Scott Tibbs
Cooling down the culture wars with a culture of free speech
By Scott Tibbs, December 1, 2023
"It is not 'cancel culture' to hold people accountable for bad behavior. This is accountability culture." This is the refrain we have heard from many on the Left for years, usually when someone is fired for making a politically incorrect statement or joke online. Sometimes, the Left will turn on its own, finding a hidden "racist" meaning in even the mildest post from someone who has been fighting for "social justice" for years or even decades.
Every now and then, we will have a major news story that will get some on the Left worrying about cancel culture. When employers started rescinding job offers for university students involved in pro-Hamas protests,
Kat Rosenfield wrote this in the
Washington post:
Even the real jerks among us have families to feed. Unless you want your taxes going to a welfare fund for the canceled (I certainly don't!), we’ll need to agree that contributing to society is something every capable person must be allowed to do, as opposed to some sort of prize to be reserved exclusively for those who hold the right set of beliefs.
Cancel culture has been described as a phenomenon of the Left, but it also exists on the Right. For an example, see how the Dixie Chicks were excommunicated from country music radio for their criticism of George W. Bush. Or see a case from a decade ago, where conservatives led an online campaign to get a woman fired from her job after she posted a disrespectful photo in
Arlington National Cemetery. The photo was in bad taste, certainly, but it is more than a little disproportionate to try to ruin someone's life over a joke photo.
Are these things legal? Sure. The First Amendment does not protect you from being punished by a private sector employer, especially in an "at will" employment state. But if we want to dial down the heat in our culture wars, a culture of free speech needs to be part of that goal. Employers should stand by their workers and make it clear that so long as you are doing your job, your employment is safe from the mob. It does not help the political culture or national unity to have a never ending cycle of scalp-collecting for violating this or that idol of the Right or Left.
Obviously, there are exceptions to this principle. A church or parachurch ministry cannot be expected to employ people who, through personal behavior or public statements, reject their employer's theological commitments. A political advocacy organization cannot be expected to retain people who disagree with the core ideological commitments of the organization. And even when an employer does not have an ideological or theological mission, there are some things that are so odious that it creates a serious disruption for the employer. But those things should be very limited and the policy for off-the-clock speech should be as clear as possible, not vague or open-ended.
This requires employers to have courage, of course, and not be spooked by every AstroTurf "campaign" against one of their employees. But if enough demands for termination are ignored or rebuked, eventually the mobs on both Right and Left will realize this is a fruitless endeavor. It will also eliminate the need to get "revenge" for someone on "our side" getting canceled. We can make our political culture less heated, but only if people are willing to stand up to the mob to show it can be done.
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