Month: July 2020

If “Cancel Culture” Is About Getting Fired, Let’s Cancel At-Will Employment

[This article was co-authored with Moshe Marvit.] You know what should be canceled? The legal right of most bosses to fire you for a “good cause, bad cause, or no cause.” That status quo is so widely accepted that some progressives don’t think twice about appealing to the authoritarian power of bosses in the pursuit of social justice: Many high profile social media campaigns have been employed to get people who are caught on video committing racist acts in their everyday lives fired from their jobs. But the desire to hold racists and sexists accountable—or the related struggles against sexism, homophobia and fascism—need not be in conflict with the principles of workplace rights. So-called “cancel culture” is not well-defined, but its critics frequently use the moniker to refer to an activist program of making individuals who harm their neighbors or coworkers with acts of racism, sexism (and worse) accountable through exposure and de-platforming—including attempts […]

The Powerful Movement To Micromanage and Defund Public Schools Has Been Awfully Quiet About Police

Police are violently suppressing street protests across the country in mutiny against community demands for democratic accountability and respect for human rights. Their brutal rejection of basic demands for greater oversight and penalties has fueled larger demands for defunding police departments, if not outright abolition and replacement with other bodies. In this context, some activists are calling for a crackdown on police unions, which they say protect police from democratic accountability. That these calls are not being joined by a seemingly obvious ally is telling. There is already a political movement that blames unions for the harm done to Black communities by publicly funded institutions. Its adherents argue that these public bodies misspend the money they have and deserve no additional resources. It is well-funded by the philanthropy world, hyped by celebrities, cloaked in the rhetoric of civil rights and showered with uncritical media coverage, and has been successful in […]