Comment by dani__german
5 days ago
That is absolutely not the case even for a moment. No white leftist seeks out black conservatives like Thomas Sowell. Not even for a moment. Leftism is a monoculture that uses cancelling as a way to force ideological uniformity.
The left wants to hold people accountable, even their own. It’s always a good chuckle to see people complain about the left doing “cancel culture” when it’s conservatives that tried to cancel Bud Light, it’s conservatives that shut down opposing viewpoints (listen to Ben Shapiro or Alex Jones answer tough questions), it’s conservatives that _literally tried to cancel a democratic election_.
You may have had a point fifteen years go, but the right has recently leapfrogged the left in all of the dimensions you're concerned about.
This cultural uniformity of the left you speak of. What's it like? I mean, the right drives big trucks and puts American flags on everything and eats a lot of meat and is really enamored of loyalty and the military and the atomic family.
So what's it like for the left? Because as far as I can tell, the only element of uniformity among the left is that they agree that they shouldn't enable things that are a threat to their safety. The argument towards wokeness is pretty strong: if you're not aware of a threat, it might hurt you, so you should stay vigilant. That's not cultural uniformity, that's survival. Sure, many have run with it in a variety of weird directions, but there's no agreement on the left that those directions are good ones. It's precisely because the left isn't a monoculture that those elements are allowed to persist.
For further evidence that the left permits dissent among their ranks, note that they kind of suck at getting anything done because they're always debating each other about how it ought to be done and not doing it. Meanwhile it's the right that falls uniformly in line and goes off to do something that was poorly thought out (but hey at least they did something).
And taking this back to the article, it's precisely because the right can't tolerate disagreement that it wants to cancel academia and create a safe space where it doesn't have hear the truth about the consequences of its terrible policies. This is literally a letter about the Right cancelling something to enforce ideological uniformity.