An information board at the Ljubljana Joze Pucnik Airport displays cancelled flights of Slovenian flag carrier Adria Airways in Brnik, Slovenia, on September 24, 2019.
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Opinion

Cancel Culture Is Killing America. Here’s How We Crush It.

DailyWire.com

Cancel culture is all around us. We witness it daily on social media, watch it unfold nightly on cable news shows, and even encounter it in our personal relationships. A society that has always embraced freedom and protected dissent is quickly becoming a nation that eschews freedom and not only silences dissent, but aims to ruin the life and livelihood of those who hold different views.

Research backs up the notion that people across our nation are concerned about polarization, worried by cancel culture, and afraid of being cancelled themselves.

In March, the Pew Research Center found that more than 90% of Americans believe partisan political conflicts in the country are strong or very strong. Just a few months later, Pew found that the coronavirus crisis has widened the already yawning gap between Democrats and Republicans. Most recently, the Cato Institute reported that 62% of Americans are afraid to share their political views. And researchers have only begun studying the effect on national polarization of the protests and unrest surrounding the death of George Floyd in May 2020.

During times of social unrest like these, we must seek common ground — something that binds us together despite our differences…something that can heal our hurting society rather than drive us further apart…something greater than our current cultural upheaval that we can all strive for together.

That something is freedom of speech. And there are encouraging signs that this is a genuine area of shared concern for the left and the right.

The first indication was when, just a few weeks ago, Harper’s Magazine published “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate.” Signed by many mostly left-of-center writers, historians, and scholars troubled by the growing intolerance, the letter affirms the importance of the “free exchange of information and ideas” and denounces “a vogue for public shaming and ostracism” of those who do not share certain viewpoints.

As if to prove the very point of the letter, its publication touched off its own round of denunciations and cancellations, with two signatories revoking their signatures and another in danger of losing his job after a fellow staffer said that his signature created an “unsafe” atmosphere at work.

Now, a mostly right-of-center group of writers, scholars, and practitioners have launched The Philadelphia Statement on Civil Discourse and the Strengthening of Liberal Democracy. Released Aug. 11, the statement’s signatories are “calling for a renewed commitment to civil discourse and free speech” that is built upon the free speech tradition at the heart of the American experiment.

It’s “the American tradition of freedom of expression,” the statement lays out, that “trains us to think critically, to defend our ideas, and, at the same time, to be considerate of others whose creeds and convictions differ from our own…. And it admonishes us that if we value the freedom of expression, we must extend the same measure of freedom to others, even to those whom we believe have gone very wrong in their thinking.”

The Philadelphia Statement and the Harper’s letter reveal that there are often unexpected points of agreement between even the most divided people. Finding that common ground and cultivating mutual respect despite our differences in political or social beliefs is the only way to work through calamitous cultural moments like our present one.

We will never arrive at the right solutions concerning COVID-19, racial justice, police reform, and myriad other vexing public issues if people are afraid to express their views on those topics. Becoming more tribal, more polarized, more intent on cancelling those with whom we disagree is a recipe for deeper division and greater strife.

It is also the stuff of tyrants and failed nations, not Americans.

Cancel culture, performative wokeness, social media mobs, and public shaming are all not just real phenomena, they are deeply to corrosive to democracy. They are teaching a new generation to countenance but one orthodoxy and to shut down all dissent. They are planting the seeds of totalitarianism. And history has taught us that totalitarian regimes often arise from such toxic social milieus.

What we need is what existed in American life until very recently: a broad understanding of the good that comes from civic discourse unregulated by government strictures and unafraid of social mores or majoritarian “consensus.” We can have it through a renewed commitment to free speech that crosses ideological lines. The Philadelphia Statement and the Harper’s letter, and the principles that unite both, are crucial first steps in the right direction.

But if we want to protect free speech — and indeed, freedom itself — for our children, we’ll need to do more than sign our names to statements. We must live out those statements’ principles in our daily lives, especially when we encounter someone with whom we disagree.

Jeremy Tedesco is senior counsel and senior vice president of communications for Alliance Defending Freedom (@AllianceDefends).

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