Attention Economy


Saturday, March 19, 2022

Cancel Culture and Identity Politics

We need to reach a cancel-culture truce
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/19/yale-law-school-protest-free-speech-cancel-culture/
Megan McArdle:
At the moment, we have the opposite of a truce. The right birthed Donald Trump, who has never met a civic norm he wouldn’t trample. The left, which at this point basically has total control over the centers of cultural production, has managed to get media, academia and a lot of large corporations to adopt a narrow progressive orthodoxy. Those institutions don’t just endorse that orthodoxy, but enforce it — on employees, customers and even local governments.
Just as the right should never have expected the left to calmly pretend things were business as usual while Trump was ripping up the old social contract, the left should never have expected the right to leave them alone while they used their cultural and economic power to drive conservative viewpoints out of the public square. Conservatives were going to use whatever levers they could find — including their outsized political power — no matter how sincerely the left insists that no, that’s not fair, government power is different.
 
Identity politics is eroding the values which set the West apart from Putin
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/03/19/identity-politics-eroding-values-set-west-apart-putin/
 
Against Identity Politics: The New Tribalism and the Crisis of Democracy
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/americas/2018-08-14/against-identity-politics-tribalism-francis-fukuyama