The Pendulum is Swinging

Cancel Culture and the 2024 Election

“A great man once said that the true symbol of the United States is not the bald eagle. It is the pendulum. And when the pendulum swings too far in one direction it will go back. ”Ruth Bader Ginsberg, 2017 BBC Interview

For someone who sees freedom of expression and behavior resulting from a representational democracy rooted in a moderate middle that bridges between political extremes, I worry that we are riding a pendulum whose swings are increasingly uncomfortably wide.

The balance of powers is eroding, with moderate Senator Susan Collins calling decisions to ignore congress’ budget authority illegal and the American Bar Association expressing concern about executive branch assaults on the courts. We added $5.5 trillion in debt over 10 years while disrupting the science that has driven economic growth. Conservatives are turning socialist, nationalizing businesses. We have removed the American Medical Association from reviewing vaccinations in the midst of the largest measles outbreak in 25 years.

How did we get here?

The election, and the policies that have followed, are a reaction against the wealthy, highly educated, and well-connected elites. There are many ways to parse President Trump’s win, with his successful appeals to the working-class and Hispanics. But education level was one of the best predictors of voting preferences and the key to understanding his winning coalition. An admirable outcome, defending democracy spoke to the educated elite but failed as a motivating message. Is it any worder that Democrats lost voters without four-year degrees as they embraced free trade, institutionalized growing wealth inequality and declining economic mobility, with admissions to top colleges increasingly passing within families. Having won the election, the attacks on experts, universities, media, and law firms are an extension of President Trump’s campaign promises, with the authoritarianism motivated by the argument that nothing less would upend a traditional order failing so many.

Should we be surprised by the electoral fury?

This large, rightward swing of the pendulum has been set in motion in part by liberal illiberalism, the exclusion of conservative views from academics, media, and law firms. The self-perceived exclusion is well documented. A 2023 AP poll found that 9% of republicans felt that conservatives can speak their mind on public campuses compared to 58% of liberals. Pew Research found that republicans are more likely to believe that social media companies favor liberals. This exclusion, when combined with the emergence of a cancel culture that actively suppresses individuals under the guise of accountability, has provided what Ezra Klein describes as “the subjective reality out of which they [conservatives] will their politics.”

The power and dysfunctionality of cancel culture can be difficult to appreciate until you see it in action. This summer 13 RMBL’ers requested removal of Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb from RMBL’s Visitor’s Center. Contrary to intellectual freedom which involves a clash of ideas, cancel culture delegitimizes individuals. The group asserted that much of Paul’s work is explicitly racist and that he advocated for coercive birth control. While extraordinary claims deserve extraordinary evidence, the only cited evidence was Charles Mann’s Smithsonian article arguing Paul plays on stereotypes to generate population alarmism, leading to terrible policies. Mann doesn’t suggest Paul is racist and while Mann offers a nuanced analysis of Paul’s role in draconian population control policies, he states that Paul “did not advocate for the programs’ brutality and discrimination”. The banning request echoes conservative criticisms of Paul, and of President Barack Obama’s National Science Advisor John Holdren, conflating discussion with advocacy.

RMBL removed the book. While the best practice for a request to a library to ban a book is to leave it out while considering the request, a threat of controversy combined with an institution’s lack of expertise or capacity often leads to temporary or permanent book removal. RMBL eventually returned Paul’s book, though it is now in the history/interpretation section, implicitly endorsing the message that one of the most impactful environmental books doesn’t belong in RMBL’s gift shop. With little evidence, a towering figure in the environmental sciences and RMBL community member of 50+ years was “de-platformed”, with others remaining quiet, unwilling to invite social backlash.

What do you think about the display in the Gothic Visitors Center? Kudos to RMBL for keeping the book out. My quibbles are minor. It implicitly suggests that scientists are responsible for how their ideas are used, which would make most great works, including Darwin’s Origin of Species, problematic. It doesn’t describe or flesh out Paul’s long connection with RMBL, something of which it should be proud.

Cancel culture is especially pernicious because of how it feeds extreme perspectives. Political scientists Pippa Norris and Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann suggest a spiral of silence can expand around socially charged issues, with individuals choosing acceptance over expression, conformity over nuance. As fewer voices speak out, self-censorship grows. Voiced opinion can become unhealthy and out of touch. When combined with media, universities, and law firms favoring liberal framing of issues in the US, there has been opportunity nationally for liberal thought to drift away from the mainstream. For conservatives it can seem it will take a singular force, an individual beyond social constraint, to break through. And so the pendulum swings, with a force equal to the combined might of colleges, media, law firms, and even congress and the courts. President Trump has grabbed the “banner of common sense”, putting together a winning electoral combination.

I’m at KU basketball fan and Wilt Chamberlain (show above) led KU to its first national title. Paul overlapped with Wilt and was involved with a desegregation movement in Lawrence that received death threats, a precursor of the threats he received for his book.

How Do We Move Forward?

The job of politicians is to win more votes than their opponents. Democrats need to get better at connecting beyond the educated. I would minimize the demonstrably failed anti-Trump or pro-democracy messages. Rather, I would emphasize economic mobility, looking for younger candidates focused on issues directly affecting families and workers, including inflation, health care, and opioids, avoiding traps around largely abstract issues (e.g., transgender athletes) designed to reveal progressives as out of touch.

Setting aside politics, if scientists want to return to a society that values knowledge, we need to be better. If we continue to focus on canceling individuals rather than exchanging ideas, should we be surprised to see populists attack scientists?

As the pendulum swings far to the right, let’s push back against the spiral of silence, publicly expressing our commitment to a society in which everybody is valued, knowledge matters, and right and wrong exist. When the pendulum swings back our way, and it will, let’s moderate the swing, standing up for ideas but not attacking individuals. Let’s disagree while spreading grace, humility, and empathy.