The Case Not Made: A Response to Anne Applebaum's "The New Puritans"

All social relations create vulnerabilities and dependencies that are subject to abuse. This is a fundamental fact about the social nature of humanity, a baseline from which all specific arrangements need to be judged. Most of our public debates,however, take the posture of implying that the mere occurrence of some specific wrong is enough to indict the entire system. While we should not grow complacent about combating the problems of our day, the diagnostic question should always be “compared to what?”

Nowhere does the inability to draw meaningful comparisons lead to ridiculous conclusions more often than in the debate over “cancel culture.” This is the alleged tendency of online “mobs” to attack some target for their ideological impurity, often resulting in the target losing their job (hence being “cancelled”). Anne Applebaum’s recent essay in The Atlantic is what some might call the very specimen of the genre. “The New Puritans” opens with a comparison of the present to the fictional Puritan past of The Scarlet Letter, in which an unwed mother is forced to wear an identifying mark on her clothing in order to make shunning more convenient. Like all essays of this kind, she swiftly moves to the claim that Puritan-style social shunning is very much in vogue today—a claim she fails to back in any meaningful way with evidence.

A deeper understanding of the nature and scope of these cases is clouded by a number of factors. The internal conversations of institutional decisionmakers who fired individuals embroiled in media scandals are rarely made public—this is true both today and in the recent past, making it even more difficult to shed light on what has changed. The media-driven nature of the “cancellation” events themselves makes it difficult to quantify how much occurs beneath the surface, below the higher profile cases, or even the secondary or tertiary cases. 

Moreover, writings on this topic are simply oozing with status anxiety; Applebaum talks almost entirely about people who were formerly top editors at prestigious publications or highly successful academics sitting at top universities. Applebaum is herself a highly accomplished writer for a very prestigious and widely read magazine, as well as the author of books printed by major publishers. It’s possible that even very small problems among this group enjoy substantial public attention, as they have very loud voices. That is not evidence against the pervasiveness of the problem, but it does muddy the water for someone who wishes to get an accurate estimate of that pervasiveness.

This will not be another essay claiming that “cancel culture” does not exist, though many writers I respect have taken this line. It is a rebuttal to what was yet another poorly thought out essay from a writer who ought to know better at a publication that ought to have higher standards. I would like to draw attention to the structural factors in play for this particular issue, and the implications they have for not just our particular political moment but our future.

Applebaum’s argument

Other than the one fictional reference to a period in American history, Applebaum’s chief points of comparison are to Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s China, and (to provide some kind of non-totalitarian reference point) Erdoğan’s Turkey. This kind of rhetoric is precisely why it is so hard to take arguments of this kind seriously. Applebaum has produced a series of terrific and scholarly books on the USSR, so one understands that such topics are ready at hand for her, but the comparisons invite ridicule.

Applebaum’s criticism of “modern mob justice” is somewhat novel in its attempt to avoid litigating whether a given “victim” had done something meriting social sanctions. Hers is a procedural case against “the modern online public sphere” and in particular what it has done to “American cultural institutions: universities, newspapers, foundations, museums.”

Heeding public demands for rapid retribution, they sometimes impose the equivalent of lifetime scarlet letters on people who have not been accused of anything remotely resembling a crime. Instead of courts, they use secretive bureaucracies. Instead of hearing evidence and witnesses, they make judgments behind closed doors.

These “secretive bureaucracies” impose “the equivalent of lifetime scarlet letters” even though the offenders have violated “no laws, and sometimes no workplace rules either.” A thick normative conception of the rule of law which applies not only to actual legal institutions but also (apparently) to any large bureaucracy is assumed but never truly defended. Applebaum’s narrative is of an America that had achieved this ideal more or less but is rapidly moving away from it. And it is the apparent departure from this ideal that leads Applebaum to draw extreme, one might say unhinged, parallels:

I have been trying to understand these stories for a long time, both because I believe that the principle of due process underpins liberal democracy, and also because they remind me of other times and places. A decade ago, I wrote a book about the Sovietization of Central Europe in the 1940s, and found that much of the political conformism of the early Communist period was the result not of violence or direct state coercion, but rather of intense peer pressure. Even without a clear risk to their life, people felt obliged—not just for the sake of their career but for their children, their friends, their spouse—to repeat slogans that they didn’t believe, or to perform acts of public obeisance to a political party they privately scorned.

She quickly assures readers that “you don’t even need Stalinism to create that kind of atmosphere.” What you need apparently is Erdoğanism, as her next example involves self-censorship in Turkey due to “unpredictable prosecutions and drastic sentences for speech or writing that can be arbitrarily construed as insulting the president or the Turkish nation.” Do we have such things in America? Are they the explanation for the apparent pervasiveness of “the equivalent of lifetime scarlet letters” people are forced to wear here?

No, she quickly assures us:

In America, of course, we don’t have that kind of state coercion. There are currently no laws that shape what academics or journalists can say; there is no government censor, no ruling-party censor. But fear of the internet mob, the office mob, or the peer-group mob is producing some similar outcomes.

So a people that is arguably the freest on Earth from legal censorship is nevertheless becoming effectively as unfree as authoritarian Turkey, which employs heavy-handed prosecutions and legal sanctions. Of course, the gesture towards “similar outcomes” fails to specify how similar and how pervasive this problem is, even restricting the question to what goes on within “America’s cultural institutions.” 

Applebaum never attempts to address the problem of scope at all. Her entire research consists of speaking with “more than a dozen people who were either victims or close observers of sudden shifts in social codes in America.” To put matters politely, this seems a very thin basis for diagnosing an encroaching Erdoğanism, never mind Stalinism or Maoism, and quite disappointing coming from someone who has elsewhere shown herself quite capable of diligence in her research.

Indeed, the empirical weaknesses of the essay are quite egregious. There are 21 references to cases that can be publicly confirmed. There are then 19 references to unnamed individuals who spoke to Applebaum directly, the details of which are left out “because they are involved in complicated legal or tenure battles and do not want to speak on the record, or because they fear another wave of social-media attacks.” The number of unique individuals contained in these 19 references is not clear. Nearly all are professors or journalists at institutions like Yale or the New York Times, many quite prominent within those prestigious institutions. One could be forgiven for thinking that Applebaum began by speaking to people within her social circle and then simply expanded it outward from there—but just far enough to get “more than a dozen individuals.”

Many of her specific claims rest upon even weaker reeds than this. In one case she tells readers that “At least two of the people I interviewed believe that they were punished because a white, male boss felt he had to publicly sacrifice another white man in order to protect his own position,” as though anonymously speculating that the white man’s guilt of their bosses was the cause of their unspecified misfortune constitutes any kind of credible evidence of the truth of those speculations. In another she quotes a different anonymous professor who “thought that one of his colleagues resented having to work with him.” In a third she mentions that Yale Law professor Amy Chua “believes that investigations into her relationships with students were sparked by her personal connections to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.” In these and other examples, she simply conveys the beliefs of the people she talked to without subjecting them to any critical scrutiny or providing further reason to believe they are correct. These examples could very well reflect a news-inflicted paranoia rather than the reality of the case. Applebaum needn’t have dismissed these speculations, but she ought to have either substantiated them or left them out.

The biggest conceptual weakness of the essay is the failure to flesh out the standard by which Applebaum is clearly judging the cases she discusses. There is a difference between sanctions imposed by the state and private individuals exercising their right to not associate, and it is not clear that Applebaum has given any serious thought to how we ought to judge the latter.

Rule of law is a standard we hold states to; it is not a standard by which to judge the way voluntary organizations manage their memberships, much less the way private individuals maintain or abandon their friendships. It’s not that she has no case at all—we ought to scrutinize the decisionmaking processes of large employers, for example—it’s that she doesn’t make her case. Do the cases under consideration cash out in a need for abolishing at-will employment? Or is this less about crafting public policy than it is about cultivating private virtue? Questions such as these are not even raised, never mind considered.

Institutions are craven

When it comes to online media events causing people to get fired, I can’t say that I know much more than anyone else. But one thing that I do know—something of a foundational touchpoint—is that institutions, to be institutional at all, are institutionally cowardly. A mass organization provides a convenient means for all individuals involved in it to avoid taking personal responsibility by pointing to other individuals who can in turn point to other individuals, who can point to still more individuals or simply point back to the first individual in the blame game, thus passing the buck in a perfect circle for as long as necessary. 

Applebaum spoke of “secretive bureaucracies” and implied their exercise of arbitrary power in the university or other large employers was something novel, but in 1970 Hannah Arendt could speak of a system “in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many, can be held responsible, and which could be properly called the rule by Nobody.” By 1970 the bureaucratization of life was already decades along its path.

Once you find some individuals who have a vested interest in the preservation of the institution, people who could plausibly “be held responsible” as Arendt put it, matters get worse rather than better. After Pennsylvania State University’s sexual abuse scandal broke into public awareness, an internal investigation found:

Paterno and the three administrators covered up the 2001 report to avoid bad publicity, and that a “culture of reverence for the football program” at Penn State caused others to willfully ignore signs of Sandusky’s abuse.

This was not some exception to the rule. It was not even an especially extreme example in the history of institutional leaders fearing public perceptions more than they feared for people’s safety or wellbeing. You cannot reach out and touch “Penn State” but you can see and talk to the President of Penn State, and you can assume that if the President of Penn State follows the appropriate procedure to have a member of their staff fired, the person will indeed be fired and cease to draw income. Institutions at their core are a tool for shaping our social relations; people speak of “Penn State” as if it were an object that exists in the world, but instead it is a means for structuring power relations among people who do actually exist in the world.

How have human beings typically handled the social power conferred by institutions, historically? About how you might expect: cravenly seeking personal advantage in the power they have as well as to expand that power beyond its current limits, while at the same time seeking to position themselves to stick responsibility for anything that goes wrong on someone else, ideally a rival but in a pinch simply someone lower in the hierarchy. Arendt’s rule by Nobody always involved finding that certain Somebody who would be stuck holding the bag when matters took a turn for the worse. Institutional leadership has always engaged in the most cynical power grabs, crushed the weak underfoot, and publicly humiliated those who became too ambitious.

And yet institutions are an ineradicable necessity for human society and human flourishing. The Penn State scandal does not imply the need to abolish the university, which is the best means we have for producing biomedical research and researchers, to give but one obvious example of the important functions it serves. Domestic abuse doesn’t imply the need to abolish the family. The brutal machinery of state power does not imply that anarchy is anything other than a utopian posture. It would be nice if we could simply do without these things, but we cannot, and such alternatives that we know of aren’t necessarily any nicer in the respects we care about here—no society on Earth or in history has ever done away with the abuse of trust and of authority.

This is not a counsel of despair nor a defense of complacency. Michel Foucault, a thinker whose influence looms over contemporary discussions of social power, once characterized his position as follows:

My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism.

We always have something to do in the struggle against the base tendencies of our institutions and communities. So when it comes to universities or media companies, the question is not whether they are currently engaging in unfair and abusive behavior. The answer to that question is obviously and unambiguously “yes.” The question, in terms of what Applebaum and others are claiming is currently a pervasive problem, is what has changed?

Employers were always sensitive to media scandals centering on their employees, whether this was fair to those employees or not. The difference is that the total number of people who could put a story in front of the public at large was a vanishingly small fraction of the population. Most of the time institutional leadership could side with some privileged member of their ranks or some rising star even when they had done something plainly wrong, and correctly calculated that the story would not reach very far.

And of course, this calculation is precisely what has had to change. Between phone cameras, the stored and shareable nature of digital communication, and the Internet, everyone can now put a story out into the public view. Few may gain a proper public, but all individually hold some small chance of doing so, and that dramatically increases the overall odds that a media scandal will originate from within an institution.

High-status people occupying prestigious positions have also always been targets for media scandals, because they are precisely the people for whom a scandal will sell papers. Stories about relatively unknown persons who were made to stand in for a type were relatively common too, and so people lower in the social status hierarchy were not exactly safe from the gaze of journalists either. But typological hit pieces don’t sell like celebrity tabloids, and so the latter and more respectable variants soaked up much more of the attention of a media class that was, as I have said, relatively small.

Now that everyone has the power to publish, everyone faces essentially the same incentives. Going after a famous person, especially if they have some prestige beyond mere popularity, is much more likely to garner you attention if you pull it off than commenting angrily on an unknown blogger’s posts. It is quite possible that Applebaum’s social circle really is under digital siege, but the rest of the country is not. Usually, anything that can be done to the powerful is done to the weak, with greater frequency and intensity. This is the norm of the American criminal justice establishment, for example. But it’s possible that the incentives of attention-seekers are such that the problem is most intense at the top and diminishes the further down one goes. Or perhaps it transforms into something more like cyberbullying and online harassment⁠—psychologically terrible but unlikely to result in the target getting fired.

I do not have nearly enough information to settle these questions and I won’t pretend to. But I do hope that if we are going to continue to have these moral panics over something called “cancel culture”, someone would at least try to.

What is known

I have tried quite hard to find hard data on this matter. FIRE, an organization I consider fairly credible in its consistency regardless of the partisan valence of particular incidents, has documented 426 “targeting incidents involving scholars at public and private American institutions of higher education,” and 477 “disinvitations” (Joe and Hunter Biden being the first and second most recent incidents at the time of this writing). Canceled People, an organization dedicated entirely to tracking cases of this kind, documents 217 cases of “cancellation.” The National Association of Scholars documents 185 cases of “cancellation” in academia. The first FIRE database goes back to 2015, the second goes back as far as 1998. The Canceled People list includes a case from 1991. The NAS list has a case from 1975, one from 1988, and one from 2004, growing considerably more recent after that.

I have not bothered to deduplicate these lists; even if they are all unique cases, the total is very small relative to both the size of the populations they are drawn from and the time period over which they occur. If any other problem in social life was occurring at this frequency and at this scale, we would consider it effectively solved. I am open to the argument that these things are difficult to document and these databases dramatically undercount, but it could be an order of magnitude larger and it would still be quite small relative to nearly any other problem one could imagine. 

Perhaps the most compelling evidence that something has changed of significance is a much-contested poll which asked, “Do you or don’t you feel as free to speak your mind as you used to?” Only 13% said they did not feel as free when the same question was asked in 1954, but that number jumped to 48% in 2015 (then dropped to 40% in 2019). Critics were understandably skeptical that self-censorship was 73% lower in the era of McCarthy and Jim Crow, but that doesn’t imply that the poll result is meaningless, even if we’re unsure just what, exactly, it does mean. Attempts to graft it onto very specific narratives about “cancel culture” are unpersuasive. These narratives have not, to my knowledge, been connected to this particular data with any particular rigor.

The authors of the paper with the poll data note that this is highly correlated with educational attainment. Elsewhere they go further:

“This helps to explain the nature of contemporary censorship culture. We might imagine that Americans engage in self-censorship if they lack the educational resources to know how they are supposed to talk about certain issues. But the evidence suggests that those Americans who have little education and live in the hinterland actually feel most free to speak their minds. Perhaps they have simply never been taught that it is wise to keep their mouths shut.”

Allow me to offer an alternative possibility: colleges do not, in fact, teach students “that it is wise to keep their mouths shut.” Instead, they induct students into a peer group, a peer group that has both grown much larger over time as a greater percentage of Americans have obtained a college degree, and has grown more nationally integrated, as the Internet has made rapid communication from any part of the country a reality. A large, integrated peer group, which has become trivially easy to make a public statement in front of, is a recipe for peer pressure. Because it is large, it does not take a large percentage of the group to have an appetite for punitiveness for there to be a large number of individuals in absolute terms who do.

The persistence of public posts for years, including the posts of teens who have since grown up, coupled with ubiquitous phone cameras and more discreetly stored conversations over email and chat—all of these can be shared with an enormous audience with very little effort. Peer pressure in the past largely relied on enough people being present to observe something that would then be denounced, or more often than not unsubstantiated rumors were enough of a basis for condemnation. It should come as no surprise that when an unprecedented quantity of material to potentially denounce is made available, there are those who will make use of it.

The so-called “hinterland” to which the authors refer, meanwhile, does not form a comparably integrated national peer group. The college-educated group also fills the most prestigious positions in the country, as most of the subjects of Applebaum’s essays did. The former is therefore less likely to be a target in the first place, but then the pool of peers who might potentially denounce you is also smaller, further reducing the odds of facing peer pressure of this nature.

What to do

Many vocal persons seem very sure of how pervasive this problem is or its exact nature. I am not, and I have tried not to pretend to be. I can only offer possible models, and critique the weaknesses of arguments like Applebaum’s.

As to what can be done, that is clearer. If you don’t like the power of the “secretive bureaucracies” at large employers, then consider promoting laws more favorable to the development of unions and alternatives to at-will employment. 

If you want to make a case for fighting back against an extreme culture of conformism, and you have the resources and the chops to document that culture, then actually document it, rather than speaking to “more than a dozen people” and then crafting a narrative that is then subtly turned into a national problem worth devoting time, energy, and resources to. Investigate the recent history of America before the Internet for relevant points of comparison. Actually wrestle with the role of social sanctions in a free society rather than simply assuming that their mere existence is a sign of unfreedom.

This matter may be difficult to truly get to the bottom of, but it’s hard to say, as it feels that few have truly tried diving below the surface

Featured Image is Telegram, by Luisa Max-Ehrlerová