Conservatives fight against cancel culture

People on the right feel harassed by progressives

We live in an age of social sanction. Perhaps every age is to a degree. But the predominating social sanction (or “cancel culture” if you like) from the American left as it expresses itself in popular culture and the activist activation of major American institutions are yielding a soft secessionism from the American right.

Cancel culture, whether one generally supports or opposes it, has been well discussed. But within the worrisome rise of existential polarization in American life, the latter phenomenon also deserves attention.

An impulse toward secession always has been a part of the American character. We ought not look at it as an absolutely pejorative term. The United States was founded, after all, in secession from the British Empire.

Hard secession, of course, also led to the Civil War in a contest between the interests of slavery and the interests of the Union – one that wound up destroying the former before nearly destroying the latter.

Since then there have been no truly serious efforts toward large-scale secession, though in more recent years there have been minor efforts. A small but stubborn secessionist movement on behalf of Texas popped up in the Lone Star State in the 1990s and still seems to continue.

For unique historical reasons, secessionism has particular roots in Texas, but perhaps one could argue that the only (briefly) successful secessionist enterprise came about in liberal Seattle during the separation declared by activists during the summer of protest after the police murder of George Floyd. This established what came to be known as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. That unsettling uprising soon subsided.

‘Soft secession’ on the right

What faces us today is a swelling movement toward “soft secession,” and it is overwhelmingly a phenomenon of the political right. Jeff Deist, president of the Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank, uses this phrase to advocate what he describes as “a counterrevolution within the form: aggressive federalism, regionalism, localism, and an aggressive subsidiarity principle, operating in de facto opposition to the federal state – or at least sidestepping it.”

This includes acts of “direct nullification or flouting of federal edicts” whether in the enforcement of vaccine mandates or other directives of the state. One also could apply that to resistance to international governing acts, such as climate change commitments and United Nations decisions thought to bind the American people.

There’s a long history to the idea of nullification (deeply interwoven with efforts to resist the implementation of civil rights, particularly in the South, though I do not seek to racialize or regionalize the matter here).

In the legal sense then, there is a long history to soft secessionism. What I also mean by this phrase is a deliberate, but selective, effort to divorce major portions of the body politic away from the cultural influence of mainstream institutional society. For this there is a longer history, too, particularly surrounding efforts to preserve evangelical Christian culture from the massing influence of liberal political and popular culture.

Perhaps the difference today in part is that people on the right do not feel they are being ignored by the progressive mainstream so much as actively hounded and harassed by it.

Right-leaning libertarians and social conservatives differ somewhat in the degree to which their responses to this emphasizes legal resistance to left-wing social sanction, in the name of liberty, versus cultural resistance, in the name of protecting the social strength of conservative Christianity and the traditional family.

For conservatives, libertarians and even a number of moderate liberals, this push reveals itself not just in the perceived insistence upon centering discourse over sexuality in schools leading to such measures as Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act (better known as the “Don’t Say Gay" bill) but also in political condemnation of conservative legislation by leading corporations.

Why Disney and DeSantis clashed

In the past, major corporations could be relied upon to be at least outwardly neutral on matters of politics. Their role was to provide goods and services for their customers and to turn a profit for their shareholders, not to polarize the American people by weighing into politics. But the recent battles between Disney and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over the education bill shows that the era of corporate neutrality is behind us, lending urgency to the feeling among many on the right that it is open season on conservatives.

Progressive activists have pushed corporations and many other institutions out of their traditionally neutral postures, and for reasons of deep conviction. The host of “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” firmly believing that the effect of the Florida legislation will be to marginalize LGBTQ parents, teachers and children, points out that Disney gave $50,000 in donations to DeSantis and supported other backers of the bill in the Florida Legislature over the past two years, and has a moral obligation to fix the damage it has done.

But in response to the political awakening activated by progressives within institutions, libertarians and conservatives are responding by developing their own ecosystems of cultural separation while also fighting back in the courts.

No one has brought these two camps, or these two approaches, together more effectively than has The Daily Wire, founded by writer and commentator Ben Shapiro and business partner Jeremy Boreing. Amassing an audience of millions through bold branding, polished podcast production, and charismatic and controversial personalities delivering a widely resonant message on the right, The Daily Wire has diversified its efforts in remarkable ways. Shapiro and Boreing have galvanized their following by suing the Biden administration over matters such as vaccine mandates while also launching fulllength feature films showcasing conservative values in entertaining fashion. They even are launching a children’s network called DW Kids to compete with content offered by Disney.

Progressives have every right to push back against people and institutions they consider to be in positions of influence just as conservatives have every right to respond in the courts and in the media, and to build their own cultural spaces. But for all things there is a price to be paid.

The danger that comes from the social sanction of the left and the soft secessionism of the right is that we will abandon any efforts to remember what we have in common as Americans.

We share a greater history that need not make us aliens to each other. The work of groups such as the New Pluralists, the Listen First Coalition and Braver Angels (for which I work) set forth the infrastructure by which we can prevent the cultural dissolution of the union. But that is a column for another day.