Let's Separate Progressivism from Cancel Culture
Progressive thinkers, activists, and politicians need to get much better at cultivating feedback on their ideas and preparing for the inevitable backlash
"Surgical Scalpel" by tudedude is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
“The voting public, the public which must be won over if the Left is to emerge from the academy into the public square, sensibly wants to be told the details.” Richard Rorty in Achieving Our Country (1998)
Donald Trump won the 2024 United States (US) Presidential election as an explicitly anti-”woke” candidate. It was a tragedy for his opponents, first Joe Biden and later Kamala Harris, who had both tried to run on an economic platform emphasising investment, infrastructure, and jobs. Even so, neither had done nearly enough to distance themselves from progressive activists, who had spent many years annoying ordinary voters on the internet and in real life.
At its most simple level, “wokeness” just means a basic awareness that life can be unfair and dangerous, particularly for minorities and women, as we have mentioned before. It is best seen as an offshoot of the progressive movement, which seeks to enable human flourishing through social reforms. Even if you aren’t particularly drawn to progressivism yourself, you might agree that it is one of the least toxic forms of left-wing politics (just as libertarianism deserves some credit with people on the left as one of the least toxic forms of right-wing politics).
I would suggest two axes to understand progressive politics. Progressivism can be liberal (letting people live their own lives their own way, within certain clearly demarcated and legally defined limits) or illiberal (encouraging activists to tell other people what they can and can’t do or say without any due process); and it can be straightforward (focusing on issues like working conditions in warehouses) or arcane (overly theoretical and obsessed about what words people use in daily life).
If we frame it like this, we can clearly see that the modern iterations of “woke” that provoked such a fierce backlash should be seen as an illiberal and arcane version of progressive ideas. Many liberal progressives reacted so badly to the movement’s illiberal tendencies that they ended up on the hard right, as we have mentioned before. If we accept these points, the solution should be obvious: those of us who think progressivism is worth fighting for should do our best to develop a version that is both liberal and straightforward.
What would liberal progressivism - woke 2.0 - look like if it were split from cancel culture and the need to look for scapegoats for society’s ills? The rest of this essay will sketch out some ideas. One common theme throughout this essay will be on the need to welcome feedback in order to strengthen progressive ideas and policy suggestions. Another idea underlies this one at a more basic level: the burden of proof should be on people proposing new ways of organising society. It is not on those who offer criticism of new ideas.
Of course, some people will push back with the response that evil institutions, like slavery, should be abolished even if nobody has ever done it before. Medieval historians will tell you that the reality of abolition is a little more complicated. France was the first country to abolish slavery, in 1315, but this came more than 200 years after the disappearance of serfdom (tenant farmers bound to a plot of land and subject to the will of a feudal landlord) from Normandy, which had been part of the French kingdom since 1204. Observant people in France had seen how the peasantry in one corner of the country could thrive without being in bondage for many generations before the first experiment to abolish slavery.
Returning to the contemporary world, let’s begin with universities. Many of the ideas that formed the core of the most recent “woke” movement were developed in elite universities in New England and California in the United States (US), with a strong influence from French social theorists, who specialise in impenetrable prose. The context was the evident failures of Karl Marx’s prophecies about the future of society. Instead of engaging in genuine double-loop learning (questioning basic assumptions), many of the post-Marxist theorists tried to replicate some of the worst elements of Marxist ideology, which often involve academic gurus designing new societies for the rest of us, while smearing any critics as being foot-soldiers of a corrupt actually existing world.
Social scientists can do much better than this. As we hinted before, the answer lies in getting much more feedback on new ideas. If you want to use your position in a social sciences faculty to redesign society, please actively seek feedback from sociologists, historians, and anthropologists to understand the precedents. Speak to psychologists and political theorists to see what the backlash might look like. Work with experimental psychologists to see how you can test your ideas. It is particularly important for social scientists to ask economists if the new ideas under development will create any perverse incentives.
Also, speak to biologists and evolutionary psychologists so you can understand the evolutionary conditions for any actually existing structures that you want to over-throw. I would also suggest reading some of the great tragedies that have survived for centuries to temper any naive expectations you might have about the alleged perfectibility of the brainiest branch of the great apes.
Of course, most of these suggestions have been stolen from the the late, great biologist E. O. Wilson, who described an inter-disciplinary approach that respects the findings of harder sciences as consilience. A lifelong progressive, he was himself unjustly demonised in the 1970s for having the audacity to suggest that maybe sociologists should speak to biologists sometimes.
Once progressive ideas emerge from the academy and into the public square, they will still tend to be half-baked and untested. They will need plenty of feedback in order to reach maturity. As a result, liberal progressives should resist the temptation to include multiple untested ideas in a package that can never be questioned by anyone ever.
In a similar vein, liberal-progressive activists need to get much better at welcoming pushback from potential allies who have identified some possible side effects of untested ideas. The full-blown attack on feminists who criticised the unintended consequences of gender self-identification (ID) is a clear example of what to avoid in the future. Self-ID had never been tested in the wild. The input of feminists on how predatory males might exploit well-meaning laws designed for people with gender dysphoria should have been welcomed with open arms!
As ideas take form and get ready for prime time, progressive politicians and their advisors need to be very aware that culture tends to change slowly. Trying to rush through changes while silencing criticism is a recipe for disaster. Former US Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama showed great wisdom when it came to gay rights. Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” formula and Obama’s delay before throwing his weight behind gay marriage gave society time to catch up with the progressive agenda. Hardly anyone on the hard right questions gay marriage nowadays as a result.
Progressive politicians and their advisors should borrow the concept of “proof of concept” from business. If you want to see if an idea works or not, run a series of small-scale tests first. You will be much more persuasive if you can point to successful experiments (think agriculture in Normandy thriving without serfs for centuries before slavery was abolished in France). The Scandinavian countries tend to do good work on this front by showing the world that new ways of organising society can work in practice, rather than just telling everybody about how to do it in theory.
Also, the next time activists on your own side suggest anything as unsafe and badly conceived as defunding the police, moderately progressive politicians should make a big song and dance about distancing themselves from the proposal, particularly for the benefit of low-information voters. A little deliberate unpleasantness at a well-chosen moment should be seen as an insurance policy against attack ads and tight campaigns in the future.
This is particularly true when the activists in question position themselves as revolutionaries, who want to change everything in society at once. Former British Prime Minister (PM) Tony Blair made the point forcefully in opposition in the 1990s by deliberately picking a fight with hard-left activists who saw themselves (wrongly) as the base of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom (UK). The fight prepared the way for three landslide victories in a row.
Once in power, it is also important for progressive politicians to pick their battles. It is impossible to change society on multiple fronts at once. Karl Popper’s advice to start with the largest problems first should be framed and hung above the desk of the advisors to all progressive politicians. Finding any issues more important than climate change will be difficult for at least a generation or two, in my opinion.
Of course, many voters will judge progressive politics by the results. If “not in my back yard” (NIMBY) policies combine with niggly new-build rules to create a housing crisis in progressive-run cities, as we saw in a recent essay on this issue, you can bet cold, hard cash that when the backlash comes, it will be a fierce one.
When it comes to defending progressive ideas in the public sphere, it is worth bearing in mind that it will never be a fair fight: your opponents will come bearing conspiracy theories. Although the content of the conspiracy speculation will largely be nonsense, there is an emotional core that needs to be addressed. Progressive ideas will always be smeared by their opponents as deracinated, effete. theoretical, unmanly, untested, and weak. They will be painted as lacking in common sense and disconnected from the ways that ordinary people actually live, at best; as unsafe and creepy, as a baseline assumption; or as undermining all that is true and good, at worst.
To understand this point, we need to go deep into the prehistory of our species. The plough (or plow for Americans) was invented nearly 8,000 years ago and was widely used in many agricultural societies by about 5,000 years ago. An oxen-driven plough required greater strength than digging sticks, or hoes; and using it came to be seen as part of the male domain.
Author Helen Fisher says this of pre-industrial societies in Europe, China, Japan, India, and the Middle East that adopted the plough:
A woman living on a farm depended on her husband to move the rocks, fell the trees, and plow the land. Her husband needed her to sow, weed, pick, prepare, and store the vegetables. Together they worked the land.
More importantly, whoever elected to leave the marriage left empty-handed. Neither spouse could dig up half the wheat and relocate. Farming women and men were tied to the soil, to each other, and to an elaborate network of stationary kin. Under these ecological circumstances, divorce was not practical.
These societies developed in patriarchal ways that would have surprised the ancestors of the people who came to depend on ploughs. Adultery came to be “considered a female vice,” Fisher said. As a result, she says: “Women lost their ancient, honored roles as independent gatherers and providers.”
If we take the long view, progressive politics should be seen as a way of transcending the kind of societies that developed after the adoption of the plough. Male strength has become gradually less important; and women are increasingly seen as having the right to live their lives in their own way. On the other hand, no-divorce marriages, male authority, female subjugation, large families, marginal roles for those who choose not to form traditional families, and ethnically homogeneous villages with unified religious practices have all come under pressure in recent centuries. Progressives will welcome most, if not all, of these changes.
It is noteworthy that much of the fiercest backlash against “woke” politics, which push these tendencies further and further, has come from working-class straight men. One solution for liberal progressives is to look for and promote very masculine spokespeople. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former bodybuilder and action star, who served as Republican Governor of California, is a good example. A social progressive, when he defends inclusive politics, he does it from a position of strength and generosity, which is difficult for his opponents to undercut or misrepresent.
Diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) policies are an example of well-meaning proposals that can create a fierce backlash among people who think they now face discrimination, rightly or wrongly. A liberal-progressive take on DEI would make it very clear that in many cases merit should come first and that promoting diversity will often act as a tie-breaker. DEI can also be framed as a way of helping under-privileged people get to the starting line, with the race itself being based on merit. The under-performance of non-diverse teams should also be a regular theme for progressives - individuals who feel discriminated against might be less resistant if they appreciate that DEI is designed to strengthen the performance of their teams.
Towards the beginning of this essay, we discussed the way that woke 2.0 should be straightforward rather than arcane. DEI can be an example. Concrete measures to help parents of young children progress in their careers should be part of the conversation; as should policies that coax former stay-at-home parents back into the workplace as their kids get older and become more independent.
Pushback
As progressive policies advance, there will inevitably be pushback from some segments of society. We would expect young people, secular folks, graduates with degrees in the social sciences and the humanities, and urbanites to be generally supportive of progressive ideas, on the whole. However, older people, those who attend traditional religious services, people without university degrees, and inhabitants of smaller communities will tend to be less enthusiastic, on average.
In this context, progressives need to get much better at discriminating between conservatives, in the true sense of the word, and actual bigots. Society always tended to change slowly up to the industrial revolution; and it is unrealistic to expect everyone to completely rejig their whole worldview in the blink of an eye as new ideas emerge in the public square. Resistance to change and allergic reactions to bossiness should be seen as being in a completely different category to outright hostility to women and minorities.
In that context, liberal progressives need to draw a very clear line between criminal speech, such as actual death threats against named individuals, and thoughtless speech, such as edgy jokes or crass comments on social media. We should be very reluctant to “cancel” someone for speech that would have been commonplace a couple of decades earlier. We should also resist the temptation to “cancel” crackpots, who are profoundly wrong about fundamental issues.
Telling people why certain forms of speech can be offensive is one thing; trying to ban words is quite differently. We can see this clearly with the “coming out” movement, which began in the late 1960s. Homophobic slurs were extremely common in the 1980s in the United Kingdom (UK), when I was a teenager. I had never knowingly spoken to an openly gay person until I went to university. Since then, I have met countless people who are openly lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender (LGBT); and many have become good friends and valued colleagues. I am much more thoughtful about my language now than I would have been when I was young, just because I know so many people who would be hurt by cruel words.
There is an important lesson here. Trying to ban words will always tend to backfire. Exposing people to those who would find certain words offensive is slower. It will always tend to yield better results, though.
Let me briefly pause to engage in some double-loop learning. One of the first essays on this blog to gain traction was from 2021. I made the case that Spain is not a fascist state. While I am proud of the essay, and the underlying thesis is still right, I included a long section on rappers who had been criminalised for expressing their emotions through songs that fantasised about killing politicians. I said this “should clearly be problematic to most thoughtful people.” Today, I am not so sure that I took the right line on this issue. Nowadays I think we should err on the side of tolerating transgressive art, even if it makes us uncomfortable. The Museu d’Art Prohibit (Museum of Forbidden Art), which opened in Barcelona in 2023, deserves the credit for this change of opinion.
We now come to the hardest issue of all. Some people will remain bigots even after being exposed to minorities. Some men will continue to think women should be subjugated. Some hard-right politicians will be drawn to bigoted views, which they will see as added a little emotional punch to their backward-looking narratives. How should liberal progressives deal with this inconvenient fact?
I strongly believe that we should be very reluctant to criminalise our opponents. Progressives need to beat bigots at the polls! A lot of the ideas in this essay are aimed at just doing that, but I’d like to re-emphasise feedback. Biden’s advisors should have been much more attentive to feedback that he was too old and feeble for a second term; and Harris should have insisted on a primary fight instead of accepting a coronation. She was unready for such an important election.
The Democratic Party should have also realised it was failing to reach working-class men during the campaign and actively looked for ways to change course. It was a tragedy that Harris’s background as a gun-carrying law enforcement officer was never used to define her with low-information voters. Did any of the criminals that she prosecuted try to intimidate her? If so, American voters should have heard about it on a regular basis during the campaign.
Of course, the other side will sometimes win elections. We have seen that the world is becoming more complicated; and voters sometimes yearn for politicians who promise to turn back to the clock to simpler times. When in power, progressives need to prepare for this moment by strengthening the guardrails of liberal democracy. Society should be able to contain any populists or bigots who get a few years in power, even if they try to engage in some democratic backsliding when they do.
There is a lesson here for Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez, who is trying to govern after losing the 2023 election as a desperate attempt to keep a hard-right party out of power as a junior partner of the main conservative party. For example, he has agreed to water down embezzlement laws to keep some of his populist allies happy. This is a serious mistake, in my humble opinion.
We have seen that populists tend to be bad at governance, so progressives need to be patient in opposition, while nurturing political talent. The backlash against the backlash will often come. Incompetence and over-reach come with bills to pay; and asabiya (unity in the face of an external threat) can help progressives.
We saw this recently in Canada. The country’s Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, was widely expected to become Prime Minister. However, his decision to embrace Trump hurt him badly after the US President openly talked about annexing Canada. Poilievre ended up losing his seat in April. Meanwhile, centrist technocrat Mark Carney of Canada’s Liberal Party stormed to victory, in a result that would have been difficult to predict just a few months previously.
Carney also showed himself to be excellent at the kind of bareknuckle scrapping that populists and would-be strongmen claim to love. It is noteworthy that he did so without striving to bend the rules of the game in the same way that populists would have done. There is another important lesson here for progressive politicians, who often come across to the general public as being preachy, smug, and maybe a little hypocritical and/or humourless. Sometimes it is important for politicians to roll up their sleeves and brawl!
A few days later, there was a similar result in Australia. Peter Dutton, leader of the centre-right Liberal Party, lost his seat after running a Trump-light campaign. Meanwhile, the country’s centre-left PM, Anthony Albanese of the Labor Party, achieved a second term in power, largely thanks to the backlash to the backlash. He had described the US President’s tariffs on Australia as “not the act of a friend” before the election. Voters agreed.
Of course, hard-right candidates have also won large numbers of votes in a series of European elections this year, while mostly falling short of power. The exception was in Poland, where Karol Nawrocki of the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party won a tight presidential vote in early June. He had been backed by Trump.
Finally, it is worth making one important point. Progressives do themselves no favours at all when they throw the word “fascism” around at anyone who disagrees with them. There is a significant difference between the hard right (who accept the rules of the democratic game, more or less) and the far right (who clearly don’t), even if both tend to be populist and illiberal nationalists.
Of course, not everyone we dislike is a true fascist, who wants to overthrow democracy in a violent revolution and actively persecute minorities, but some are. We have a duty to stand up and fight hard against genuine neo-Nazis.
I believe that we should welcome allies on the right in this battle, even if we disagree with them on other subjects. Progressives in the UK might find little common ground with hard-right politician Nigel Farage, but when he claims to have killed the British National Party (BNP) - a neo-Nazi party that has been inactive since 2019 - maybe we should err on the side of generosity when we listen to his case? The comments are open. Please keep the discussion respectful and inclusive. See you next week!
Previously on Sharpen Your Axe
The liberal backlash to “wokeness”
On Popper (part one and part two)
Climate change (part one and part two)
The world is getting more complicated, but voters sometimes yearn for simplicity
Populists are bad at governance, crackpots in power, and asabiya
Fascism and accusations of fascism
Further Reading
Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences by Michael Billig
Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray by Helen Fisher
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by E. O. Wilson
This essay is released with a CC BY-NY-ND license. Please link to sharpenyouraxe.substack.com if you re-use this material.
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I’ve subscribed to your blog for four years. I don’t read everything, so I’ve missed some of your beliefs and opinions you may have expressed, but I do read sometimes. When I happened to see the email notification of this post a week ago, I opened it because I was concerned about the phrase “cancel culture” in the title; the ideas this term typically expresses are, in my estimation, false and harmful.
My understanding of how “cancel culture” is typically used is that one person makes a set of pointed arguments; another says they disagree, which might be for any number of reasons having to do with factual observations, feelings, ethics, the logical validity of what was said, the aesthetics of it, or its consequences for others; and the first person, not wanting to acknowledge or address the disagreement, complains that the person who disagrees has somehow “canceled” them, i.e., disagreed with them. The first person may face consequences, big or small, for having said something false, offensive, or nonsensical, even losing some of their own audience or organizational affiliations, especially if they refuse to clean up their own mess. That's how life works. No one is entitled to anyone else's attention or endorsement. As thinkers, writers, creators, etc., we have to earn it. Words mean something and have power — we wouldn’t want it any other way, right? — and so people reap the consequences of their choices. I don't like the phrase “cancel culture” because it shifts the scrutiny onto “the culture,” as if the true problem lies with an undiscerning audience rather than with the speaker’s unjust comment that their audience correctly and justly discerns.
On the matter of what’s often called “cancel culture,” in your fourth paragraph you say “the burden of proof should be on people proposing new ways of organising society…not on those who offer criticism of new ideas.” Here I observe, and would like to add, that in a dialogue, the roles of proposer and critic are ever-shifting, and whether their ideas are old or new is subject to evaluation. For example, where you say in your first paragraph that “libertarianism deserves some credit with people on the left as one of the least toxic forms of right-wing politics,” are you proposing something or criticizing something else? Are you reaffirming something old or offering something new? Are there definitive answers to those two questions, and do the answers determine whether anyone who interacts with you is themselves a proposer or critic, saying something old or new, and does the answer determine which of you should have the burden of proof in your conversation?
Anyway, I was jolted awake when I saw your post (it was the first thing I read that day, before sunrise) and it has been troubling me deeply since. I have not made time to comment until now because I don’t know whether you’re open to feedback on this point, what level of feedback you’re open to, how to express it briefly so it fits in a comment box, and whether this is a good use of my time — that last judgment hanging on whether you might be willing to change your mind, as I could do this exercise with various levels of productivity with countless others on the internet who make similar comments. Another reason I was too preoccupied to comment over the past week is that there was a wave of bad political news; I mention that because the particular sort of bad political news is relevant to what you said.
I see that in your fourth paragraph you do literally refer to “the need to welcome feedback,” but I don’t know if you intend to apply this to your own essay. I don’t mean this to be snarky. I seriously don’t know if you are open to feedback on this. I’ve spent some early-morning moments lying awake this week (it’s before sunrise, here, again) wondering about this.
My issue:
In the 1990s, in my final year of high school, I transitioned away from living as a girl and began living as a man. At 17, I began taking testosterone, started to grow a beard and got a deeper voice, and I asked people to recognize me as a boy, call me by a new name, and refer to me in third-person as “he.” For the most part, they did. Some immediately, and for others it took a few months, but they did. Shortly after I turned 18, I legally changed my first name and the gender marker on all my identity documents and had a chest reconstruction surgery so I could have a flat chest. I went to college in 1998 as a young man, which is how I was perceived; no one I met had any reason to imagine that I was “transsexual” unless I told them; the staff at student services, behind the scenes, did know (as I had been accepted to the school as a girl on paper yet had shown up as a man), and they assigned me a male roommate, and he and I had a quite nice year rooming together.
It is therefore frustrating to me to hear your assertion that “self-ID had never been tested in the wild.” Trans people have always lived in the real world among other humans, and our gender transitions have typically involved some period of so-called “self-ID” because that’s part of the coming-out process: You tell people your gender and ask them to start treating you that way. One day you're having an ice cream at the mall, you need to go to the bathroom to wash your hands, and, for the first time in your life, you choose the bathroom of the "other" gender because, despite the enormous fear barrier you likely feel and the existential implications of this moment for the rest of your life, it seems to be right and necessary. Depending on your appearance, strangers may start automatically treating you as a member of your "new" gender. Some people are perceived as another gender with as little effort as a change of clothes and a haircut. Others need hormones, surgery, voice training, and a whole new social and professional circle in a new city where no one knows them. Mid-20th-century psychologists’ expectations for trans people were that we’d live full-time in our genders, and they saw our ability to do so as a *prerequisite* for approving us for surgery. That is, they required us to do self-ID for a couple years, and if we could hack it and were “successful” at it (playing tennis without a net!), they’d formally grant us an approved ID. If you try to imagine how you'd go about transitioning to living in a new gender, some degree of self-ID would probably be part of the process for pursuing official approval, right? You'd likely be curious to know whether the world could perceive you as a woman before you went through a years-long government application process to get an F on your ID, right? [1/4, to be continued]
Thanks for this article. I was just today discussing with my daughter how just asking questions about many progressive issues can lead to being labeled a bigot, so many people in the left just avoid them. (You expose a few very good examples in your article, like the "unintended consequences of gender self-identification".) This is not healthy thinking. I believe we should welcome challenges to progressive ideas, as they give us an opportunity to test and refine them for the common good.