The Harper's Letter on cancel culture, or maybe about Mean Libruls, or something ...

There's a kerfuffle on social media at the moment over a vaguely worded open letter, A Letter on Justice and Open Debate 07/07/2020, signed by various academic and journalistic luminaries, including:

Martin Amis
Anne Applebaum
Paul Berman
David Blight
David Bromwich
David Brooks
Ian Buruma
Noam Chomsky
Federico Finchelstein
Francis Fukuyama
Todd Gitlin
Michelle Goldberg
Jeet Heer
Arlie Russell Hochschild
Michael Ignatieff
Wendy Kaminer
Nicholas Lemann
Mark Lilla
Dahlia Lithwick
John R. MacArthur
Susan Madrak
John McWhorter
Olivia Nuzzi
George Packer
Katha Pollitt
Salman Rushdie
Anne-Marie Slaughter
Paul Starr
Gloria Steinem
Zephyr Teachout
Cynthia Tucker
Michael Walzer
Randi Weingarten
Sean Wilentz
Garry Wills
Matthew Yglesias
Fareed Zakaria

Those are all people who I would include on the spectrum of people worth paying attention to, although I'm much more likely on any given issue to be on the side of Dahlia Lithwick or Michelle Goldberg than that of Fareed Zakaria or David Brooks.

It also includes some "the-Mean-Liburls-are-pickin'-on-us" whiners like Steven Pinker, Bari Weiss and also J.K. Rowling, currently controversial because of her dubious comments on trans people. But given the other supporters, I'm not inclined to tdismiss the letter as frivolous.

The problem is, I read the letter and found it hard to tell what they are talking about. It has a kind of bill of particulars:

Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

When I first read that, I honestly couldn't tell what specific instances they refer to. Paul Campos Censorship and "Censorship" Lawyers, Guns and Money 07/07/2020) writes, "Missing from this cri de coeur are any ... specific examples."

It's kind of a problem when people are making a stand on principle but even those who would be inclined to be sympathetic can't actually tell what you're talking about.

Jennifer Schuessler and Elizabeth Harris did some reporting for the New York Times on the letter (Artists and Writers Warn of an ‘Intolerant Climate.’ Reaction Is Swift. 07/07/2020). They identify Thomas Chatterton Williams as the person who "spearheaded" the letter. (Whatever that may mean.) They quote him giving a bit more detail on the incidents referenced, with some internal links included:

He said there wasn’t one particular incident that provoked the letter. But he did cite several recent ones, including the resignation of more than half the board of the National Book Critics Circle over its statement supporting Black Lives Matter, a similar blowup at the Poetry Foundation, and the case of David Shor, a data analyst at a consulting firm who was fired after he tweeted about academic research linking looting and vandalism by protesters to Richard Nixon’s 1968 electoral victory.

Such incidents, Mr. Williams said, both fueled and echoed what he called the far greater and more dangerous “illiberalism” of President Trump.

“Donald Trump is the Canceler in Chief,” he said. “But the correction of Trump’s abuses cannot become an overcorrection that stifles the principles we believe in.”

Mr. Williams said the letter was very much a crowdsourced effort, with about 20 people contributing language. Then it was circulated more broadly for signatures, in what he describes as a process that was both “organic” and aimed at getting a group that was maximally diverse politically, racially and otherwise.

In other words, it was written by a committee. And in order to make it general enough for a politically diverse group to comfortably endorse, they used language that is mostly stock formulations of classical liberal justifications for freedom of speech and opinion. And they made the reference to abuses against that principle so vague that even people who are politically engaged news junkies can't immediately tell what they are talking about.

One of the links there is to a piece by Jonathan Chait, who himself loves to fret about the dire effects of Mean Libruls criticizing people, The Still-Vital Case for Liberalism in a Radical Age New York 06/11/2020. The cases he discusses there at least sound like some of the things the Harper's Letter criticizes. None of them like some dire threat to free speech to me. Journalists and political consultants argue with each other all the time. One of his examples involves the notorious Tom Cotton editorial in the New York Times, which raised substantial questions about journalistic responsibility and the Times' ever-diminishing brand reputation for quality journalism.

There are substantial issues about substantive free speech involving questions about how far private companies can go in coercing employees in their personal political expression and the many ways that "at-will employment" laws and practices endanger essential individual freedoms. But it's also important to remember that the classical liberal notion of free speech originally behind the First Amendment concepts in the US Constitution meant that the government can't put you in jail for some political or religious opinion you expressed. As Campos puts it in criticizing the Harper's Letter:

This is some right fine rhetorical sleight of hand, which tries to slip in the claim that “censorship” by social disapproval is comparable to censorship by the government. It isn’t. At all.

Government censorship is backed by the violence of the state. There is all the difference in the world between a newspaper deciding that your views are too noxious to be allowed on its pages, and a government deciding that they’re too noxious to be allowed in print, period. This distinction is absolutely fundamental, and eliding it is a disastrous and increasingly common mistake. [my emphasis]

Again, that is the classical liberal meaning of free speech, and doesn't address the class and social problems involved in the notion that that Jeff Bezos and one of his Amazon delibery workers are equally free to buy a newspaper. And so is any employee of the Wahington Post, which Bezos actually does own.

In the case of David Shor, mentioned by name in the Times quote above, Chait writes: "'Progressphiles,' a progressive data listserv, announced it was kicking Shor out, according to another member of the group. Shor, who did not respond to comment, has been a member of the group but has not posted there in two years." I used to be active on listservs, too. Back in the 1990s before Movable Type software came out and enabled blogging to take off and before Twitter and Facebook were parts of everyday life. I once got banned from one of my favorite listservs because the guy running it at the time was a twit. It was irritating, but I don't recall thinking that made me a martyr to free speech. (Some of us started a split-off listserv of our own.) And if Shor hadn't been active for two years, I'm going to make a wild guess that being banned had minimal effect on his emotional or financial well-being.

Also: there are still active listservs around?

My bottom line on the Harper's Letter: Yeah, I agree that the classical liberal notion of free speech is great as far as it goes. And even after writing this blog post, I still can't honestly say I know what they are talking about.

07/10/2020: This response signed by a number of less prominent figures, A More Specific Letter on Justice and Open Debate The Objective 07/10/2020, has more speculation on what instances it may have been to which the Harper's Letter refers. Saagar Enjeti also offers an overcaffeinated take from a conservative perspective relative to the letter in Cancel Culture WARS hit journalist, include racist attacks against POC on free speech The Hill/Rising 07/09/2020.

07/12/2020: Additional piece on the Harper's Letter: Tom Scocca, The Harper’s Letter Is What Happens When the Discourse Takes Precedence Over Reality Slate 07/10/2020; Osita Nwanevu, The Willful Blindness of Reactionary Liberalism New Republic 07/06/2020.