How Liberal America Came to Its Senses
13 min read
A decade ago, cultural norms in elite American institutions took a sharply illiberal turn. Professors would get disciplined, journalists fired, ordinary people harassed by social-media mobs, over some decontextualized phrase or weaponized misunderstanding. Every so often, I would write about these events or the debates that they set off.
But I haven’t written about this phenomenon in a long time, and I recently realized why: because it isn’t happening any more. Left-wing outrage mobs might still form here or there, but liberal America has built up enough antibodies that they no longer have much effect. My old articles now feel like dispatches from a distant era.
The beginning and end of any cultural moment is difficult to pin down. But the period of left-wing illiberalism that began about a decade ago seems to have drawn to a close. None of the terms or habits will disappear completely; after all, anti-Communist paranoia continued to circulate on the right for decades even after the era of McCarthyism ended in 1954. Nonetheless, the hallmarks of this latest period—the social-media mobbings, the whispered conversations among liberal onlookers too frightened to object—have disappeared from everyday life. The era lasted almost exactly 10 years. The final cause of death was the reelection of Donald Trump.
The illiberal norms that took hold a decade ago have gone by many terms, including political correctness, callout culture, cancel culture, and wokeness—each of which has been co-opted by the right as an all-purpose epithet for liberalism, forcing left-of-center critics of the trend to search for a new, uncontaminated phrase. The norms combined an almost infinitely expansive definition of what constituted racism or sexism—any accusation of bigotry was considered almost definitionally correct—with a hyperbolic understanding of the harm created by encountering offensive ideas or terms.
Whatever you want to call it, two main forces seem to have set this movement in motion. The political precondition was the giddy atmosphere that followed Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection, which appeared, based on exit polls—although these were later found to have been misleading—to reveal a rising cohort of young, socially liberal nonwhite voters whose influence would continue to grow indefinitely. The rapid progression of causes like gay marriage seemed to confirm a one-way ratchet of egalitarian social norms.
The technological precondition was the rapid adoption of iPhones and social media, which allowed the memetic spread of new ideas and terms. Twitter in particular was the perfect forum for political correctness to flourish. It favored morally uncomplicated positions. It encouraged activists and clout-seekers to gain audience share and political influence by mustering braying crowds to render summary judgment on the basis of some fragment of video or text. The instant consensus that formed on Twitter felt like reality to those absorbed inside of it, an illusion that would take years to dispel.
Numerous analyses have identified 2014 as the year when the trend achieved exit velocity. It was in December 2013 that Justine Sacco, a publicist with only 170 Twitter followers at the time, dashed off a clumsy tweet attempting to make light of her white privilege before getting on a flight to South Africa. By the time she landed, a social-media mob was calling for her to lose her job, a request that her employer soon obliged. That same year, #cancelcolbert swept through social media, in response to a tweet by The Colbert Report that used cartoonishly over-the-top Asian stereotypes to make fun of the obvious racism of the Washington Redskins. Stephen Colbert wasn’t canceled, but the premise that one misplaced joke could be punished with a firing was now taken seriously. (Both cases also demonstrated social-media mobs’ difficulty distinguishing irony from sincerity.) That spring, Michelle Goldberg wrote possibly the first column diagnosing the rise of what she called “the return of the anti-liberal left” for The Nation.
The censorious elements of the new culture could be hard to acknowledge at a time when many of the same energies were being directed at deserving targets—most notably, police mistreatment of Black Americans (#handsupdontshoot) and sexual harassment and assault of women in the workplace (#MeToo). Partly for that reason, or out of a general discomfort with criticizing their allies, some progressives insisted either that nothing new was afoot in the culture and that reactionaries were manufacturing a moral panic out of thin air, or alternatively that there was something new, but it merely involved overdue accountability (or “consequence culture”) for racist and sexist behavior.
Over time, both defenses grew untenable. Student protesters began routinely demanding that figures they disapproved of be prohibited from speaking on campus or, when that failed, shouting down their remarks. Seemingly innocent comments could generate wild controversy. In 2015, for example, Yale erupted in protest after a lecturer suggested that a school-wide email cautioning students about offensive Halloween costumes was infantilizing.
Donald Trump’s election in 2016 accelerated the dynamic. Everything about Trump’s persona seemed to confirm the left’s most dire warnings. He gleefully objectified women and had boasted about groping them. He made statements deemed racist even by fellow Republicans and inspired active support from white nationalists. And yet, at the same time, his victory seemed tenuous and reversible. He had squeaked into office on the tailwinds of a hyperventilated email scandal, and still lost the national vote by two percentage points.
The prevailing interpretation among Democrats was that Hillary Clinton had lost because she had failed to turn out enough nonwhite voters. The key to energizing those constituencies, many liberals believed, was to ramp up identity-based appeals to drive home the stakes of Trump’s racism and misogyny. The retrograde behaviors Trump exhibited were simultaneously threatening enough to present a crisis, yet vulnerable enough to be defeated if the opposition could summon enough energy.
That energy took many forms, not all of them equally productive. Protesters tried to shut down campus appearances by right-wing speakers such as the provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and the conservative race-science theorist Charles Murray. These tactics ignored the possibility that any charge of racism might be erroneous, or that it might be possible to overreact to its scale, and had no limiting principle.
Inevitably, the scope of targets widened. Harvard fired the first Black faculty dean in its history after students protested his work for Harvey Weinstein’s legal defense, establishing a new norm that the sins of misogynists and racists would now attach to the defense lawyers who represent them. Censoriousness also applied retroactively. In 2019, the comedian Sarah Silverman said she was fired from a movie over a resurfaced 2007 photo from a sketch in which her oblivious character wore ludicrously offensive blackface in an effort to see whether Black or Jewish people faced worse treatment. (The whole joke was that she mistook angry reactions to her racist getup for anti-Black discrimination; once again, a satirical take on racism was treated as racism itself.) A NASCAR driver lost a sponsorship over a report that his father had used the N-word—in the 1980s.
This is just a tiny sample of the kinds of events that had become routine. If you think we are still living in that world today, you have forgotten how crazy things got.
The mania peaked in 2020. By this point, Twitter’s influence had reached a level where large swaths of reporting in major newspapers were simply accounts of what Twitter was talking about. When the coronavirus pandemic struck, social media almost totally eclipsed real life—especially for liberals, who were much likelier than conservatives to stick with social distancing. This gave the summary judgments delivered by online crowds a new, inescapable force. George Floyd’s murder seemed to confirm the starkest indictment of systemic racism. Progressive Americans, many of them white and newly aware of the extent of racism in American life, set out to eradicate it. Much of that energy, however, was trained not outward, at racist police officers or residential segregation patterns, but inward, at the places where those progressives lived and worked.
Many of the most famous and consequential cancellations played out during this period. A New York Times op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton calling for deploying the National Guard to stop riots was deemed “dangerous” by Times staffers, leading to the ouster of James Bennet, the editorial-page editor. Bennet’s critics insisted that Cotton’s argument would pave the way for attacks on peaceful protesters, but even criticizing violence became risky behavior in progressive circles. The Democratic data analyst David Shor lost his job after retweeting a study by a Black academic suggesting that violent demonstrations had helped Richard Nixon’s campaign in 1968.
In classic witch-hunt logic, the guilt often spread to those who failed to join in the condemnations of others. In June 2020, The Washington Post published a surreal story about how its cartoonist, Tom Toles, had hosted a Halloween Party two years earlier in which one attendee had shown up dressed as “Megyn Kelly in blackface.” (The costume, intended to lampoon Kelly for her comments defending blackface, did not go over well at the time, and the designer apologized shortly afterward.) The article, which resulted in Toles’s guest being fired from her job as a graphic designer, implied that Toles was guilty of secondhand racism for not confronting her. The next summer, a contestant on The Bachelor was found to have attended an antebellum-themed fraternity party during college, and when the show’s longtime host defended her as having been caught up in rapidly changing social norms, the ensuing uproar forced him out of his job. (Again, these cases reflect just a tiny sample.)
But by late 2021, with COVID in abeyance and Joe Biden occupying the presidency, things began calming down quickly. Trump’s (temporary) disappearance from the political scene deescalated the sense of crisis that had fueled the hysteria. And Elon Musk’s disastrous 2022 Twitter takeover accelerated the decline. By driving away much of Twitter’s audience and suppressing the virality of news reports and left-leaning posts, Musk inadvertently shattered the platform’s monopolistic hold on the political attention economy, negating the most important arena for identifying and punishing dissidents.
The aftermath of the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel further chipped away at the foundations of left-wing illiberalism by showing how easily its premises could be co-opted by the other side. Many Jews who had previously supported the left’s approach to racial issues began to apprehend that their allies considered them oppressors, rather than the oppressed. Meanwhile, the response from supporters of Israel turned the cancel-culture debate on its head. In the face of anti-Israel protests, congressional Republicans hauled several university presidents into hearings, where they were berated and urged to adopt sweeping policies not only against anti-Semitic conduct, but against any speech that made Jewish students feel threatened. Suddenly, the rhetoric of safety and harm that had been used by the left was being deployed against it, and principled free-speech defenders were sticking up for the right of protestors to chant “Death to Israel.” This put even more strain on the already unraveling consensus that allegations of racial discrimination must be treated with total deference.
In the end, progressive illiberalism may have died because the arguments against it simply won out. Although a handful of post-liberal thinkers on the left made an earnest case against the value of free-speech norms, deflections were much more common. It was just the antics of college undergraduates. When it began happening regularly in workplaces, the real problem was at-will employment. And, above all, why focus on problems with the left when Republicans are worse? None of these evasions supplied any concrete defense for sustaining dramatic, widely unpopular culture change. Eventually, reason prevailed.
Much of blue America is now experiencing a determined reaction against the excesses of that bygone period. Many important organizations that had cooperated with mob-driven cancellations came to experience regret, installing new leaders or standards in an explicit attempt to avoid a recurrence. The New YorkTimes, perhaps liberal America’s most influential institution, has made a series of moves reflecting implicit regret at its treatment of figures like Bennet and the science writer Donald McNeil, including publishing a pro-free-speech editorial and defying demands by activists and writers that it stop skeptically covering youth gender treatment.
Corporations have pulled back on the surge in spending on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that began in 2020, and some universities may follow. Many elite universities have stopped requiring job applicants to submit DEI statements, which have been widely criticized as a de facto ideological screening device. The sociologist Musa al-Gharbi has found that the upsurge in attention by scholars and journalists to race and gender bias peaked a few years ago, as did reports of cancellations.
One interpretation of these shifts, suggested by the conservative Times columnist Ross Douthat, is that the trend has merely settled in at an elevated plateau. The repressive machinery might be less fearsome than it was a few years ago, but it is still far more terrifying than in, say, 2010.
I believe that the illiberal-left movement has not merely declined. It is dead, or at least barely breathing. When was the last time you saw a social-media mob have any effect outside social media? Who is the last person to be publicly shamed and unjustly driven out of their high-status job over some misunderstood joke or stray comment? Indeed, the roster of cancellation victims has not only stopped growing, but begun ticking downward. Five years ago, Saturday Night Live fired the comedian Shane Gillis before his first appearance on the show in response to outrage over offensive jokes he had made on a podcast. This past February, he was brought back as a guest host. David Shor, who lost his job in 2020 for suggesting that violence is politically counterproductive, helped direct advertising by the Democratic Party’s most powerful super PAC this year.
Douthat and other critics of left-wing illiberalism suggest that bureaucratized diversity represents a kind of consolidated machinery of the social revolution. But this misses the sheer hysteria that was the hallmark of the cancellation era. What made social-media mobs so fearsome was the randomness of their actions, and the panicked submission that often followed. Bureaucracy, however annoying it can be, inherently involves process. A corporate department is unlikely to terminate an employee simply because he was guilty of a “bad look” or failed to “read the room,” or any other buzzword that once swiftly turned people into nonpersons.
One reason the demise of political correctness has failed to register fully is that critics have redefined it as “wokeness.” And wokeness can mean a lot of things, some of them noble, some of them silly. Land acknowledgments are woke. Hate Has No Place Here yard signs are woke. But those forms of wokeness are not illiberal or coercive.
The left-wing ideas about race and gender that spawned the recent era of progressive illiberalism remain in circulation, but this fact should not be confused for the phenomenon itself. The repressive effect of political correctness may spring from ideological soil, but it requires other elements in order to grow and spread. And the political atmosphere that fostered the conditions of 2014–24 has grown chilly.
Many anti–political correctness moderates feared that another Trump victory would revive left-wing illiberalism, just as it had in 2016. Instead, the immediate response on the left has been almost diametrically opposite. Rather than confirming the most sweeping condemnations of American social hierarchy, Trump’s second election has confounded them.
This time around, Trump managed to win the popular vote, making his victory seem less flukish. More important, he won specifically thanks to higher support among nonwhite voters. This result upended the premise that undergirded political correctness, which treated left-wing positions about social issues as objectively representing the interests of people of color. Now that the election had confirmed that those positions alienated many minority voters themselves, doubts that had only been whispered before could be shouted in public more easily. On Morning Joe, for example, Mika Brzezinski read aloud a Maureen Dowd column blaming the defeat on “a worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation” that featured “diversity statements for job applicants and faculty lounge terminology like ‘Latinx,’ and ‘BIPOC.’”
Establishment Democrats were not alone in reaching such conclusions. “We have to make it OK for someone to change their minds,” Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, the executive director of Advocates for Transgender Equality, told The New York Times. “We cannot vilify them for not being on our side. No one wants to join that team.” Cassie Pritchard, a labor activist in Los Angeles, conceded on X that the left had miscalculated. “I think there was a time where it felt like the liberal-left coalition had essentially won the culture war, and now it was simply a matter of enforcement,” she wrote. “But that’s clearly wrong. We didn’t, and a lot of us overestimated our power to enforce our preferred norms.”
Once political correctness had expanded to the point where it could affect candidates for office at a national scale, it would inevitably begin to self-destruct. A small group of committed activists can dominate a larger organization by intimidating a majority of its members into silence, but that tactic doesn’t work when people can vote by secret ballot.
Trump’s success reveals the limits of a political strategy that was designed to impose control over progressive spaces on the implicit assumption that controlling progressive spaces was enough to bring about political change. What will come after the era of political correctness within the left is, hopefully, a serious effort to engage with political reality. While the illiberal left is in retreat, the illiberal right is about to attain the height of its powers—and, alarmingly, some of the institutions that once gave in too easily to left-wing mobs are now racing to appease the MAGA movement. A new era of open discourse in progressive America cannot begin soon enough.
