Comment by ElevenLathe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ElevenLathe | Hacker News Reader

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I anticipate that you will be voted down (though I might be wrong). For your edification, the line that probably did it is this:

> the left has much more societal power than the right

If we're speaking about the US (and we are), this is so far from a realistic view that no one will take you seriously for espousing it. Even if you believe this, I would recommend that you hold back on stating it in discussions like this.

If the US left existed meaningfully at all (it doesn't, we are an incredibly niche group), we would have universal healthcare, a minimum wage indexed to inflation, bankers would have gone to jail over 2008, and thousands of other things that have demonstrably not materialized. Hell, the Democratic (supposedly the "left" party in our rigged system) president recently forced a contract on union railroad workers against their will. This is just about as right-wing/pro-capital as a policy can be without calling for a formal return to serfdom.

As things stand now, 6 hours later, I am at +3 votes! About the best I ever do. I am surprised too.

You are right in saying that they left has not yet gotten everything they want with respect to healthcare, minimum wage, college tuition, etc. But the inexorable trend seems to be that we become more of a welfare state year by year.

But I'm referring more to the power of the left to cancel those who dare to disagree with their pronouncements. It is on that score that I think 95% of the American public should be in agreement: Freedom of speech, not just a constitutional right which prevents government reprisals but a rich cultural value, is something that needs to be protected and nurtured.

That's what I get for making predictions!

What pronouncements do you mean? Who in the left is making them? What does it mean to cancel someone? I guess you mean things like a celebrity saying something unsavory and then a fan campaign on Twitter getting them written off of a show? I can't say how I understand that to have anything to do with political economy (except in that literally everything happening on the planet does) and definitely not the left.

Also, my understanding is that being written off of a show is on the harsher end of things that have been called "being cancelled". Most are really just instances where somebody has had something (or lots of things) mean written about them. By this measure, I was cancelled several times on LiveJournal in middle school, Nixon was cancelled repeatedly in hundreds of newspapers, and Ea-nasir was cancelled in a clay tablet in like 1700 BCE.

Anyway, this kind of stuff hardly seems to matter at all, and I can't find any way to connect it to leftism. Or do I misunderstand?

The Yale Halloween controversy involved a couple who were cancelled in a way that it would be disingenuous to describe as hardly mattering at all:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new...

For me the most illuminating cancellation was that of Brendan Eich, inventor of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla, in 2014. He was forced to resign as CEO of Mozilla because someone unearthed that he had made a $1000 donation in support of California's Proposition 8 of 2008, the California Marriage Protection Act, which was approved by the voters. It was upheld in State court but was overturned by a federal court.

https://www.businessinsider.com/mozilla-ceo-prop-8-controver...

With the note that I still don't understand how these incidents relate to leftism at all, or even with elected Democratic officials, I did look into these two things. (https://archive.ph/jN2Up is a non-paywalled version of the first URL, btw)

For the Yale incident, it seems this was basically just some people being mean to a couple professors because of an email blast they sent out. One of the professors still works for Yale and the other quit a year later, so it doesn't seem that anybody was fired over it, just more spilled ink. The one who quit has since had a book on the NYT bestseller list so even voluntarily quitting doesn't seem to have really hurt her career.

In the Mozilla case, this was basically just some people saying they disagree with the CEO of their company about gay marriage, and he eventually resigned. Even if he was really forced out by the board or something and the "resignation" is a nicety for the public statement, this just seems like a "risk" of making millions of dollars being a tech CEO. If your employees are gonna quit over some political donation unless you resign, your choices are basically: 1) let them quit, 2) don't write the check, or 3) write the check and resign. He probably didn't know he was choosing 3 when he wrote the check but lots of things in business are like that, and he probably could have chosen 1 if he'd actually owned the company but apparently he didn't. Also, he is now some other flavor of tech CEO (Brave Software, which seems to be trying to market a browser while also running what is presumably a crypto scam?). Again, no real consequences.

If "cancel culture" is just what we call it now when rich, powerful people have mean things said to them then yeah, it hardly seems to matter at all.

I guess I have a lower threshold for what constitutes nasty, destructive, unjustified behavior than you do.

Guess so! Anyway thanks for letting me interrogate you. I've never before had the chance to understand what people who are scared of "cancel culture" are actually upset about.

Get "canceled" in your own work or social sphere, or in social media in a way that filters down to your work or social sphere for saying, writing, being recorded doing (or saying) something that doesn't fit the dominant ideological narrative of modern culture, and maybe you'll rapidly find out just why and how some people get scared of cancel culture. Sure, Stalinist show trials or Maoist purges these things in our modern western world certainly are not, but examples abound and in a non-lethal modern context, they can be very damaging indeed.

I have worked with Congressional Progressive Caucus affiliated representatives, but this "No True Scotsman" of Left is ignoring the OP's point. Relatively, us in the DNC are to the left of the GOP. End of story. We are not Far Left like a Communist Party, but we 100% are a coalition between Center Left-Center.

And it pains me to say as a Progressive, but our movement has absolutely been hijacked by the "elite". There's a good article about it in the Harper Mag (https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a37628920/rad...) and I have definetly seen this in my network of friends who work in the Media, Government, Law, VC, and Tech (3rd generation upper middle class/upper class, attended the same 20 universities, went to the same 200 high schools, 60-40 White-Asian).

If you're from a working class Black, White, Latino, Asian, Indigenous backgroud, you don't have the in group network to leverage the levers of power. And any activist organization that wants to help the working class ends up having to kowtow to donors who always fit the archetype above.

That said, this 100% is happening in the GOP as well. Among their network of staffers and journalists, it's the exact same architype as above except more like 80-20 White-Asian.

At the end of the day, Bari Weiss, Carl Tucker, Rachel Maddow, $insertJournalistHere are all different sides of the same coin.

OK maybe if the Democratic Party and all liberal media institutions count as "The Left," then you can say they have societal power. This is a crazy statement because, as I cited, these people being in power never leads to any leftist reforms and is mainly just more of the same pro-capital cronyism as when Republicans are in charge. There is essentially no daylight between the parties on economic issues of substance. Instead they pretend to differentiate by adopting increasingly radical social policies. It won't be /good/ exactly when President DeSantos signs the Freedom To Learn Act requiring all schoolchildren to carry sidearms, but it is inevitable when "the left" (your definition) fight on this ground instead of on economic issues.

If you define "left" as "political movement that represents the interests of workers", then yes, the American "left" is a bad joke. But pmdulaney was referring to a very different coalition in his usage of the term.

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