What Neera Tanden’s demise says about ‘cancel culture’
Neera Tanden became President Joe Biden’s first Cabinet casualty on Tuesday when she withdrew her nomination to be budget director. The Republicans who sank her have not accomplished much. Biden’s next nominee will be a little more or less progressive, and a little more or less competent, but not significantly different in any way that matters.
The next nominee will, however, lack Tanden’s record of combative tweets against Republican senators. Those tweets were what kept her from being confirmed.
Tanden’s disappointed supporters are slamming her Republican opponents for hypocrisy. It’s not just that Republicans waited until just after Donald Trump’s presidency to start saying that mean tweets are disqualifying. They have also gotten more and more worked up about the excesses of “cancel culture” except when it comes to canceling Tanden.
For some of the people calling out Republicans’ behavior, the point is that Tanden should have gotten confirmed. For others, it’s that complaints about “cancel culture” are never anything more than political weapons. When people say they’re being canceled, runs the argument, they’re not being silenced; they’re trying to silence criticism.
My initial reaction to the claim that Tanden has been canceled is that it is absurd: Of course politicians are within their rights to weigh what political activists have said when deciding whether to give them jobs.
On second thought, though, maybe these seemingly opportunistic invocations of “cancel culture” are telling us something about that phrase and the phenomenon it describes. The view that “cancel culture isn’t real” has purchase because the concept is fuzzy.
If you’re a book publisher, or the director of a speaker series, or the editor of an op-ed page, where do you draw the line between the reasonable exercise of discretion over who should be able to use your platform and the illiberal suppression of debate?
Jonathan Rauch, a centrist who has been writing about challenges to free speech for decades, has proposed a six-point checklist to distinguish between criticism and cancellation. A campaign to get someone fired for something he said trips two of Rauch’s wires: It’s “organized” and “punitive.”
If you’re a cancel-culture skeptic, this checklist won’t convince you that it’s real, because the items on it are matters of degree. Nobody has tried to deny Tanden the ability to earn a livelihood, but she has been deprived of an opportunity for professional advancement. Does that count as punitive? The difference between a campaign of hostility and a spontaneous cascade of disapproval, meanwhile, can be undetectable on Twitter.
What Tanden’s defeat mostly tells us is that you should not insult a group of people if you might need their support in the future. It doesn’t tell us much about the broader question of how tolerant our culture is. Most people, according to polls, think the answer is: less and less. We are quick to attribute disagreements to evil motives.
To change that will require something more than the First Amendment or even a dedication to its spirit. It will take good judgment, which continues to be in scarce supply.