Punitive Heretic-Hunting = Far-Left McCarthyism

Do Progressives Have a Free Speech Problem?: The illiberal left is a lot less threatening than the right wrong. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

"Like the people who wrote the letter, I think left-wing illiberalism is a problem, though I’ve mostly stopped writing about it since Idiot-in-Chief was elected installed despite losing the popular vote, because it seems like complaining about a bee sting when you have Stage IV cancer.

So I signed. The statement, published in Harper’s Magazine as “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” spawned takes and countertakes, most of them, despite my modest effort, about “cancel culture.”

At first I avoided wading into discourse about what’s now called the Letter. It seemed self-indulgent to write about media angst when the country is self-immolating because of unchecked disease and an economic catastrophe that’s about to get much worse. But as the debate over free speech grew and grew, I started to think I was using the burning world as an excuse to avoid personal discomfort."

...

"At the same time, a climate of punitive heretic-hunting, a recurrent feature of left-wing politics, has set in, enforced, in some cases, through workplace discipline, including firings. It’s the involvement of human resources departments in compelling adherence with rapidly changing new norms of speech and debate that worries me the most."

...

"Anyone venturing ideas in public should be prepared to endure negative reviews and pushback on social media. Internal workplace reviews are something else. If people fear for their livelihoods for relatively minor ideological transgressions, it may not violate the Constitution — the workplace is not the state — but it does create a climate of self-censorship and grudging conformity."

...

"It should be said that many people on the left, including some who are often dismissive of the idea of left-wing illiberalism, condemned Shor’s firing. Surely one reason this episode has been invoked so often is that there aren’t many comparable examples of such obvious social justice overreach."

[I have yet to find a full analysis of the multiple factors feeding the predominantly-American subset comprising cancel-culture, social-mob, opinionated, oversensitive, illiberal, non-prescient, holier-than-thou Social Just-us Whiners, but I suspect an array of factors: 

a) helicopter parenting that increased interpersonal dependence and fostered an expectation/demand that every emotional twinge should be mollycoddled, 

b) every-opinion-counts platitudes that were intended to boost children's confidence, yet promoted a bizarre combination of emotional insecurity plus hubris devoid of metacognition/cognitive humility/attempts to achieve fairness,

c) a defective educational system in which a) and b) are not merely encouraged, but armed with postmodernist counter-biological psychobabble,

d) profit-focused educational institutions whose administrators fold under the slightest pressure, rather than upholding rationality and justice-oriented values,

e) social-media screen-obsession which has robbed youth of non-anonymous, nuanced, interpersonal communication skills,

f) polarized, profit-chasing media outlets which either (wrong-wing) actively amplify divisions—even to the point of encouraging dangerous (mask-refusing) rebellion and outright violence—or (placatory left-wing) organizations which cower in the face of clamorous, moralistic criticism,

g) social-platform algorithms which feed increasingly paranoid and blaming material to conservatives, and increasingly self-righteous and blaming material to supposed-liberals.

h) increased anxiety thanks to science-ignorant DISinformation rebelliously swallowed by those raised to distrust expertise; excessive free time; and, utter lack of the calming distraction of gainful employment—ALL necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the resurgent first wave.]