A Form of Madness

The latest attempt to shut someone down for voicing opinions the left doesn't like is the effort to force Ilya Shapiro out of his position at Georgetown University for a pair of innocuous tweets criticizing the president for basing his forthcoming Supreme Court nomination on the candidate's race and sex.

The attempt to destroy someone's career over such a frivolous matter is as cruel as it is absurd.

Federalist Senior editor John Daniel Davidson offers a few insightful comments on this most recent manifestation of the "cancel culture":

Let’s get something straight: there was absolutely nothing racist or sexist about a pair of tweets by Ilya Shapiro last week criticizing President Biden for his blatantly racist and sexist decision to consider only black women for nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Every single person who saw them knows that — especially the people who immediately tried to get Shapiro fired for it.

That’s really what this is all about. The feigned outrage over Shapiro’s tweets is nothing more than a pretext for trying to get him run out of his new job at Georgetown Law School, where this week he’s supposed to begin as executive director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. The left thinks it owns places like Georgetown, and for the most part it does.

The message of this coordinated campaign to cancel Shapiro is simple: if you’re right-of-center, stay out of academia because it’s ours.

It's ironic that the left conjures racism out of a tweet that condemns racism while having nothing to say about Mr. Biden's own history of both selecting his vice-president on the basis of race and sex and voting against black female judicial candidates:

Biden’s race-based and sex-based criterion is how we got Kamala Harris as vice president, a woman who isn’t remotely qualified and never should have been chosen for the post. The only reason it ended up being her is that Biden pledged to nominate a black woman — not a particular black woman, just a black woman.

For Biden, checking a diversity box and appeasing the far-left wing of the Democratic Party was more important than picking the right person for the job. Again, everyone in America understands this perfectly.

Of course, the left is only using race as a pretext for smearing people. If the race of a candidate for a judgeship is "correct" but their ideology is conservative then blocking their careers is an end that justifies any means:

If a person happens to fit Democrats’ race and sex requirements but has the wrong political beliefs or background, then they must be stopped. That’s why Biden and a host of his erstwhile Senate colleagues filibustered and tried to block the nomination of Janice Rogers Brown, a black woman, to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2005.

That’s why Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and a dozen of his fellow Democratic senators opposed the nomination of Judge Ada Elene Brown, a black woman and a citizen of the Choctaw Nation, to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas in 2019. Democrats do this all the time, and have been for years.

If ... Shapiro loses his new gig at Georgetown over this, understand that that was the purpose of the outrage and the smear campaign against Shapiro. They don’t want someone like him at Georgetown, not because he’s a racist but because he’s not a leftist. And they will say and do anything, including launch an entire smear campaign based on a lie, to get him out.

The left's appetite for destroying the lives of people whose ideas they find disagreeable raises an interesting question. How did a movement which started out in the sixties promoting free speech and free thought gradually morph into the intolerant, narrow-minded bunch of ideological prudes they are today?

It was largely the influence of Marxists of the German Frankfurt school of critical theory, most notably Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), that has been responsible for this evolution. In his essay in Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965) Marcuse advocated what he called "Repressive Tolerance."

He wrote:

The tolerance which enlarged the range and content of freedom was always partisan - intolerant toward the protagonists of the repressive status quo....Can the indiscriminate guaranty of political rights and liberties be repressive? Can such tolerance serve to contain qualitative social change?....

When tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society, when it serves to neutralize opposition and to render men immune against other and better forms of life, then tolerance has been perverted....

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.(Italics mine)

In other words, any ideas, or people, seen as inimical to the left must not be tolerated. If that means shouting them down, beating them up, destroying their livelihoods, whatever it takes, they must be suppressed.

As Marcuse's idea of repressive tolerance percolated through the academy in the decades following the sixties it informed the thinking of two generations of leftists and is today manifesting itself in what's called cancel culture which is a form of Marcusan repression.

Those who participate in the destruction of people with whom they disagree are hostile to individual freedom, they're hostile to any common sense notion of justice and to any morality based on treating people with dignity, respect and kindness.

Cancel culture is a form of madness, and one can only hope that it exhausts itself before it achieves its aim of tearing this country apart.