limits, is the dual legacy of the internet’s

ILLUSTRATION BY PATRICK EDELL

own peculiar rhetorical ideology and Amer-

ica’s cyclical, never-ending culture wars.
In 1993, John Gilmore, an early internet
pioneer, told Time magazine, “The Net in-
terprets censorship as damage and routes
around it.” Gilmore was already an éminence
grise of the computing world and the fifth
employee of Sun Microsystems, the com-
pany that created Java and helped develop
many other crucial technologies. He and
several other early internet figures had
emerged from the libertarian strain of the
counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s,
and their anti-establishment spirit infused
early online communities with a palpable
sense of transgression. The public internet
was still in its infancy, but a geometrically
expanding user base was about to leave the
walled gardens of early commercial net-
works like America Online to enter a more

Culture
anarchic, smutty, and rambunctious online
world—where anyone could say anything,
and where someone surely would.
Freed from the fetters of gatekeeping

Warriors
publications and loosed upon freewheeling
forums and chat rooms, which would soon
become blogs and newspaper comments
sections, an army of Herzogs (including
professionals such as Slate columnist and

How the 1990s created a group of

early blog adopter Mickey Kaus and an
ever-expanding cast of pseudonymous

thinkers obsessed with cancel culture

amateurs—often cranky and brilliant, but
also prolix and picayune) suddenly found
themselves with outlets and audiences for
By Jacob Bacharach their theories, gripes, and polemics.
At the time, the idea that a censorious,
OTHER THAN THE joys and sorrows of inherently totalitarian; and any attempt to even Stalinist, culture of repression, grown
leaving New York City (or staying there), no link speech and expression to other rights, in the radical hothouses of elite universities,
recent topic has launched more exasper- to hierarchies of power, to access to prom- had been foisted upon schools, workplaces,
ating essays than “cancel culture.” When inent gigs in paid media or the college- HR departments, and the country at large
Glenn Greenwald departed The Intercept campus lecture circuit constitutes a strong was gaining widespread currency. The
late last year, he wrote an extraordinary push down an icy slope to the gallows. primary antagonism toward political cor-
missive of more than 3,000 words, accus- This perplexingly apocalyptic mindset rectness came from the political right:
ing the editors of attempting to censor him. seems to conflate getting nitpicked by an Everyone from conservative writers like
Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan resigned editor, yelled at on social media, or losing Roger Kimball and Dinesh D’Souza; to Rush
from The New York Times and New York an occasional opportunity to rile up an au- Limbaugh, who arguably achieved the
magazine, respectively, both citing an intol- ditorium of snowflake undergraduates with squalid, bullying, vulgar height of his fame
erably illiberal culture of woke conformism. the purges and disappearances of a total- and power in the ’90s; to George H.W. Bush,
These are just a few examples. itarian state. But it also has clear roots in who, in 1991, asserted that political cor-
Today’s diverse cast of anti-woke, anti– a pair of rhetorical and technological de- rectness “replaces old prejudice with new
cancel culture agitators run the gamut, velopments in the 1990s. Many of these ones” and “declares certain topics off-
from civil libertarian critics of empire to figures, who are largely members of Gen X limits, certain expression off-limits, even
self-styled neoliberals, middlebrow intel- or older millennials, came up in the 1990s certain gestures off-limits.” But this kind of
lectuals to GOP opportunists. For all their culture wars, and then found professional thinking also found plenty of willing allies
wildly varying political views and commit- prominence in a media landscape dominat- among the more libertarian, libertine, and
ments, they have broadly coalesced around ed by online platforms and publishing. Their individualistic figures on the left. In 1993,
a single set of rhetorical points. Modera- incredulous attitude toward any sugges- Bill Maher, a left-leaning, weed-smoking co-
tion, whether by governments or private tion that there should be limits on what one median, premiered Politically Incorrect. The
entities, is censorship; social approbation is ought to say, or even a debate about those following year, 20th Century Fox released

10 April 2021
 LOOSE TALK

FIL·I·BUS·TER
NOUN | VERB
BY JOHN PATRICK LEARY

I
n the summer of 1855, William Walker, a ruthless, ambi- Mississippi’s governor, sought to annex new slave territories
tious, famously short Tennessean, invaded Nicaragua to the United States. None had much lasting success.
with a private militia, declared himself president, and The word filibuster, though, lived on as a synonym for
reintroduced slavery. For his brief reign, he was, as one any furtive attempt to defend the slave interest and, after
of his biographers recently put it, a “five-foot-five colossus that, white supremacy by subverting legitimate political
astride the isthmus.” But of all the nicknames he ever earned, procedure. This, and not the Jolly Roger or Blackbeard’s
Walker particularly hated being called a “filibuster”—because gold, is the legacy of Walker and of another Southerner with
it marked him as a brigand and a thief. a passion for minority rule, Mitch McConnell.
Today, whenever the Senate filibuster is in the news, McConnell is hardly as unscrupulous as, say, Charles
people note the strange word’s probable origins in a Eldredge, a Wisconsin Democrat who filibustered an 1871 bill
seventeenth-century Dutch word for “freebooter,” or pirate. to suppress the Ku Klux Klan; or Richard Russell, a Georgia
Few go much further than to imply that the politicians segregationist who filibustered anti-lynching laws in the
obstructing Senate business bear some resemblance to 1930s; or Strom Thurmond, who spoke on the Senate floor
the buccaneers who interrupted colonial maritime trade. for 24 hours to interrupt the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights
Unflattering as this analogy may be, it isn’t the word’s most Act. But McConnell, whose recent accomplishments include
relevant history in the United States. In the two decades filibustering a revised Voting Rights Act, is their descendant.
before the Civil War, private militias that recruited heavily By 1900, the old paramilitary sense of “filibustering” for
in the slaveholding South, but enjoyed support elsewhere in slavery and empire had mostly given way to its new parlia-
the country, invaded nations in Latin America. Denounced mentary meaning, roughly synonymous with “obstructing.”
as filibusteros by their would-be subjects, and alternately But the word remained associated with efforts to preserve or
praised and prosecuted as filibusters back home, they styled expand white rule. William Walker has always been better
themselves as statesmen and freelancers serving the sacred known in Central America, where he is buried and hated,
cause of Manifest Destiny. Some of the invaders set up nom- than he is in the United States. But his legacy lives on in his
inally independent republics. Others, like Narciso López, home country: Exiling the “filibuster” from our political vo-
a Venezuelan who twice invaded Cuba with support from cabulary would be one way to start burying him here, too.

PCU, an initial box-office flop that went on to sacred cows. On the internet, expertise These thinkers are unwilling or unable
become a great frat-house VHS cult classic is instantaneous; we all perform in exag- to grasp that debate alone cannot resolve
for its broad, gross satire of politically correct gerated avatars of ourselves, which only many of the problems we face—climate,
college life. These debates about political reinforces the cultural message that more inequality, poverty, disease. They are not
correctness were never really resolved, al- speech (never mind what speech) is always mere exercises. They are material and real,
though they went into abeyance during the better, and that the individual—not editors, and they are immune to cleverness and
patriotic hysteria after September 11. publications, collectives, contemporary outrageousness. They require solidari-
Contemporary crusaders against cancel mores, or social solidarity—is the final ar- ty and collective action as much as they
culture take an ostensibly maximalist view biter of value, accuracy, and decency. require argument. Reflecting on the often-
of free speech: If it can be said, it must be There is also something regressive and failed promises of the countercultural
said. They tend to conflate criticism with a bit adolescent about this sort of thinking, 1960s, the writer Todd Gitlin lamented
censorship, the right to speak with the right as though all the cancel culture complain- that “the extravagance of its libertarian
to have an audience. They view with con- ers long for are evenings at the debate club strain” had overwhelmed the collective
tempt the idea that certain utterances may and late-night rap sessions full of grand solidarity necessary for real revolutionary
be beyond the pale, and reject the idea that philosophical gestures and free from the change. But here we are, five decades lat-
they should ever be bystanders or students grotty pressures of real life. It may be why er, fighting the same pointless culture war,
rather than interlocutors in a conversation. so many cancel culture critics are fixated while real power has only continued to con-
Having come up in the ’90s, and very on- on the college campuses they themselves centrate in the hands of an extraordinarily
line, myself, I feel the pull of this argument. have long since left. The concession and wealthy economic and political elite. Are
Online discourse, unconstrained by poli- compromises of adulthood are rarely as we doomed to repeat the same failures, or
tesse, by editorial standards, by antiquated fun or as heroic as the caffeinated debates can we learn a lesson?
mores, and by boring restraint, is thrilling of their youth, when they could say and do
Jacob Bacharach is a novelist and essayist.
and heady. It can even feel daring and he- almost anything, parked in a beanbag chair He divides his time between Blacksburg,
roic, all wild abandon and the toppling of in a red-brick dorm. Virginia, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Signs & Wonders 11

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