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Terrorism, public health, and police violence are all life-and-death issues, and all involve the state, so they’re more consequential than the criticism, shunning, and loss of professional opportunities associated with cancel culture. But that doesn’t mean the latter isn’t a problem.

We can, and should, care about more than one thing at a time, and many things that aren’t the worst problem deserve attention.

Nevertheless, it’s important to assess problems accurately.

Michael Hobbes calls all this worrying about wokeness a “moral panic.” That’s a term some use online to wave away serious concerns, but Hobbes uses it the way sociologist Stanley Cohen did in the 1970s, as a phenomenon where something becomes “defined as a threat to societal values and interests” based on media accounts that “exaggerate the seriousness, extent, typicality and/or inevitability of harm.”

The point here is not that stranger abductions never happened, but that they didn’t happen nearly as much as the media, concerned parents, and lawmakers thought. And because stranger kidnappings were not a national crisis, but treated as one, the “solution” made things worse.

Along similar lines, Hobbes argues that anti-woke alarm-bell-ringing relies on a relatively small number of oft-repeated anecdotes. Some don’t stand up to scrutiny, and some of those that do are low-stakes. The resulting moral panic fuels, among other things, a wave of red state legislation aimed at banning “critical race theory” that uses vague language and effectively cracks down on teaching about racism in American history.

For that, we should look to data, and here again the problem looks smaller than anti-woke liberals make it out to be

In the universe of cancel culture cases, I find more incidents concerning than Hobbes and fewer concerning than Young, but “this one incident wasn’t actually bad” vs. “yes it really was” doesn’t answer the question about size and scope. It doesn’t tell us what, if anything, society should do about it.

In Liberal Currents, Adam Gurri cites the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which documented 426 “targeting incidents involving scholars at public and private American institutions of higher education” since 2015 and 492 “disinvitation attempts” since 1998

The organization Canceled People lists 217 cases of “cancellation” since 1991, while the National Association of Scholars (NAS) lists 194 cancellations in academia since 2004 (plus two in the 20th century).

Based on these numbers, Gurri concludes, “If any other problem in social life was occurring at this frequency and at this scale, we would consider it effectively solved.”

There are nearly 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States. U.S. News’ 2021 rankings of the best schools lists 1,452. Using that smaller number and NAS’s figure of 194 academic cancellations since 2004, the chance of a college or university experiencing a cancellation in a given year is less than 0.8 percent.

There are some concerning cases in the NAS database too, in which professors were fired for actions that should be covered under a basic principle of academic freedom — for example, reading aloud a Mark Twain passage that included a racial slur, even after giving students advance notice — so this isn’t a total non-issue. But the number of low stakes and relatively unobjectionable cases means the risk is lower than 0.8 percent (and it’s even lower than that, since NAS includes Canada and my denominator is ranked schools in the United States).

Similarly, FIRE classifies about 30 percent of the attempted disinvitations in its database as from the right. About 60 percent are from the left — the other 10 percent N/A — so if you want to argue that the left does this more, you’ve got some evidence. But still, the number of cases from the left is lower than the total. And more than half of FIRE’s attempted disinvitations did not result in anyone getting disinvited.

Using U.S. News’ ranked schools as the denominator, the chance of left-wing protestors trying to get a speaker disinvited at a college or university in a given year is about 0.5 percent. The chance of an actual disinvitation is less than 0.25 percent. And that’s in the entire school. To put this in perspective, my political science department alone hosts speakers most weeks of the semester.

Two things jump out here:

Bari Weiss and Anne Applebaum both cite a Cato study purporting to show this effect:

even if we assume these databases capture a fraction of actual instances — which would be surprising, given the media attention on this topic, but even so — the data does not show an illiberal left-wing movement in control of academia.

The number agreeing that the political climate prevents them from saying things they believe ranges from 42% to 77%, which is high across political views. That suggests self-censorship is, to a significant degree, a factor of the political, cultural, and technological environment, rather than caused by any particular ideology.

Conservatives report self-censoring more than liberals do.

The same study shows that the biggest increase in self-censorship from 2017 to 2020 was among strong liberals (+12), while strong conservatives increased the least (+1).

If this data told a story of ascendent Maoists suppressing conservative speech, it would probably be the opposite, with the left becoming more confident of expressing their views — on race, gender, etc. — while the right becomes disproportionately more fearful. Culture warriors fixate on wokeness, but when asked about the political climate, many Americans likely thought about Trumpism

Nevertheless, this data does show conservatives are more likely to say the political climate prevents them from expressing their beliefs. But what it doesn’t show is which beliefs or why.

Self-censoring can be a problem, but also not. The adage “do not discuss politics or religion in general company” goes back to at least 1879. If someone today is too scared to say “Robin DiAngelo’s conception of ‘white fragility’ does not stand up to logical scrutiny,” that’s bad. If they’re too scared to shout racial slurs at minorities, that isn’t. A lot depends on the content of the speech.

When I was a teenager in the 1990s, anti-gay slurs were common insults among boys, and tough-guy talk in movies. Now it’s a lot less common, one of the things pushed out of polite society, like the n-word, Holocaust denial, and sexual harassment. I think that’s a positive.

Another problem with the anti-woke interpretation of the Cato study is media constantly tells conservatives they’re under dire threat.

Fox News, including Tucker Carlson (the most-watched show on basic cable), Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino (frequently among the most-shared on Facebook), and other right-wing outlets devote tons of coverage to cancel culture, riling up conservatives with hyperbolic claims that people are coming for them

Anti-woke liberals in prestigious mainstream outlets tell them it’s the Cultural Revolution

Then a survey asks if the political climate prevents them from saying what they believe, and, primed by media, they say yes.

With so many writers on the anti-woke beat, it’s not especially plausible that we’re missing many cases of transgender servers getting people canceled for using the wrong pronoun in coffee shops to the point that everyone who isn’t fully comfortable with the terminology should live in fear. By overstating the threat of cancellation and the power of woke activists, anti-woke liberals are chilling speech they aim to protect.

a requirement to both-sides the Holocaust is a plausible read of the legal text. It’s an unsurprising result of empowering the state to suppress ideas in an environment with bad faith culture warriors, such as Chris Rufo and James Lindsay, advocating state censorship and deliberately stoking panic to get it.

Texas, Florida, and other states trying to suppress unwanted ideas in both K-12 and higher ed isn’t the Cultural Revolution either — no state-sanctioned mass violence here — but it’s coming from government, making it a bigger threat to speech and academic freedom.

To put this in perspective, antiracist guru Ibram X. Kendi has called for an “anti-racist Constitutional amendment,” which would “make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials,” and establish a Department of Anti-Racism to enforce it. It’s a terrible proposal that would repeal the First Amendment and get the state heavily involved in policing speech (which, even if well-intentioned, comes with serious risks of abuse).

It also doesn’t stand the slightest chance of happening.

It’s fair to characterize this article as anti-anti-woke. And I usually don’t like anti-anti- arguments, especially anti-anti-Trump (because it’s effectively pro). But in this case I’m doing it because I reject the binary.

American politics is often binary.

Culture is not. It’s an ever-changing mishmash, with a large variety of influential participants

There have been unmistakable changes in American culture — Western culture, really — regarding race and gender, but there are way more than two sides to that. You don’t have to be woke or anti-woke. It’s not a political campaign or a war. You can think all sorts of things, mixing and matching from these ideas and others.

I won’t say “this is trivial” nor “this stuff is great,” because I don’t think either. At least not if “this” means uncompromising Maoists seeking domination.

I think that’s bad, but it’s not especially common. It’s not fiction — I’m online a lot, I have feet in both media and academia, I’ve seen it too — but, importantly, it’s not in control

I think government censorship is inherently more concerning than private censorship, and that we can’t sufficiently counter the push for state idea-suppression without countering the overstated fears that rationalize it.

I think a lot of the private censorship problem can be addressed by executives and administrators — the ones who actually have power over businesses and universities — showing a bit of spine. Don’t fold at the first sign of protest. Take some time to look into it yourself, and make a judgment call on whether discipline is merited and necessary. Often, the activist mob will move on in a few days anyway.

I think that, with so much of the conversation focusing on extremes, people often miss when administrators do this.

I think violence is physical, and that while speech can be quite harmful, it’s better to think of these two things as categorically different than to insist harmful speech is literally violence.

at a baseline, treating people as equals means respecting who they say they are. The vast majority are not edge cases like a competitive athlete, but regular people trying to live their lives. Let them use the bathroom in peace.

I think the argument that racism and other forms of bigotry operate at a systemic or institutional, in addition to individual, level is insightful, intuitive, and empirically supported. We can improve people’s lives by taking that into account when crafting laws, policies, and practices.

I think identity and societal structures shape people’s lives (whether they want it to or not) but they’re far from the only factors. Treating them as the only, or even predominant, factor essentializes more than it empowers.

I think transgender and non-binary people have a convincing case for equality. I don’t think that points to clear answers on every question—what’s the point of gender segregated sports?

I think free association is an essential value too. Which inherently includes the right of disassociation.

I think these situations often fall into a gray area, and businesses should be able to make their own judgment calls about personnel, since companies have a reasonable interest in protecting their brand.

I think free speech is an essential value, not just at the legal level, but culturally as well. I think people who would scrap it, from crusading antiracists to social conservatives pining for Viktor Orban’s Hungary, have a naively utopian sense of how that would go (both in general and for them specifically). Getting the state involved in speech suppression is a bad idea.

I think America’s founding was a big step forward for government and individual liberty, and early America was a deeply racist, bigoted place that needed Amendments (13-15; 19), Civil Rights Acts, and landmark court cases to become a liberal democracy. I don’t think it’s hard to hold both of those in your head at the same time.

I think students learning the unvarnished truth about America’s racist past is good, and that teaching students they are personally responsible for the sins of the past is not.

I think synthesis of these cultural forces is both desirable and possible. Way more people think both that bigotry is bad and individual freedom is good than online arguments lead you to believe.

I don’t think the sides are as far apart as they think.

I think we should disaggregate cancel culture and left-wing identity politics. Cancellation should be understood as an internet phenomenon.

If it ever was just something the left does, it isn’t anymore.

I think a lot of us could agree that social media mobbing and professional media attention on minor incidents is wrong, especially as part of a campaign to get someone fired. In general, disproportionally severe social and professional sanctions is a problem, no matter the alleged cause.

I think most anti-woke liberals really do want to defend free speech and academic freedom. But I don’t think their panic-stoking hyperbole is helping.

A “civilization-based world order” was emerging, in which societies “sharing cultural affinities” were more likely to group themselves into alliances or blocs.

And the would-be universalism of the West was setting the stage for sustained conflict with rival civilizations, most notably with China and the Islamic world.

These claims were the backbone of Huntington’s book “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” which was seen as a sweeping interpretive alternative to Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, with its vision of liberal democracy as the horizon toward which post-Cold War societies were likely to converge.

often lately Huntington has been invoked either warily, on the grounds that Putin wants a clash of civilizations and we shouldn’t give it to him, or in dismissal or critique, with the idea being that his theory of world politics has actually been disproved by Putin’s attempt to restore a Greater Russia.

Christopher Caldwell also invokes Huntington’s seemingly falsified predictions about Orthodox Christian unity. But then he also offers a different reason to reject Huntington’s application to our moment, suggesting that the civilizational model has been a useful framework for understanding events over the last 20 years, but lately we have been moving back to a world of explicitly ideological conflict — one defined by a Western elite preaching a universal gospel of “neoliberalism” and “wokeness,” and various regimes and movements that are trying to resist it.

Caldwell’s analysis resembles the popular liberal argument that the world is increasingly divided between liberalism and authoritarianism, democracy and autocracy, rather than being divided into multiple poles and competing civilizations.

if you want to understand the direction of global politics right now, the Huntington thesis is more relevant than ever.

The first years of the 21st century, in other words, provided a fair amount of evidence for the universal appeal of Western capitalism, liberalism and democracy, with outright opposition to those values confined to the margins — Islamists, far-left critics of globalization, the government of North Korea.

American power has obviously declined relative to our rivals and competitors, or that our post-9/11 efforts to spread Western values by force of arms so often came to grief.

The specific divergences between the world’s major powers have also followed, in general ways, the civilizational patterns Huntington sketched out.

None of the emerging non-Western great powers have yet built grand alliances based on civilizational affinities, meaning that the third of the four big Huntingtonian predictions looks like the weakest one tod

wherever smaller countries are somehow “torn,” in his language, between some other civilization and the liberal West, they usually prefer an American alliance to an alignment with Moscow or Beijing.

This speaks to the West’s resilient appeal, to enduring American advantages even in a multipolar world. But it doesn’t mean that liberalism is poised for some sweeping return to the position it occupied when American strength was at its height.

while aspects of Fukuyama’s end of history have clearly spread beyond the liberal West, it’s as often the shadow side of his vision — consumerism and childless anomie — as the idealism of democracy and human rights.

Still less does the conflict in Ukraine mean that the export of American-style “wokeness,”

Quite the reverse: Most of wokeness feels inward-looking and parochial, a specifically Western and especially Anglo-American response to disappointments with the neoliberal period

the current culture war may actually be reducing ethnic polarization in our political parties — drawing some racial minorities rightward, for instance — while resurfacing some of the oldest divides in Anglo-American politics.

The woke often seem like heirs of the New England Puritans and the utopian zeal of Yankeedom; their foes are often Southern evangelicals and conservative Catholics and the libertarian descendants of the Scots-Irish; and the stakes in the debates are competing interpretations of the American founding, the Constitution, the Civil War and the settlement of the frontier.

if there’s going to be a clash of civilizations, the clash inside America is over what kind of civilization ours should be.

Angered, nearly 20 women appeared together this month in a TV studio for Mediapart, France’s leading investigative news site, with some recounting rapes or assaults that lasted minutes, carried out with barely a few words.

“He was called a Don Juan for years,” said Hélène Devynck, 55, a journalist who has accused Mr. Poivre d’Arvor of raping her at his home when she worked as one of his assistants in the early 1990s.

“His ego is destroying him,” said Cécile Delarue, 43, a journalist who has accused Mr. Poivre d’Arvor of engaging in sexual harassment when she worked with him two decades ago.

Mr. Poivre d’Arvor declined an interview request through Mr. Naepels, who said that at least one more woman could be included in the defamation suit.

According to the French news media, Mr. Poivre d’Arvor has been married for 50 years to the same woman, who has not commented publicly on the accusations.

On air, he appealed especially to a target audience of women under 50, Mr. Lévrier said.

He regularly invited young women to watch his live broadcasts before leading them to his private office, where several of the women say he assaulted them. He also pressed young female employees for sex, or sexually harassed them, according to former employees, including Ms. Devynck, the former assistant.

“I knew that, at the time, if I complained, he was the seducer and so I was the whore — I couldn’t say anything because of his power and the support he had,” said Ms. Devynck, who went on to a successful career at other channels.

“I’m of a generation that was raised with the idea that women and men were equal, and that it was through work that I would gain freedom — my mother told me often,” Ms. Delarue said. “But this man just saw me as a fresh piece of meat.”

A famous letter written by Catherine Deneuve and other prominent Frenchwomen denounced #MeToo as “puritanism” and defended “the freedom to importune” as part of French “gallantry.” Traditional French feminism — and its fierce rejection of #MeToo as an American aberration — was a “trap” that led women to believe that they could be free without worrying about sexual violence, Ms. Devynck said.

“His image was so powerful that people kept saying it’s not possible, he’s such a seducer, she should have been flattered,” Ms. de Blasi, 33, recalled. “I kept reading, ‘French charm, gallantry and seduction,’ when it wasn’t about that at all.”

“Little jokes about not wearing a décolleté, makeup or a skirt,” she recalled.

The great seducer is “such a part of our collective imagination,” she said. “And the problem is that part of French society still believes in it, or at least believed in it.”

Now with Putin’s recognition of the separatist regimes, he has, perhaps, set the stage for a wider conflict; and the United States and its allies in NATO would have no choice but to respond with sanctions. But sanctions, such as those imposed after Russia seized Crimea, are unlikely to deter Putin. And really draconian sanctions, such as those used against Iran, could plunge Europe and the U.S. into a recession.

On the basis of this entirely unrealistic view of the world, the U.S. has stumbled into crises that it didn’t know it was creating.

The conflict with Russia over Ukraine would seem to have called for what Richard Nixon called “playing the long ball.” Nixon had played the long ball — defied prevailing opinion — by going to China

The United States might have stepped back from the years of provocations and resets to propose a “grand bargain” with Russia that would resolve or at least ease the conflict — one based, perhaps, on a neutral Ukraine or on the enforcement of the Minsk II agreement.

it seems to me that without such a bargain, we could be headed for another foreign policy disaster — one that will have repercussions in the United States and Western Europe as well as in Russia and Ukraine. Think war, skyrocketing energy prices, recession, refugees and a Russian-Chinese alliance against the United States and its allies.

it is not just that Europeans spend a few extra weeks on the beach. The typical working day in Britain, France and Germany is half an hour shorter than in America, according to the International Labour Organisation.

which is the better way of living—with more money or more free time? The reality is that it is difficult for people to choose

Those in America work according to American schedules; those in Europe conform to European norms.

the more fruitful question is why Americans put in longer hours

The answer leads to a curious new observation: that remote work is making America’s office drones a little more European, albeit with a puritanical twist.

A first guess suggests that culture might account for the variation in work hours. Maybe Europeans enjoy their leisure more. They are spoilt for choice about how to spend time off

As for Americans, surveys indicate that they view hard work as intrinsically worthwhile. “Rugged individualism” is, after all, what built the country.

the difficulty with chalking up the difference to culture is that until the early 1970s many Europeans worked more

American working hours are basically the same now as back then. The big change is that Europeans now toil less. Hours are down a whopping 30% in Germany over the past half-century. Something beyond culture—a slow-moving, ill-defined variable—is at play.

Edward Prescott, an American economist, came to a provocative conclusion, arguing that the key was taxation

Until the early 1970s tax levels were similar in America and Europe, and so were hours worked. By the early 1990s Europe’s taxes had become more burdensome and, in Prescott’s view, its employees less motivated

A substantial gap persists today: American tax revenue is 28% of GDP, compared with 40% or so in Europe.

A recent study by Jósef Sigurdsson of Stockholm University examined how Icelandic workers responded to a one-year income-tax holiday in 1987, when the country overhauled its tax system. Although people with more flexibility—especially younger ones in part-time jobs—did indeed put in more hours, the overall increase in work was modest relative to that implied by Prescott’s model.

Regulation seems to matter more.

European rules give workers power, from generous parental-leave policies to stricter laws on firing staff. Many European countries try to put caps on working tim

most research agrees that they have reduced work hours.

Another important relationship is that, as people get richer, they typically want to work less

A recent paper by the IMF shows a remarkably strong link between GDP per person and hours worked in Europe. People in richer countries, such as the Netherlands, generally work less than those in poorer countries, such as Bulgaria.

Americans are wealthier than most Europeans, so why do they still work more?

Perhaps leisure is a collective-action problem. Americans may want to ask their bosses for longer holidays but are worried about being seen as slackers

A paper in 2005 by Alberto Alesina of Harvard University and colleagues argued that Europe’s stronger unions had in effect solved this collective-action problem by fighting for paid vacations, which ended up enshrined in law.

Europe’s well-regulated leisure time may then beget more leisure because it is more socially acceptable, and the market responds by supplying more good ways not to work. It is a virtuous cycle of lovely cafés.

One fascinating new development is a discrepancy in the rise of remote work

In 2023 the Global Survey of Working Arrangements found that full-time employees in America work from home 1.4 days a week, while those in Europe do so for 0.8 days

a striking result: Europeans and Americans now spend almost exactly the same amount of time in the office, with 1,320 hours a year for the former and 1,304 for the latter.

In other words, the extra 15% of work done by Americans annually is now from the comfort of their own homes—or occasionally on the beach, perhaps even one in Europe. Americans do still work harder, but rather more enjoyably than in the past

In the 1960s fantasyland goes into overdrive. Psychedelics, academic scholarship and the New Age movement conspire to make reason and reality the realms of idiots and squares.

After the Kennedy assassinations, conspiracy theories become not just a fringe hobby but a “permanent feature of the American mental landscape.” U.F.O. sightings explode, and the stories become ever more elaborate

In the meantime, a kind of comfort with small fibs settles into the populace. When Andersen was young, he recalls, it was rare to see a woman over 50 whose hair was not gray or white. And apparently there were only eight plastic surgeons in all of Manhattan. But the market for hair color and plastic surgery explodes, as America starts writing its “national fiction of permanent youthfulness.”

the most persistent thread in “Fantasyland” is Christianity — the astounding number of Americans who believe in heaven and angels, which most of Europe gave up decades ago

Andersen reserves a starring role for the secular spiritualists. They were supposed to be a counterpoint to narrow-minded evangelicals, but Andersen says the New Agers committed an even greater sin than the faithful. What Anne Hutchinson started, Gestalt therapy finished off in the ’60s. Fritz Perls, a psychotherapist and Gestalt founder, simply put it: “I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine.” Or put more simply: You do you.

If there’s a flaw in this book, it’s repetitiveness. Andersen seems by nature a collector. He goes for wide rather than deep. So he doesn’t examine, for example, how we would separate the junk from the gems

What we Americans need, it would seem, is something more powerful. A story to end all stories, preached by someone with the fire of Anne Hutchinson. A collective delusion so seductive that it will have us all, in Locke-step, bowing down to reason and reality.

our real progenitors were the Puritans, who passed the weeks on the trans-Atlantic voyage preaching about the end times and who, when they arrived, vowed to hang any Quaker or Catholic who landed on their shores. They were zealots and also well-educated British gentlemen, which set the tone for what Andersen identifies as a distinctly American endeavor: propping up magical thinking with elaborate scientific proof.

In Andersen’s telling, you can easily trace the line from the self-appointed 17th-century prophet Anne Hutchinson to Kanye West: She was, he writes, uniquely American “because she was so confident in herself, in her intuitions and idiosyncratic, subjective understanding of reality,” a total stranger to self-doubt.

As he explains in what must have been an alarmingly self-confirming last chapter: Donald Trump is “stupendous Exhibit A” in the landscape of “Fantasyland,” a fitting leader for a nation that has, over the centuries, nurtured a “promiscuous devotion to the untrue.”