President Joe Biden walks from the podium after speaking at the White House about the end of the war in Afghanistan on Aug. 31, 2021. | AP Photo/Evan Vucci
Opinion by JEFF GREENFIELD
Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.
They were words no president has ever spoken, at least not since the Cold War began three-quarters of a century ago.
They spoke not of global responsibility nor the “indispensable” role of the United States, but of what this richest and most powerful nation could and should not do, and the astonishing financial and human cost of trying — and failing.
We are, President Joe Biden said, “ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries … trying to create a democratic, cohesive and united Afghanistan — something that has never been done over centuries in Afghanistan history.”
We spent “$300 million a day for 20 years,” he said. “What have we lost as a consequence in terms of opportunities?”
And while he talked of the heroism of our military, intelligence personnel and diplomats, Biden’s account of what veterans suffered was nothing less than searing: “A lot of our veterans and their families have gone through hell,” he said with more than a touch of anger as he talked of traumatic injuries, noting that “18 veterans on average die by suicide every single day in America, not in a far-off place.”
Much of the commentary on Biden’s speech today will focus on his defense of the Afghanistan withdrawal strategy — his celebration of the U.S. military’s mass evacuations and whether his promise to get those left behind has the ring of plausibility.
But perhaps more significant for American politics is that Biden seems to be embracing a belief now shared across ideological lines: America’s international role has been an exercise in overreach. For more than a decade, in fact, this has been a more powerful current than the foreign-policy establishment might like to admit. This message was one of the less-appreciated strengths of Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016 (muddied though it was by a heavy dose of nativism). It was evident in the sharp turn against George W. Bush in the 2006 midterms as the Iraq War, which purported to turn the country into a bulwark of freedom, crashed and burned. It bolstered the candidacy of Barack Obama at the expense of Hillary Clinton, who voted for the Iraq War. And it lies at the heart of the appeal Biden made today: Whatever went wrong as we left Afghanistan, his argument went, we had to get out and we have to learn from that misguided adventure.
But in making this argument, Biden left a larger question unanswered: what are we to do about the immense global military machine that remains very much in place? As intent as Biden is on bringing the so-called forever wars to an end, the reality is that he and others skeptical of U.S. intervention abroad need to look not at particular conflicts, but at America’s massive military apparatus. Thus far, such criticism has been confined to the periphery of national security debates. But Biden may have laid the foundation for a more fundamental rethinking of the enormous, and largely unquestioned, amount of resources America expends in the name of national security.
The United States has a military budget of some $700 billion a year, supported by a web of multibillion-dollar procurement contracts that turn members of Congress into enthusiastic lobbyists for weapons that do not work and drain the treasury. We have 800 bases in dozens of nations around the world. Our spending, on armed conflicts and more generally on preserving this empire, staggers the imagination. Biden did not mention this in his speech, but the combined cost of the Afghanistan and Iraq engagements would more than fund his $3.5 trillion spending proposal. Critics of his domestic plans deplore that amount, but it’s only a fraction of what we have in fact spent not on child care, free community college, universal pre-K and better care for older people, but on a pair of largely futile conflicts — one bogged down for years in stalemate, another irreparably tainted by the false pretenses under which it began.
These numbers don’t lie. Since America gained superpower status in the early to mid-20th century, it has built a military footprint that all but guarantees the country will be tempted to try and solve problems far from its shores, whether counterterrorism, nation building, humanitarian intervention in a genocide or something else. This is the reality that Biden and future presidents similarly inclined toward restraint will confront.
It is not hard to imagine that this deeper message of Biden’s speech could emerge as a more salient political argument in the coming months. The upcoming midterm and presidential election cycles may feature debate not just about Afghanistan and how we left, but about what we have been committing lives and resources to for decades, and how much longer we are prepared to do it. Elements of the left and the right have already joined hands in opposing “muscular” U.S. policies in the Middle East, Asia and Europe. But the next step may be to question the premises that makes those policies possible — and their cost.
There is no ideological pattern to these arguments. We may see it from the Republican contenders for the presidency. We will likely see it from the left, as centrist Democratic incumbents face primary challenges from progressives.
Back in 1963, President John F. Kennedy, on a speaking tour in the American West, discovered that evoking the nuclear test ban treaty and a rethinking of the Cold War was winning huge applause even from essentially conservative regions. He was planning to make “peace” a central case for his reelection. After three-quarters of a century, and tragic misadventures from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan, I wonder if Biden’s speech today, with its clear caution that we cannot remake the world based on our illusions, may be the start of a larger debate about the U.S. military — a debate this country has never really had but is long overdue.
Alexandra Kane is a former New Yorker turned New Orleanian. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely her own. View more opinion on CNN.
(CNN)"I don't know if I want to exist without this place," I told my boyfriend on Friday morning. Hurricane Ida was due to hit our New Orleans home in the next two days, and I was trying to decide if I should evacuate. He replied that he would wrestle me into the car if need be.
The truth is that evacuating is a privilege -- one that requires money, transportation and a safe place to flee to. The thought of leaving (in my mind, abandoning) my neighbors, many of them who had no means to leave, made me feel guilty.
I moved here about six years ago and have lived for half that time in a great old mansion built in the 1800s that has been turned into apartments. During the pandemic, my neighbors and I became close friends, sharing meals on our big green porch -- designed with curling ironwork -- while debating what to do with the garden.
We have very little in common. A Navy veteran with a large German shepherd always willing to lend a hand despite his long-term hip injury. A gay hairdresser who had spent his early adult years performing in drag as Janet Jackson, his photo albums a time capsule of the queer culture of NOLA in the 80s and 90s. Someone we call the Duchess of the house has lived there for six years -- the longest -- is a woman with fantastic taste in antiques who loved to survey the group on important issues such as, "If you were in a movie, what song do you enter to?" A sailor with a refined palette who taught me more about food and beverages than anyone else I have ever met. An early twenties Vietnamese American man who kept an orchid so temperamental it needed a 15 minutes mist bath every day. I loved that we were so incredibly different.
Strangers becoming family is a common but precious phenomenon in the culture of this city.
I bought supplies in case we stayed and packed in case we left
The house is beautiful but has large windows that hadn't been boarded up. They held through Hurricane Katrina without protection but could they handle the gusts of Ida? My living room ceiling had already leaked during another occasion and a portion of my balcony had recently rotted and needed replacing. Even if the other units held, I had serious concerns about mine being on the second floor.
Alexandra's building decorated in 2020 for Mardi Gras. There were no parades because of Covid, so there was a city wide project of people turning their houses into floats.
There was a possibility that staying would have me living in the hallway or further burdening my neighbors by asking to share their place. The inevitable loss of power would mean that eventually in the aftermath I wouldn't be able to confirm my safety with my family. Even with all of this, I couldn't bring myself to make a final call on departing.
Vacillating between paralysis, tears and preparing, I bought supplies in case we stayed and packed in case we left.
I pack up my vintage 70s rain lamps, the ones I light up for parties. My boyfriend asks if I need them, and I think to myself that it's like asking if I need Mardi Gras. The answer is yes. He was set on leaving because he had cats that needed shelter -- and friends in Mobile, Alabama, offered him a place to stay.
The koi pond in Alexandra's yard.
I took a break from packing to wander the yard and photograph the koi pond built years ago by a former resident. Scrolling through my phone, I see the government has issued a mandatory evacuation of the parishes closer to the coast but none for us. My friend told me it was because they want to give those people a chance to leave before New Orleans residents add to the traffic. Then the mayor gave a news conference: there is no mandatory evacuation for New Orleans because there isn't even time to establish one. Blood rushed to my head as the sun winked at me between tall elephant ear plants. I went back upstairs to keep packing.
We had a final meal Friday night at my favorite restaurant. They feature a new artist every month and I wonder if that person will see their art again. We could have gotten ahead of traffic but we were exhausted from racing around town getting supplies and taking my other vehicle to higher ground. Our friend who moved here a year ago doesn't know anybody in the surrounding states, so we offer to bring her with us to Mobile -- another reason to depart added to my list. If we leave, we can convince her just how serious this is as she is debating staying. I comfort myself with the thought of getting even one person out of harm's way.
That night, after dinner, I listened closely to the sounds of my apartment. I wanted to memorize the clicking of the ceiling fan, the chime that hangs across the street, even the hum of the refrigerator was suddenly rendered sacred.
Finally convincing myself I'm doing the right thing
Thoughts circled around in my mind: I have the money to leave, I have a safe place to go, I am one less person in need of rescue. One less person for an already overburdened health care system to care for. The supplies I bought for staying will be left for neighbors -- my extended family. I finally convinced myself that I am doing the right thing.
On Saturday morning, after leaving my keys with a neighbor, I climbed into my Subaru, piled high with instruments, albums and artwork and headed toward Mobile. What should be a two-hour drive becomes eight hours as we hit lots of traffic. I don't cry until we listen to a podcast. The host talked about the sensation of missing the past before you have even left it. I think of dancing on the porch on Mardi Gras with my neighbors at 3 a.m., singing riotously loud and how badly I wanted that moment to last forever.
Waiting for the storm to pass was agonizing. Shortly after arriving in Mobile on Saturday night, I got a video of my neighbors, drinks in hand trading stories on the porch. My heart is gutted. I should be there, helping them, I think.
I regularly send out SMS texts with short messages to friends in the area. "Alive?" It reads. I don't want them to waste their battery. There will be weeks of no power and eventually I know I won't get a reply.
A photo of the10 foot window taken right before Alexandra left.
The Duchess of our home tells me my ceiling is leaking and that she has availed herself of the bottle of Ruffino in my fridge. Good. They can take anything of mine they need.
I've gotten regular updates in our group chat. My 10-foot windows are miraculously holding up. I am touched that they checked my place, but I'm also trying to get the image of my windows at any given moment raining glass down on them while they inspect my living room out of my head.
As of Tuesday morning, there is still no power. My neighbors have decided to try to evacuate to different parts of the country to be safe. There is no flooding, though the roof is damaged and a single pane of glass was broken in another unit.
I know leaving was the right thing for me to do but the thought that I could have been of help in any capacity haunts me. The ability to evacuate is an immense privilege that I was lucky to have.
When you fall in love with New Orleans, you accept that you might experience ultimate heartbreak. Each hurricane season that passes without incident is one to celebrate. I know that I will return to my beloved neighbors and our big green porch as soon as I can.
Have we lost all sense of decorum and decency during this pandemic?
Over the past year and a half, we have battled an invisible enemy that attacks randomly, without regard to sex, skin color, nationality and now age. During this invasion, we have learned quite a bit about this virus and about ourselves.
Learning about the virus involves believing in science and trusting doctors and nurses. Science and medical professionals tell us not to ingest bleach or horse de-wormer, to social distance and to wear a mask. Science also has brought us vaccines that work. We still might get the virus, but the odds of dying or ending up in the hospital are slim or next to none. Plus, dying from the vaccine alone is very rare — 190 million people fully immunized in the United States and only three deaths. Science is hard to refute.
On the other side of the COVID-19 coin is how we have reacted to the virus. Civility, decorum and decency have taken a back seat to rudeness, discourtesy and bad manners.
This was evident at a recent school board meeting in Putnam County. A person speaking in support of a mask mandate was booed and mocked by the crowd. This was reported in multiple news outlets and was quite disheartening to read. What was even more disheartening was that the school board members allowed this behavior to occur.
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So, what I gathered from accounts of the meeting was that loud, obnoxious people, unwilling to listen quietly, forced the school board to reverse its decision concerning a mask mandate.
As I see it, the school board has two primary goals: providing a quality education to all students and providing a safe environment in which that quality education can be provided (this includes administrators, teachers, service personnel and students).
A statement in one article really hit a nerve and that was, “Every student has the right to decide for themselves whether to mask up or not.”
So, elementary students, which include preschoolers and kindergartners, have all the facts and have read the data and understand it completely to make an “informed” decision? By this logic, I’m quite sure they all also know the facts concerning the diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, varicella and hepatitis B immunizations they needed before entering Putnam County schools.
Maybe those dissenters need to fully read the Constitution to understand that a mask mandate, like those required immunizations, is a clear and rational protection of the public health, just as no mask mandate is a clear and present danger to the public health.
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Jeff Pratt: Discourse over public health shows decaying civility (Opinion) - Charleston Gazette-Mail
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaks during a news conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, in May. Efrem Lukatsky/AP
Efrem Lukatsky/AP
William B. Taylor is a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.David J. Kramer, a former assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor in the George W. Bush administration, is director of European and Eurasian studies at Florida International University's Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs.
Nearly lost amid the understandable focus on Afghanistan, the earthquake in Haiti and the resurging pandemic is a critically important meeting set to take place Wednesday between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and President Biden. Zelenskyy's White House visit will be the first by a Ukrainian leader in more than four years. It will be an opportunity for Biden to reiterate U.S. support for Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russian aggression, for its integration into the Euro-Atlantic community and its fight against corruption.
Zelenskyy's predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, met in the Oval Office with former President Donald Trump for a brief encounter in 2017. After Zelenskyy's landslide victory over Poroshenko in 2019, Trump invited Zelenskyy to visit — but then embroiled him into American politics in the infamous July 2019 phone call, which led to Trump's first impeachment.
Zelenskyy had to settle for an awkward encounter with Trump in New York two months later, and bilateral relations floundered. This is a chance for the Biden administration to accelerate closer and deeper ties between the two countries.
The Biden administration's record is uneven
The Biden administration's record so far on Ukraine has been uneven. Amid a Russian military buildup along the border with Ukraine and in Crimea, which Russia occupied illegally in 2014, the White House in April invited Putin to a summit and reversed plans in April to deploy two destroyers to the Black Sea out of fear that such a move would provoke Moscow.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken had a productive visit to Kyiv in May, but that was followed by the administration's decision to waive sanctions on an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin over a Russian pipeline project to carry natural gas from Russia to Germany. Then, during a July meeting between Biden and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the administration dropped its efforts to block completion of the pipeline, known as Nord Stream 2.
Russia currently relies on gas transiting through Ukraine for its exports to Europe in an amount equal to what would be sent through the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The current arrangement provides Ukraine with some $2 billion in transit fees and leverage over further Russian encroachment.
Biden invited Zelenskyy to Washington before leaving on his week-long trip to Europe in June, which included his one-on-one summit with Putin. The U.S. and Ukrainian presidents have spoken twice over the phone, and Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba visited Washington earlier this month and met with administration officials and U.S. lawmakers.
Last week, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm led a presidential delegation to Kyiv to inaugurate the Crimea Platform — to focus international attention on Russia's continuing illegal occupation of the Ukrainian peninsula and celebrate Ukrainian Independence Day.
Russia and corruption will top the agenda
When Biden sits down with Zelenskyy, two issues are certain to dominate their discussions. The first is Russia's ongoing aggression against Ukraine, an existential and immediate threat, for which Kyiv needs the U.S. in the ring with it. Ukrainians have watched with dismay the hasty U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. They need help from the United States to counter Russian aggression and are desperate to hear reassurances from President Biden that the United States will strongly support them.
The second issue is the critical and persistent problem of corruption — in which Ukraine is the main fighter, with the United States, European Union, International Monetary Fund and World Bank solidly in its corner.
Since taking office, Zelenskyy has wanted to visit Washington, but he also has been eager to meet with Putin, thinking that such a session might help resolve the crisis Putin started in 2014 when he illegally annexed Crimea and invaded Ukraine's Donbas region. Earlier this month, Zelenskyy indicated that plans were being made for a meeting with Putin.
A Zelenskyy-Putin sit-down, however, is unlikely to produce any satisfactory result. Putin recently posted a lengthy diatribe on the Kremlin's website arguing that Ukraine and Russia are "one nation." (Ukraine has been independent since 1991, though in centuries past, parts of it were ruled by the Russian empire). Putin has also questioned the utility of meeting Zelenskyy "if he has put his country under full foreign control and key issues for Ukraine are decided not in Kyiv but in Washington, and, to a certain extent, Paris and Berlin?"
What the U.S. can do
Instead of placing hopes in Putin, Zelenskyy should push the United States to get more involved in the negotiations to end the war in Donbas. For the past seven years, Ukraine has been negotiating with Russia — with Germany and France in attendance — in a futile attempt to get Russian forces out of Ukraine. The Russians have been wholly uncooperative, content to keep their forces and puppet "republics" on Ukrainian territory. In the process, Putin has sought to undermine Ukrainian sovereignty and destabilize it, while denying any responsibility for the conflict. During this time, some 13,000 Ukrainians, including more than 3,000 civilians, have died in Donbas, and more than 1.5 million Ukrainians have been displaced. The United States should join the negotiations to bolster the Ukrainian position and move them to conclusion.
At the same time, the Biden administration should rally allied support to ramp up sanctions against the Putin regime — complementing those put in place in response to the Russian invasion of Crimea and Donbas — to increase the costs for continuing to violate Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity.
In light of the recent Sea Breeze military exercise involving more than 30 countries in the Black Sea, which took place over Russian objections, Biden should order the release of an additional $100 million in U.S. security assistance for Ukraine. (On Friday, he authorized the secretary of state to proceed with $60 million of that total to help Ukraine with "defense articles and services of the Department of Defense, and military education and training.")
This aid, which the U.S. froze before Biden and Putin met, would be on top of a previously appropriated $275 million package. Such help is needed now, before fighting flares up again — not in the middle of a crisis, when it would be too late. The United States should also beef up its naval presence and that of its NATO allies in the Black Sea.
Washington should also grant Ukraine major non-NATO ally status, which would give the country military and economic benefits and put it in the company of such allies as Australia, Israel, Japan and South Korea. It is on the front line of democracy against a revanchist regime in Moscow, contributing to the security of Europe by fending off potentially even further Russian aggression.
In 2008, NATO promised Ukraine and Georgia that they would become members of the alliance, albeit with no timetable mentioned. Thirteen years later, the U.S. needs to reaffirm its support and press its European allies to live up to this pledge, as long as Ukraine meets the criteria. Major non-NATO ally status would underscore U.S. support for Ukraine's eventual full NATO membership.
This will signal to Putin that he does not have a de facto veto over Ukraine's aspirations to join Euro-Atlantic institutions, especially important since Putin warned in the spring that Ukrainian membership in NATO would be a "red line" for Russia.
Zelenskyy's frustration with a lack of progress on NATO membership is understandable, but pushing for a membership action plan or an outright invitation now would be premature; the worst of all possibilities would be rejection by the alliance.
Zelenskyy has work to do, too. While he has started to move against corruption — just last week, he sanctioned two Ukrainians who collaborated with the Kremlin to try to affect the 2020 U.S. presidential election — corrupt oligarchs have long been a drag on Ukraine's economic and political development. Left unchecked, corruption will weaken Ukraine and leave it more vulnerable to Russian influence.
No Senate-confirmed person has held the position of U.S. ambassador to Ukraine since 2019, when Marie Yovanovitch was unceremoniously removed. President Biden should nominate a qualified candidate to serve as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine as soon as possible.
Biden also should commit to travel to Ukraine within the next 12 months. No American president has set foot on Ukrainian soil since President George W. Bush did in April 2008. Biden was a regular visitor to Ukraine during his time as vice president and senator. A return trip as president would send a powerful signal of American support for Ukraine and its people, and to the Kremlin.
A month ago I thought I was a cynic about our 20-year war in Afghanistan. Today, after watching our stumbling withdrawal and the swift collapse of practically everything we fought for, my main feeling is that I wasn’t cynical enough.
My cynicism consisted of the belief that the American effort to forge a decent Afghan political settlement failed definitively during Barack Obama’s first term in office, when a surge of U.S. forces blunted but did not reverse the Taliban’s recovery. This failure was then buried under a Vietnam-esque blizzard of official deceptions and bureaucratic lies, which covered over a shift in American priorities from the pursuit of victory to the management of stalemate, with the American presence insulated from casualties in the hopes that it could be sustained indefinitely.
Under this strategic vision — to use the word “strategic” generously — there would be no prospect of victory, no end to corruption among our allies and collateral damage from our airstrikes, no clear reason to be in Afghanistan, as opposed to any other failing state or potential terror haven, except for the sunk cost that we were there already. But if American casualty rates stayed low enough, the public would accept it, the Pentagon budget would pay for it, and nobody would have to preside over anything so humiliating as defeat.
In one way, my cynicism went too far. I guessed that the military and the national-security bureaucracy would be able to frustrate the desire of every incoming U.S. president to declare an endless-seeming conflict over, and I was wrong. Something like that happened with Obama and Donald Trump in their first years in office, but it didn’t happen with Joe Biden. He promised withdrawal, and — however shambolically — we have now actually withdrawn.
But in every other way the withdrawal has made the case for an even deeper cynicism — about America’s capacities as a superpower, our mission in Afghanistan and the class of generals, officials, experts and politicos who sustained its generational extension.
First the withdrawal’s shambolic quality, culminating in yesterday’s acknowledgment that between 100 and 200 Americans had not made the final flights from Kabul, displayed an incompetence in departing a country that matched our impotence at pacifying it. There were aspects of the chaos that were probably inevitable, but the Biden White House was clearly caught flat-footed by the speed of the Taliban advance, with key personnel disappearing on vacation just before the Kabul government dissolved. And the president himself has appeared exhausted, aged, overmatched — making basic promises about getting every American safely home and then seeing them overtaken by events.
At the same time, the circumstances under which the Biden withdrawal had to happen doubled as a devastating indictment of the policies pursued by his three predecessors, which together cost roughly $2,000,000,000,000 (it’s worth writing out all those zeros) and managed to build nothing in the political or military spheres that could survive for even a season without further American cash and military supervision.
Only recently the view that without U.S. troops the American-backed government in Kabul would be doomed to the same fate as the Soviet-backed government some 30 years ago seemed like hardheaded realism. Now such “realism” has been proven to be wildly over-optimistic. Without Soviet troops, the Moscow-backed government actually held out for several years before the mujihadeen reached Kabul. Whereas our $2,000,000,000,000 built a regime that fell to the Taliban before American troops could even finish their retreat.
Before this summer, in other words, it was possible to read all the grim inspector general reports and document dumps on Afghanistan, count yourself a cynic about the war effort and still imagine that America got something for all that spending, no matter how much was spent on Potemkin installations or siphoned off by pederast warlords or recirculated to Northern Virginia contractors.
Now, though, we know that in terms of actual staying power, all our nation-building efforts couldn’t even match what the Soviet Union managed in its dotage.
Yet that knowledge has not prevented a revival of the spirit that led us to this sorry pass. I don’t mean the straightforward criticisms of the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal. I mean the way that in both the media coverage and the political reaction, reasonable tactical critiques have often been woven together with anti-withdrawal arguments that are self-deceiving, dubious or risible.
The argument, for instance, that the situation in Afghanistan was reasonably stable and the war’s death toll negligible before the Trump administration started moving toward withdrawal: In fact, only U.S. casualties were low, while Afghan military and civilian casualties were nearing 15,000 annually, and the Taliban were clearly gaining ground — suggesting that we would have needed periodic surges of U.S. forces, and periodic spikes in U.S. deaths, to prevent a slow-motion version of what’s happened quickly as we’ve left.
Or the argument that an indefinite occupation was morally necessary to nurture the shoots of Afghan liberalism: If after 20 years of effort and $2,000,000,000,000, the theocratic alternative to liberalism actually takes over a country faster than in its initial conquest, that’s a sign that our moral achievements were outweighed by the moral costs of corruption, incompetence and drone campaigns.
Or the argument that a permanent mission in Afghanistan would could come to resemble in some way our long-term presence in Germany or South Korea — a delusional historical analogy before the collapse of the Kabul government and a completely ludicrous one now.
All these arguments are connected to a set of moods that flourished after 9/11: a mix of cable-news-encouraged overconfidence in American military capacities, naïve World War II nostalgia and crusading humanitarianism in its liberal and neoconservative forms. Like most Americans, I shared in those moods once; after so many years of failure, I cannot imagine indulging in them now. But it’s clear from the past few weeks that they retain an intense subterranean appeal in the American elite, waiting only for the right circumstances to resurface.
Thus you have generals and grand strategists who presided over quagmire, folly and defeat fanning out across the television networks and opinion pages to champion another 20 years in Afghanistan. You have the return of the media’s liberal hawks and centrist Pentagon stenographers, unchastened by their own credulous contributions to the retreat of American power over the past 20 years. And you have Republicans who postured as cold-eyed realists in the Trump presidency suddenly turning back into eager crusaders, excited to own the Biden Democrats and relive the brief post-9/11 period when the mainstream media treated their party with deference rather than contempt.
Again, Biden deserves plenty of criticism. But like the Trump administration in its wiser moments, he is trying to disentangle America from a set of failed policies that many of his loudest critics long supported.
Our botched withdrawal is the punctuation mark on a general catastrophe, a failure so broad that it should demand purges in the Pentagon, the shamed retirement of innumerable hawkish talking heads, the razing of various NGOs and international-studies programs and the dissolution of countless consultancies and military contractors.
Small wonder, then, that making Biden the singular scapegoat seems like a more attractive path. But if the only aspect of this catastrophe that our leaders remember is what went wrong in August 2021, then we’ll have learned nothing except to always double down on failure, and the next disaster will be worse.
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“It was no great distance, in those days, from the prison-door to the market-place. Measured by the prisoner’s experience, however, it might be reckoned a journey of some length.”
So begins the tale of Hester Prynne, as recounted in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most famous novel, The Scarlet Letter. As readers of this classic American text know, the story begins after Hester gives birth to a child out of wedlock and refuses to name the father. As a result, she is sentenced to be mocked by a jeering crowd, undergoing “an agony from every footstep of those that thronged to see her, as if her heart had been flung into the street for them all to spurn and trample upon.” After that, she must wear a scarlet A—for adulterer—pinned to her dress for the rest of her life. On the outskirts of Boston, she lives in exile. No one will socialize with her—not even those who have quietly committed similar sins, among them the father of her child, the saintly village preacher. The scarlet letter has “the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.”
We read that story with a certain self-satisfaction: Such an old-fashioned tale! Even Hawthorne sneered at the Puritans, with their “sad-colored garments and grey steeple-crowned hats,” their strict conformism, their narrow minds and their hypocrisy. And today we are not just hip and modern; we live in a land governed by the rule of law; we have procedures designed to prevent the meting-out of unfair punishment. Scarlet letters are a thing of the past.
Except, of course, they aren’t. Right here in America, right now, it is possible to meet people who have lost everything—jobs, money, friends, colleagues—after violating no laws, and sometimes no workplace rules either. Instead, they have broken (or are accused of having broken) social codes having to do with race, sex, personal behavior, or even acceptable humor, which may not have existed five years ago or maybe five months ago. Some have made egregious errors of judgment. Some have done nothing at all. It is not always easy to tell.
Yet despite the disputed nature of these cases, it has become both easy and useful for some people to put them into larger narratives. Partisans, especially on the right, now toss around the phrase cancel culture when they want to defend themselves from criticism, however legitimate. But dig into the story of anyone who has been a genuine victim of modern mob justice and you will often find not an obvious argument between “woke” and “anti-woke” perspectives but rather incidents that are interpreted, described, or remembered by different people in different ways, even leaving aside whatever political or intellectual issue might be at stake.
There is a reason that the science reporter Donald McNeil, after being asked to resign from The New York Times, needed 21,000 words, publishedinfourparts, to recount a series of conversations he had had with high-school students in Peru, during which he may or may not have said something racially offensive, depending on whose account you find most persuasive. There is a reason that Laura Kipnis, an academic at Northwestern, required an entire book, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, to recount the repercussions, including to herself, of two allegations of sexual harassment against one man at her university; after she referred to the case in an article about “sexual paranoia,” students demanded that the university investigate her, too. A full explanation of the personal, professional, and political nuances in both cases needed a lot of space.
There is a reason, too, that Hawthorne dedicated an entire novel to the complex motivations of Hester Prynne, her lover, and her husband. Nuance and ambiguity are essential to good fiction. They are also essential to the rule of law: We have courts, juries, judges, and witnesses precisely so that the state can learn whether a crime has been committed before it administers punishment. We have a presumption of innocence for the accused. We have a right to self-defense. We have a statute of limitations.
By contrast, the modern online public sphere, a place of rapid conclusions, rigid ideological prisms, and arguments of 280 characters, favors neither nuance nor ambiguity. Yet the values of that online sphere have come to dominate many 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.
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. In 1948, the famous Polish composer Andrzej Panufnik sent what he later described as some “rubbish” as his entry into a competition to write a “Song of the United Party”—because he thought if he refused to submit anything, the whole Union of Polish Composers might lose funding. To his eternal humiliation, he won. Lily Hajdú-Gimes, a celebrated Hungarian psychoanalyst of that era, diagnosed the trauma of forced conformity in patients, as well as in herself. “I play the game that is offered by the regime,” she told friends, “though as soon as you accept that rule you are in a trap.”
But you don’t even need Stalinism to create that kind of atmosphere. During a trip to Turkey earlier this year, I met a writer who showed me his latest manuscript, kept in a desk drawer. His work wasn’t illegal, exactly—it was just unpublishable. Turkish newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses are subject to unpredictable prosecutions and drastic sentences for speech or writing that can be arbitrarily construed as insulting the president or the Turkish nation. Fear of those sanctions leads to self-censorship and silence.
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. How many American manuscripts now remain in desk drawers—or unwritten altogether—because their authors fear a similarly arbitrary judgment? How much intellectual life is now stifled because of fear of what a poorly worded comment would look like if taken out of context and spread on Twitter?
To answer that question, I spoke with more than a dozen people who were either victims or close observers of sudden shifts in social codes in America. The purpose here is not to reinvestigate or relitigate any of their cases. Some of those I interviewed have behaved in ways that I, or readers of this article, may well consider ill-judged or immoral, even if they were not illegal. I am not here questioning all of the new social codes that have led to their dismissal or their effective isolation. Many of these social changes are clearly positive.
Still, no one quoted here, anonymously or by name, has been charged with an actual crime, let alone convicted in an actual court. All of them dispute the public version of their story. Several say they have been falsely accused; others believe that their “sins” have been exaggerated or misinterpreted by people with hidden agendas. All of them, sinners or saints, have been handed drastic, life-altering, indefinite punishments, often without the ability to make a case in their own favor. This—the convicting and sentencing without due process, or mercy—should profoundly bother Americans. In 1789, James Madison proposed that the U.S. Constitution ensure that “no person shall be … deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” Both the Fifth and the Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution invoke due process. Nevertheless, these Americans have been effectively deprived of it.
Many of the people described here remain unavoidably anonymous in this essay. This is 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. I have tried to describe their current situations—to explain what price they have paid, what kind of punishment they have been handed—without identifying those who did not want to be identified, and without naming their institutions. Necessarily, a lot of important details are therefore excluded. But for some, this is now the only way they dare to speak out at all.
Here is the first thing that happens once you have been accused of breaking a social code, when you find yourself at the center of a social-media storm because of something you said or purportedly said. The phone stops ringing. People stop talking to you. You become toxic. “I have in my department dozens of colleagues—I think I have spoken to zero of them in the past year,” one academic told me. “One of my colleagues I had lunch with at least once a week for more than a decade—he just refused to speak to me anymore, without asking questions.” Another reckoned that, of the 20-odd members in his department, “there are two, one of whom has no power and another of whom is about to retire, who will now speak to me.”
A journalist told me that after he was summarily fired, his acquaintances sorted themselves into three groups. First, the “heroes,” very small in number, who “insist on due process before damaging another person’s life and who stick by their friends.” Second, the “villains,” who think you should “immediately lose your livelihood as soon as the allegation is made.” Some old friends, or people he thought were old friends, even joined the public attack. But the majority were in a third category: “good but useless. They don’t necessarily think the worst of you, and they would like you to get due process, but, you know, they haven’t looked into it. They have reasons to think charitably of you, maybe, but they’re too busy to help. Or they have too much to lose.” One friend told him that she would happily write a defense of him, but she had a book proposal in the works. “I said, ‘Thank you for your candor.’ ”
Most people drift away because life moves on; others do so because they are afraid that those unproven allegations might imply something far worse. One professor who has not been accused of any physical contact with anybody was astonished to discover that some of his colleagues assumed that if his university was disciplining him, he must be a rapist. Another person suspended from his job put it this way: “Someone who knows me, but maybe doesn’t know my soul or character, may be saying to themselves that prudence would dictate they keep their distance, lest they become collateral damage.”
Here is the second thing that happens, closely related to the first: Even if you have not been suspended, punished, or found guilty of anything, you cannot function in your profession. If you are a professor, no one wants you as a teacher or mentor (“The graduate students made it obvious to me that I was a nonperson and could not possibly be tolerated”). You cannot publish in professional journals. You cannot quit your job, because no one else will hire you. If you are a journalist, then you might find that you cannot publish at all. After losing his job as editor of The New York Review of Books in a #MeToo-related editorial dispute—he was not accused of assault, just of printing an article by someone who was—Ian Buruma discovered that several of the magazines where he had been writing for three decades would not publish him any longer. One editor said something about “younger staff” at his magazine. Although a group of more than 100 New York Review of Books contributors—among them Joyce Carol Oates, Ian McEwan, Ariel Dorfman, Caryl Phillips, Alfred Brendel (and me)—had signed a public letter in Buruma’s defense, this editor evidently feared his colleagues more than he did Joyce Carol Oates.
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For many, intellectual and professional life grinds to a halt. “I was doing the best work in my life when I heard of this investigation happening,” one academic told me. “It all stopped. I have not written another paper since.” Peter Ludlow, a philosophy professor at Northwestern (and the subject of Laura Kipnis’s book), lost two book contracts after the university forced him out of his job for two alleged instances of sexual harassment, which he denies. Other philosophers would not allow their articles to appear in the same volume as one of his. After Daniel Elder, a prizewinning composer (and a political liberal) posted a statement on Instagram condemning arson in his hometown of Nashville, where Black Lives Matter protesters had set the courthouse on fire after the killing of George Floyd, he discovered that his publisher would not print his music and choirs would not sing it. After the poet Joseph Massey was accused of “harassment and manipulation” by women he’d been romantically involved with, the Academy of American Poets removed all of his poetry from its website, and his publishers removed his books from theirs. Stephen Elliott, a journalist and critic who was accused of rape on the anonymous “Shitty Media Men” list that circulated on the internet at the height of the #MeToo conversation—he is now suing that list’s creator for defamation—has written that, in the aftermath, a published collection of his essays vanished without a trace: Reviews were canceled; The Paris Review aborted a planned interview with him; he was disinvited from book panels, readings, and other events.
For some people, this can result in a catastrophic loss of income. Ludlow moved to Mexico, because he could live more cheaply there. For others, it can create a kind of identity crisis. After describing the various jobs he had held in the months since being suspended from his teaching job, one of the academics I interviewed seemed to choke up. “I am really only good at one thing,” he told me, pointing at mathematical formulas on a blackboard behind him: “this.”
Sometimes advocates of the new mob justice claim that these are minor punishments, that the loss of a job is not serious, that people should be able to accept their situation and move on. But isolation plus public shaming plus loss of income are severe sanctions for adults, with long-term personal and psychological repercussions—especially because the “sentences” in these cases are of indeterminate length. Elliott contemplated suicide, and has written that “every first-hand account I’ve read of public shaming—and I’ve read more than my share—includes thoughts of suicide.” Massey did too: “I had a plan and the means to execute it; I then had a panic attack and took a cab to the ER.” David Bucci, the former chair of the Dartmouth brain-sciences department, who was named in a lawsuit against the college though he was not accused of any sexual misconduct, did kill himself after he realized he might never be able to restore his reputation.
Others have changed their attitudes toward their professions. “I wake up every morning afraid to teach,” one academic told me: The university campus that he once loved has become a hazardous jungle, full of traps. Nicholas Christakis, the Yale professor of medicine and sociology who was at the center of a campus and social-media storm in 2015, is also an expert on the functioning of human social groups. He reminded me that ostracism “was considered an enormous sanction in ancient times—to be cast out of your group was deadly.” It is unsurprising, he said, that people in these situations would consider suicide.
The third thing that happens is that you try to apologize, whether or not you have done anything wrong. Robert George, a Princeton philosopher who has acted as a faculty advocate for students and professors who have fallen into legal or administrative difficulties, describes the phenomenon like this: “They have been popular and successful their whole lives; that’s how they climbed the ladder to their academic positions, at least in places like the one I teach. And then suddenly there is this terrible feeling of Everybody hates me … So what do they do? More often than not, they just cave in.” One of the people I spoke with was asked to apologize for an offense that broke no existing rules. “I said, ‘What am I apologizing for?’ And they said, ‘Well, their feelings were hurt.’ So I crafted my apology around that: ‘If I did say something that upset you, I didn’t anticipate that would happen.’ ” The apology was initially accepted, but his problems didn’t end.
This is typical: More often than not, apologies will be parsed, examined for “sincerity”—and then rejected. Howard Bauchner, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, apologized for something he’d had nothing directly to do with, after one of his colleagues made controversial comments on a podcast and on Twitter about whether communities of color were held back more by “structural racism” or by socioeconomic factors. “I remain profoundly disappointed in myself for the lapses that led to the publishing of the tweet and podcast,” Bauchner wrote. “Although I did not write or even see the tweet, or create the podcast, as editor in chief, I am ultimately responsible for them.” He wound up resigning. But this, too, is now typical: Because apologies have become ritualized, they invariably seem insincere. Websites now offer “sample templates” for people who need to apologize; some universities offer advice on how to apologize to students and employees, and even include lists of good words to use (mistake, misunderstand, misinterpret).
Not that everyone really wants an apology. One former journalist told me that his ex-colleagues “don’t want to endorse the process of mistake/apology/understanding/forgiveness—they don’t want to forgive.” Instead, he said, they want “to punish and purify.” But the knowledge that whatever you say will never be enough is debilitating. “If you make an apology and you know in advance that your apology will not be accepted—that it is going to be considered a move in a psychological or cultural or political game—then the integrity of your introspection is being mocked and you feel permanently marooned in a world of unforgivingness,” one person told me. “And that is a truly unethical world.” Elder’s music publishers asked him to make a groveling apology—they even went so far as to write it for him—but he refused.
Even after the apology is made, a fourth thing happens: People begin to investigate you. One person I spoke with told me he believed he was investigated because his employer didn’t want to offer severance compensation and needed extra reasons to justify his termination. Another thought an investigation of him was launched because firing him for an argument over language would have violated the union contract. Long careers almost always include episodes of disagreement or ambiguity. Was that time he hugged a colleague in consolation really something else? Was her joke really a joke, or something worse? Nobody is perfect; nobody is pure; and once people set out to interpret ambiguous incidents in a particular way, it’s not hard to find new evidence.
Sometimes investigations take place because someone in the community feels that you haven’t paid a high enough price for whatever it is you have done or said. Last year Joshua Katz, a popular Princeton classics professor, wrote an article critical of a letter published by a group of Princeton faculty on race. In response The Daily Princetonian, a student newspaper, spent seven months investigating his past relationships with students, eventually convincing university officials to relitigate incidents from years earlier that had already been adjudicated—a classic breach of James Madison’s belief that no one should be punished for the same thing twice. The Daily Princetonian investigation looks more like an attempt to ostracize a professor guilty of wrong-think than an attempt to bring resolution to a case of alleged misbehavior.
Mike Pesca, a podcaster for Slate, got into a debate with his colleagues on his company’s internal Slack message board about whether it is acceptable to pronounce a racial slur out loud when reporting on the use of a racial slur—an action that, he says, was not against any company rules at the time. After a meeting of the editorial staff held soon afterward to discuss the incident—to which Pesca himself was not invited—the company launched an investigation to find out whether there were other things he might have done wrong. (According to a statement by a Slate spokesperson, the investigation was prompted by more than just “an isolated abstract argument in a Slack channel.”) Amy Chua, the Yale Law professor and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, told me she believes that investigations into her relationships with students were sparked by her personal connections to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Many of these investigations involve anonymous reports or complaints, some of which can come as a total surprise to those being reported upon. By definition, social-media mobs involve anonymous accounts that amplify unverified stories with “likes” and shares. The “Shitty Media Men” list was an anonymous collection of unverified accusations that became public. Procedures at many universities actually mandate anonymity in the early stages of an investigation. Sometimes even the accused isn’t given any of the details. Chua’s husband, the Yale Law professor Jed Rubenfeld, who was suspended from teaching due to sexual-harassment allegations (which he denies), says he did not know the names of his accusers or the nature of the accusations against him for a year and a half.
Kipnis, who was accused of sexual misconduct because she wrote about sexual harassment, was not initially allowed to know who her accusers were either, nor would anyone explain the rules governing her case. Nor, for that matter, were the rules clear to the people applying them, because, as she wrote in Unwanted Advances, “there’s no established or nationally uniform set of procedures.” On top of all that, Kipnis was supposed to keep the whole thing confidential: “I’d been plunged into an underground world of secret tribunals and capricious, medieval rules, and I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about it,’’ she wrote. This chimes with the story of another academic, who told me that his university “never even talked to me before it decided to actually punish me. They read the reports from the investigators, but they never brought me in a room, they never called me on the phone, so that I could say anything about my side of the story. And they openly told me that I was being punished based on allegations. Just because they didn’t find evidence of it, they told me, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
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Secretive procedures that take place outside the law and leave the accused feeling helpless and isolated have been an element of control in authoritarian regimes across the centuries, from the Argentine junta to Franco’s Spain. Stalin created “troikas”—ad hoc, extrajudicial bodies that heard dozens of cases in a day. During China’s Cultural Revolution, Mao empowered students to create revolutionary committees to attack and swiftly remove professors. In both instances, people used these unregulated forms of “justice” to pursue personal grudges or gain professional advantage. In The Whisperers, his book on Stalinist culture, the historian Orlando Figes cites many such cases, among them Nikolai Sakharov, who wound up in prison because somebody fancied his wife; Ivan Malygin, who was denounced by somebody jealous of his success; and Lipa Kaplan, sent to a labor camp for 10 years after she refused the sexual advances of her boss. The sociologist Andrew Walder has revealed how the Cultural Revolution in Beijing was shaped by power competitions between rival student leaders.
This pattern is now repeating itself in the U.S. Many of those I spoke with told complicated stories about the ways in which anonymous procedures had been used by people who disliked them, felt competitive with them, or held some kind of personal or professional grudge. One described an intellectual rivalry with a university administrator, dating back to graduate school—the same administrator who had played a role in having him suspended. Another attributed a series of problems to a former student, now a colleague, who had long seen him as a rival. A third thought that one of his colleagues resented having to work with him and would have preferred a different job. A fourth reckoned that he had underestimated the professional frustrations of younger colleagues who felt stifled by his organization’s hierarchies. All of them believe that personal grudges help explain why they were singled out.
The motivations could be even more petty than that. The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recently described how two younger writers she had befriended attacked her on social media, partly, she wrote, because they are “seeking attention and publicity to benefit themselves.” Once it becomes clear that attention and praise can be garnered from organizing an attack on someone’s reputation, plenty of people discover that they have an interest in doing so.
America remains a safe distance from Mao’s China or Stalin’s Russia. Neither our secretive university committees nor the social-media mobs are backed by authoritarian regimes threatening violence. Despite the right-wing rhetoric that says otherwise, these procedures are not being driven by a “unified left” (there is no “unified left”), or by a unified movement of any kind, let alone by the government. It’s true that some of the university sexual-harassment cases have been shaped by Department of Education Title IX regulations that are shockingly vague, and that can be interpreted in draconian ways. But the administrators who carry out these investigations and disciplinary procedures, whether they work at universities or in the HR departments of magazines, are not doing so because they fear the Gulag. Many pursue them because they believe they are making their institutions better—they are creating a more harmonious workplace, advancing the causes of racial or sexual equality, keeping students safe. Some want to protect their institution’s reputation. Invariably, some want to protect their own reputation. 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.
But what gives anyone the conviction that such a measure is necessary? Or that “keeping students safe” means you must violate due process? It is not the law. Nor, strictly speaking, is it politics. Although some have tried to link this social transformation to President Joe Biden or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, anyone who tries to shoehorn these stories into a right-left political framework has to explain why so few of the victims of this shift can be described as “right wing” or conservative. According to one recent poll, 62 percent of Americans, including a majority of self-described moderates and liberals, are afraid to speak their mind about politics. All of those I spoke with are centrist or center-left liberals. Some have unconventional political views, but some have no strong views at all.
Certainly nothing in the academic texts of critical race theory mandates this behavior. The original critical race theorists argued for the use of a new lens to interpret the past and the present. You can dispute whether or not that lens is useful, or whether you want to look through it at all—but you can’t blame critical-race-theory authors for, say, Yale Law School’s frivolous decision to investigate whether or not Amy Chua gave a dinner party at her house during the pandemic, or for the array of university presidents who have refused to stand by their own faculty members when they are attacked by students.
The censoriousness, the shunning, the ritualized apologies, the public sacrifices—these are rather typical behaviors in illiberal societies with rigid cultural codes, enforced by heavy peer pressure. This is a story of moral panic, of cultural institutions policing or purifying themselves in the face of disapproving crowds. The crowds are no longer literal, as they once were in Salem, but rather online mobs, organized via Twitter, Facebook, or sometimes internal company Slack channels. After Alexi McCammond was named editor in chief of Teen Vogue, people discovered and recirculated on Instagram old anti-Asian and homophobic tweets she had written a decade earlier, while still a teenager. McCammond apologized, of course, but that wasn’t enough, and she was compelled to quit the job before starting. She’s had a softer landing than some—she was able to return to her previous work as a political reporter at Axios—but the incident reveals that no one is safe. She was a 27-year-old woman of color who had been named the “Emerging Journalist of the Year” by the National Association of Black Journalists, and yet her teenage self came back to haunt her. You would think it would be a good thing for the young readers of Teen Vogue to learn forgiveness and mercy, but for the New Puritans, there is no statute of limitations.
This censoriousness is related not just to recent, and often positive, changes in attitudes toward race and gender, and to accompanying changes in the language used to discuss them, but to other social changes that are more rarely acknowledged. While most of those who lose their positions are not “guilty” in any legal sense, neither have they been shunned at random. Just as odd old women were once subject to accusations of witchery, so too are certain types of people now more likely to fall victim to modern mob justice. To begin with, the protagonists of most of these stories tend to be successful. Though not billionaires or captains of industry, they’ve managed to become editors, professors, published authors, or even just students at competitive universities. Some are unusually social, even hyper-gregarious: They were professors who liked to chat or drink with their students, bosses who went out to lunch with their staff, people who blurred the lines between social life and institutional life.
“If you ask anyone for a list of the best teachers, best citizens, most responsible people, I would be on every one of those lists,” one now-disgraced faculty member told me. Amy Chua had been appointed to numerous powerful committees at Yale Law School, including one that helped prepare students for clerkships. This was, she says, because she succeeded in getting students, especially minority students, good clerkships. “I do extra work; I get to know them,” she told me. “I write extra-good recommendations.” Many highly social people who are good at committees also tend to gossip, to tell stories about their colleagwues. Some, both male and female, might also be described as flirtatious, enjoying wordplay and jokes that go right to the edge of what is considered acceptable.
Which is precisely what got some of these people into trouble, because the definition of acceptable has radically changed in the past few years. Once it was not just okay but admirable that Chua and Rubenfeld had law-school students over to their house for gatherings. That moment has passed. So, too, has the time when a student could discuss her personal problems with her professor, or when an employee could gossip with his employer. Conversations between people who have different statuses—employer-employee, professor-student—can now focus only on professional matters, or strictly neutral topics. Anything sexual, even in an academic context—for example, a conversation about the laws of rape—is now risky. The Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen has written that her students “seem more anxious about classroom discussion, and about approaching the law of sexual violence in particular, than they have ever been in my eight years as a law professor.” Akhil Reed Amar, a professor at Yale, told me that he no longer mentions a particular historical incident that he once used in his teaching, because it would force his students to read a case study that revolves around the use of a racial slur.
Social rules have changed too. Professors used to date and even marry their students. Colleagues used to drink together after work, and sometimes go home together. Today that can be dangerous. An academic friend told me that in his graduate school, people who are close to getting their doctorate are wary about dating people just beginning their studies, because the unwritten rules now dictate that you don’t date colleagues, especially if there could be any kind of (real or imagined) power differential between you and the person you are dating. This cultural shift is in many ways healthy: Young people are now much better protected from predatory bosses. But it has costs. When jokes and flirtation are completely off-limits, some of the spontaneity of office life disappears too.
It’s not just the hyper-social and the flirtatious who have found themselves victims of the New Puritanism. People who are, for lack of a more precise word, difficult have trouble too. They are haughty, impatient, confrontational, or insufficiently interested in people whom they perceive to be less talented. Others are high achievers, who in turn set high standards for their colleagues or students. When those high standards are not met, these people say so, and that doesn’t go over well. Some of them like to push boundaries, especially intellectual boundaries, or to question orthodoxies. When people disagree with them, they argue back with relish.
That kind of behavior, once accepted or at least tolerated in many workplaces, is also now out of bounds. Workplaces once considered demanding are now described as toxic. The sort of open criticism, voiced in front of other people, that was once normal in newsrooms and academic seminars is now as unacceptable as chewing with your mouth open. The non-sunny disposition, the less-than-friendly manner—these can now be grounds for punishment or ostracism too. A relevant criticism of Donald McNeil turned out to be that he was “kind of a grumpy old guy,” as one student on that trip to Peru described him.
What many of these people—the difficult ones, the gossipy ones, the overly gregarious ones—have in common is that they make people uncomfortable. Here, too, a profound generational shift has transpired. “I think people’s tolerance for discomfort—people’s tolerance for dissonance, for not hearing exactly what they want to hear—has now gone down to zero,” one person told me. “Discomfort used to be a term of praise about pedagogy—I mean, the greatest discomforter of all was Socrates.”
It’s not wrong to want a more comfortable workplace, or fewer grumpy colleagues. The difficulty is that the feeling of discomfort is subjective. One person’s lighthearted compliment is another person’s microaggression. One person’s critical remark can be experienced by another person as racist or sexist. Jokes, wordplay, and anything that can have two meanings are, by definition, open to interpretation.
But even though discomfort is subjective, it is also now understood as something that can be cured. Someone who has been made uncomfortable now has multiple paths through which to demand redress. This has given rise to a new facet of life in universities, nonprofits, and corporate offices: the committees, HR departments, and Title IX administrators who have been appointed precisely to hear these kinds of complaints. Anyone who feels discomfort now has a place to go, someone to talk to.
Some of this is, I repeat, positive: Employees or students who feel they have been treated unfairly no longer have to flounder alone. But that comes at a cost. Anyone who accidentally creates discomfort—whether through their teaching methods, their editorial standards, their opinions, or their personality—may suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of not just a student or a colleague but an entire bureaucracy, one dedicated to weeding out people who make other people uncomfortable. And these bureaucracies are illiberal. They do not necessarily follow rules of fact-based investigation, rational argument, or due process. Instead, the formal and informal administrative bodies that judge the fate of people who have broken social codes are very much part of a swirling, emotive public conversation, one governed not by the rules of the courtroom or logic or the Enlightenment but by social-media algorithms that encourage anger and emotion, and by the economy of likes and shares that pushes people to feel—and to perform—outrage. The interaction between the angry mob and the illiberal bureaucracy engenders a thirst for blood, for sacrifices to be offered up to the pious and unforgiving gods of outrage—a story we see in other eras of history, from the Inquisition to the more recent past.
Twitter, the president of one major cultural institution told me, “is the new public sphere.” Yet Twitter is unforgiving, it is relentless, it doesn’t check facts or provide context. Worse, like the elders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony who would not forgive Hester Prynne, the internet keeps track of past deeds, ensuring that no error, no mistake, no misspoken sentence or clumsy metaphor is ever lost. “It’s not that everybody’s famous for 15 minutes,” Tamar Gendler, the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Yale, told me. “It’s that everybody gets damned for 15 seconds.” And if you have the misfortune to have the worst 15 seconds of your life shared with the world, there is nothing to guarantee that anybody will weigh that single, badly worded comment against all the other things you have done in your career. Incidents “lose their nuance,” one university official told me. “So then what you get is all kinds of people with prearranged views, and they come in and use the incident to mean one thing or another.”
It can happen very fast. In March, Sandra Sellers, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, was caught on camera speaking to another professor about some underperforming Black students in her class. There is no way to know from the recording alone whether her comments represented racist bias or genuine concern for her students. Not that it mattered to Georgetown—she was fired within days of the recording’s becoming public. Nor could one know what David Batson, the colleague she was talking to on the recording, really thought either. Nevertheless, he was placed on administrative leave because he seemed, vaguely, to be politely agreeing with her. He quickly resigned.
That conversation was captured inadvertently, but future revelations might not be. This spring, Braden Ellis, a student at Cypress College in California, shared a class Zoom recording of his professor’s response when Ellis defended portrayals of police as heroes. Ellis said he did this in order to expose a purported bias against conservative viewpoints on campus. Even though the recording by itself does not prove the existence of long-standing bias, the professor—a Muslim woman who said on the recording that she did not trust the police—became the focus of a Fox News segment, a social-media storm, and death threats. So did other professors at the college. So did administrators. After a few days, the professor was removed from her teaching assignments, pending investigation.
In this incident, the storm came from the right, as it surely will in the future: The tools of social-media mob justice are available to partisans of all kinds. In May, a young reporter, Emily Wilder, was fired from her new job at the Associated Press in Arizona after a series of conservative publications and politicians publicized Facebook posts critical of Israel that she had written while in college. Like so many before her, she was not told precisely why she was fired, or which company rules her old posts had violated.
Some have used Wilder’s case to argue that the conservative criticism of “cancel culture” has always been fraudulent. But the real, and nonpartisan, lesson is this: No one—of any age, in any profession—is safe. In the age of Zoom, cellphone cameras, miniature recorders, and other forms of cheap surveillance technology, anyone’s comments can be taken out of context; anyone’s story can become a rallying cry for Twitter mobs on the left or the right. Anyone can then fall victim to a bureaucracy terrified by the sudden eruption of anger. And once one set of people loses the right to due process, so does everybody else. Not just professors but students; not just editors of elite publications but random members of the public. Gotcha moments can be choreographed. Project Veritas, a well-funded right-wing organization, dedicates itself to sting operations: It baits people into saying embarrassing things on hidden cameras and then seeks to get them punished for it, either by social media or by their own bureaucracies.
But while this form of mob justice can be used opportunistically by anyone, for any political or personal reason, the institutions that have done the most to facilitate this change are in many cases those that once saw themselves as the guardians of liberal and democratic ideals. Robert George, the Princeton professor, is a longtime philosophical conservative who once criticized liberal scholars for their earnest relativism, their belief that all ideas deserved an equal hearing. He did not foresee, he told me, that liberals would one day “seem as archaic as the conservatives,” that the idea of creating a space where different ideas could compete would come to seem old-fashioned, that the spirit of tolerance and curiosity would be replaced by a worldview “that is not open-minded, that doesn’t think engaging differences is a great thing or that students should be exposed to competing points of view.”
But that kind of thought system is not new in America. In the 19th century, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel argued for the replacement of exactly that kind of rigidity with a worldview that valued ambiguity, nuance, tolerance of difference—the liberal worldview—and that would forgive Hester Prynne for her mistakes. The liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill, writing at about the same time as Hawthorne, made a similar argument. Much of his most famous book, On Liberty, is dedicated not to governmental restraints on human liberty but to the threat posed by social conformism, by “the demand that all other people shall resemble ourselves.” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about this problem, too. It was a serious challenge in 19th-century America, and is again in the 21st century.
Students and professors, editorial assistants and editors in chief—all are aware of what kind of society they now inhabit. That’s why they censor themselves, why they steer clear of certain topics, why they avoid discussing anything too sensitive for fear of being mobbed or ostracized or fired without due process. But that kind of thinking takes us uncomfortably close to Istanbul, where history and politics can be discussed only with great care.
Many people have told me they want to change this atmosphere, but don’t know how. Some hope to ride it out, to wait for this moral panic to pass, or for an even younger generation to rebel against it. Some worry about the costs of engagement. One person who was the focus of a negative social-media campaign told me that he doesn’t want this set of issues to dominate his life and his career; he cited other people who have become so obsessed with battling “wokeness” or “cancel culture” that they now do nothing else.
Others have decided to be vocal. Stephen Elliott wrestled for a long time with whether or not to describe what it feels like to be wrongly accused of rape—he wrote something and abandoned it because “I decided that I wouldn’t be able to handle the blowback”—before finally describing his experiences in a published essay. Amy Chua ignored advice to remain silent and instead has talked as much as possible. Robert George has created the Academic Freedom Alliance, a group that intends to offer moral and legal support to professors who are under fire, and even to pay for their legal teams if necessary. George was inspired, he told me, by a nature program that showed how elephant packs will defend every member of the herd against a marauding lion, whereas zebras run away and let the weakest get killed off. “The trouble with us academics is we’re a bunch of zebras,” he said. “We need to become elephants.” John McWhorter, a Columbia linguistics professor (and Atlantic contributing writer) who has strong and not always popular views about race, told me that if you are accused of something unfairly, you should always push back, firmly but politely: “Just say, ‘No, I’m not a racist. And I disagree with you.’ ” If more leaders—university presidents, magazine and newspaper publishers, CEOs of foundations and companies, directors of musical societies—took that position, maybe it would be easier for more of their peers to stand up to their students, their colleagues, or an online mob.
The alternative, for our cultural institutions and for democratic discourse, is grim. Foundations will do secret background checks on their potential grantees, to make sure they haven’t committed crimes-that-are-not-crimes that could be embarrassing in the future. Anonymous reports and Twitter mobs, not the reasoned judgments of peers, will shape the fate of individuals. Writers and journalists will fear publication. Universities will no longer be dedicated to the creation and dissemination of knowledge but to the promotion of student comfort and the avoidance of social-media attacks.
Worse, if we drive all of the difficult people, the demanding people, and the eccentric people away from the creative professions where they used to thrive, we will become a flatter, duller, less interesting society, a place where manuscripts sit in drawers for fear of arbitrary judgments. The arts, the humanities, and the media will become stiff, predictable, and mediocre. Democratic principles like the rule of law, the right to self-defense, the right to a just trial—even the right to be forgiven—will wither. There will be nothing to do but sit back and wait for the Hawthornes of the future to expose us.
This article appears in the October 2021 print edition with the headline “The New Puritans.”When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
