#will wilkinson

Wilkinson is the Vice President of  Policy at the Niskanen Center, whose President just weeks ago threatened the St. Louis couple, who pointed firearms at protesters, that he would “beat their brains in.” Wilkinson is also a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times.

If your favorite system is quite a bit different from any system that has existed, then even if it were true that it would rank numero uno in terms of your favorite normative standard, you’re not in a position to rationally believe it. Clearly then, it’s not actually useful to aim toward a distant ideal when you don’t really have a good reason to believe that it’s better than actually existing systems in terms of liberty or equality or nationalist solidarity or whatever it is you care about.

This is a hard lesson for ideologues to swallow. I still haven’t totally digested it. But a number of things have become much clearer after giving up on my sinful, ideal-theoretic ways.

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Ideal theory can drive political conflict by concealing overlapping consensus. Pretty much any way you slice it, Denmark is an actually-existing utopia. But so is Switzerland. So is New Zealand. The effective difference between the Nordic and Anglo-colonial models, in terms of “human freedom” and “social progress” is surpassingly slight. Yet passionate moral commitment to purist ideals of justice can lead us to see past the fact that the liberal-democratic capitalist welfare state, in whatever iteration, is awesome, and worth defending, from the perspective of multiple, rival political values. We miss the fact that these values fit together more harmoniously than our theories lead us to imagine.

Parker Molloy at MMFA:

In an op-ed plastered across Monday’s New York Post front page, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) calls for an end to the “muzzling of America.” Despite getting a spot on the front page of the fourth-largest newspaper in the U.S., coverage across the entire Fox News lineup, a new book deal, an audience of more than half a million followers on Twitter, and a lengthy list of credits on IMDB, Hawley would like you to believe that he is a man without a voice.

Hawley’s essay makes a now-familiar argument against so-called “cancel culture,” which naturally, came for him all because he tried to invalidate the votes of millions of Americans and maybe, sorta, kinda helped incite a deadly mob to attack the U.S. Capitol. Who among us hasn’t had a brush with insurrection at one point or another?

That same morning, former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders announced her bid to become the next governor of Arkansas. In her announcement, she played on the same theme as Hawley, saying, “I took on the media, the radical left, and their cancel culture, and I won. As governor, I will be your voice and never let them silence you.”

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Just as right-wing media have helped Republicans play up their opposition to “identity politics” while ignoring the role white and Christian identities play in conservative coalitions, and just as they denounce the concept of “political correctness” while promoting revisionist and sanitized versions of American history, the fight against “cancel culture” is another bundle of hypocrisy wrapped in the bow of a new buzzword.

The successful branding of “cancel culture” as the invention of the left is both sad and remarkable -- as well as factually incorrect.

What was the purpose of the House Un-American Activities Committee or of the Army-McCarthy hearings if not to root out and “cancel” Communists? And what of the so-called “Lavender Scare” purge of gay employees within the federal government? The idea that “cancel culture” is new or limited to any particular political ideology is patently false.

Right-wing media try to portray this move as being driven primarily by the left, but just look at this (admittedly incomplete) list of conservative cancellation targets: ABC, ACORN, The Beatles, TV host Samantha Bee, Campbell’s Soup, The Chicks (then known as the Dixie Chicks), New York Times reporter Sopan Deb, France, Gillette razors, comedian Kathy Griffin, Guinness, director James Gunn, Hallmark, CNN commentator Marc Lamont Hill, The Hunt, tech reporter Sarah Jeong, then-NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, Kellogg’s, Keurig, KitKat, Match.com, Mexico, The Muppets, The New York Times, Nike, Pepsi, Rachael Ray (and Dunkin Donuts), left-leaning college professors, a series of words that include “science-based” and “evidence-based,” progressive commentator Sam Seder, former Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod, Starbucks, Target, transgender people, Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel (on more than one occasion), and even the White House Easter Egg roll.

Just last week, The New York Times canceled freelance editor Lauren Wolfe’s contract after she tweeted that she had “chills” watching then-President-elect Joe Biden’s plane touch down ahead of the inauguration.

Will Wilkinson, a New York Times contributing opinion writer who was the vice president for research at the Niskanen Center, lost his job at the moderate think tank this week after conservatives willfully misinterpreted a joke he made by riffing on the “hang Mike Pence” chant of members of the Trump-incited January 6 riot.

Part of the reason the idea of “cancel culture” may seem like it comes more from the left than from the right is that conservative media outlets simply will not stop talking about it. The New York Post has an extensive list of stories tagged “cancel culture.” The same is true of Breitbart, the Daily Caller, and the Daily Wire.