people who called her racist over the course of several days. Why? Because Mirai Nagasu isn’t actually an immigrant — she was born in the U.S. According to Weiss’ many attackers, Weiss’ statement implied that nonwhite people are perpetual foreigners.

That was, of course, complete hogwash. Nagasu’s parents are immigrants; the use of the term “second-generation immigrants” to describe the children of immigrants is utterly standard terminology in academic sociology. And by quoting a line from Hamilton in praise of a second-generation immigrant athlete competing on behalf of the U.S., Weiss was clearly advocating in favor of (nonwhite) immigration as something that makes America stronger — a very standard liberal viewpoint.

Whether this particular pile-on had long-term negative consequences for Weiss’ life isn’t clear, but she encountered an increasingly hostile climate at the New York Times, the paper where she worked, and eventually was forced to quit. It would have been reasonable for people observing that pile-on — and similar attacks directed at Weiss over the years — to conclude that speaking up is dangerous and that Twitter mobs hold a lot of real power.

The perception that cancel culture was the progressive H-bomb — an invincible weapon that could be fired any time at anyone who didn’t conform perfectly to a set of progressive mores that had only emerged a few years ago — reshaped much of American society in the 2010s. Every organization in the country, from knitting circles to romance novelist associations to sci-fi conventions, had its internal hierarchy disrupted by the fear that disgruntled or opportunistic subordinates would take their grievances online and summon the dreaded cancel-mob against their superiors.

Why was cancel culture both so powerful and so popular for those few years? The most obvious reason is that it worked. If you were a progressive in 2018 who really believed that calling a second-generation American an “immigrant” was racist, then you could often effectively strike at that person by raising a hue and cry about them on Twitter. Companies were afraid of boycotts, of course. But beyond that, the Gen Xers who ran those companies came from an age when having a thousand people yelling in your face meant that you were in grave danger; corporate managers would often cave out of pure fear of online negativity.

Another reason was that cancel culture was a quick route to online clout. As Eugene Wei wrote in his famous blog post “Status as a Service (StaaS)”, social media offers most people the opportunity to get much more social status than they have any hope of getting in their daily lives, if they happen to get lucky and go viral and become an influencer.

But to get that clout, you have to stand out. Attacking the same old progressive targets — Donald Trump, Republican senators, conservative influencers — is a low-yield activity, because the field is too competitive. Everyone attacks those people. But finding more novel targets for mob attack — like an NYT writer who calls a second-generation American an “immigrant” — can be a high-yield activity. It’s basically outrage entrepreneurship.

Of course, this means that there was an incentive for progressive purity spirals and tent-shrinking. If you’re a progressive looking for new people to denounce, the most tempting targets are probably center-left liberals who have heretofore been safe from cancellation. Hating Donald Trump is old news. But hating Matt Yglesias? That could get you some real attention!

And so the ranks of the online cancel-mobs were probably also swollen by people who participated in the mobs out of fear that if they didn’t, they too would be canceled. This gave rise to a phenomenon I call ponzi screaming — berating the person immediately to your right on the political spectrum, out of fear that if you don’t berate them, people further to your left will berate you. You have people like the progressive online shouter and failed Congressional candidate Will Stancil berating Nate Silver even as he gets frequently dogpiled and berated by leftists.

Between outrage entrepreneurship, purity contests, and ponzi screaming, late-2010s progressive cancel culture started to look like a farcical imitation of the French Terror or the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The stakes were obviously much lower — losing your job is a lot less bad than losing your head — but many of the social dynamics and behavior patterns were recognizably similar.

Except that just like with “the Palestinian H-bomb,” the frightened public vastly overestimated the power of cancel culture. Bari Weiss went on to start The Free Press, a very successful Substack publication that often flouts the same progressive norms that forced Weiss out at the NYT. Now, CBS News is reportedly in talks to buy The Fr