Goodbye, cancel culture; Welcome to the culture of surrender in the era of Trump

Conservatives make a lot of “cancel culture” efforts, which is the idea that liberals are trampling on free speech by calling people out on political incorrectness.

This is partly true: some liberal fashions are ridiculous. Like all fads, they will fade over time. However, as a US News and World Report contributor recently pointed out, liberals cannot withstand the repeal now taking place on the far right.

The GOP platform last year called for the loss of federal funding for any school that teaches “critical race theory” or “inappropriate” sex education. The contributor noted that 23 states have rolled back DEI initiatives, 26 states have barred transgender youth from accessing certain forms of care, 153 school districts in 33 states have banned books, and 36 states have eliminated education on racism, bias, and related topics.

In Florida and Texas, Republican governments. Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott are leading a multi-state effort to penalize companies that adopt so-called environmental, social and governance policies, focusing on corporate responsibilities to the environment, society and good governance. The fight against this “woke” policy bears the hallmarks of the fossil fuel and firearms industries, which some investors and investment advisors choose to avoid.

Cancel culture is old news. A new political phenomenon has emerged. He called it a “culture of surrender” — the parade of corporations, financiers, billionaires and politicians who once stood on principle but now bend down to kiss the ring of the next president.

An example is Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post. The editorial departments of many newspapers are separate from their news operations and endorse political candidates. The Washington Post was one of them. But Bezos halted the Washington Post’s editorial endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of the November election. More than 300,000 readers canceled their subscriptions in response.

After Donald Trump’s victory, Bezos’ Amazon company pledged to contribute $1 million to his inauguration celebration. Observers speculated that Bezos’ change of direction was to curry favor with Trump because another Bezos company, Blue Origin, has a multibillion-dollar contract with NASA.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta – which owns four popular social media platforms including Instagram and Facebook – also pledged $1 million. Zuckerberg had banned Trump from Facebook after the January 6 Capitol riot. Trump had claimed that Zuckerberg interfered in the elections and threatened to throw him in prison.

But since the election, Zuckerberg had dinner with the president-elect in Mar-a-Largo and announced that Facebook would stop fact-checking user posts. Instead, it will allow users to add their own responses to questionable posts.

Zuckerberg reportedly called Trump a “badass” — a compliment in the world of hyper-masculinity — because of the former president’s pugnacious response to his shooting during the campaign. The Wall Street Journal reported that in November, “Zuckerberg stood with his hands over his heart as the Mar-Largo club played the national anthem,” which the defendants sang on January 6.

In mid-December, Time magazine named Trump “Person of the Year” for the second time. However, Time magazine acknowledged that it fact-checked its interview with Trump, something it had never done before with other honorees in the honor’s long history. There were problems with 15 of Trump’s statements. However, the magazine’s owner, Marc Benioff, posted on social media that Trump’s election “represents a time of great promise for our nation.”

Since the election, Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs have withdrawn from the Net-Zero banking alliance, the financial alliance whose members have committed to aligning their loans and investments with global decarbonization efforts. ESG News described their departure as a result of “growing tensions between climate goals and political pressure” from Republicans. Trump calls climate change a “hoax” and says he will once again withdraw America from the Paris Climate Agreement.

In civil society, a poll conducted just before the election showed that 82% of white evangelical Protestants, 61% of white Catholics, and 58% of white non-evangelical Protestants intend to vote for Trump. They have surrendered to Trump, even though many of his behaviors contradict Christian teachings.

In December, Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times reported that Apple’s CEO, Google’s co-founder and other tech leaders also visited Trump. “In the first term, everyone was fighting me,” Trump said. “This term, everyone wants to be my friend.”

We can expect a culture of surrender to dominate Congress now that Republicans control both chambers. It happened last session but it will be worse under the GOP triumvirate.

In classic style, Trump has now said he would consider using military force to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal to the United States. He’s also talked about Canada becoming a US state, and we shouldn’t be surprised if he decides that the world has too many Americas and so plans to incorporate the North. The center and the south in one place.

This is the magician’s trick of distracting the audience from what he is actually doing. He is preparing to finance his unfunded campaign promises by taking money from clean energy and social programs, implementing other elements of Project 2025, and replacing veteran civil servants with lackeys, sycophants and amateurs. The GOP will cite its incompetence as evidence of Ronald Reagan’s dictum that government is the problem, not the solution.

After her review of the culture of surrender, Goldberg concludes that “different people have different reasons for standing in line. Some may simply lack the will to fight or feel, irrationally, that it is futile. Our technology masters, no matter how liberal they once may have seemed, They seem to welcome the new order… There are CEOs who got there by riding the zeitgeist and can easily go from spouting platitudes about racial equality to wearing a red MAGA hat.

“But all these elite decisions to bow to Trump make it seem like the air is being knocked out of the old liberal order,” she wrote. “It will be replaced by something more cruel and Nietzschean.”

It has been fascinating to watch Trump gain power over the past 10 years. Each bent knee lifts him up, allowing him to feel more powerful and less restricted. This wouldn’t be so annoying if Trump were a man of principle, but he is not. It was not possible for such a great nation to sink to this extent.

Now, capitulation threatens our constitutional order, but it also threatens something deeper: the social compact in which facts, truth, accountability, and justice matter. Surrender is cowardice. It will take thorns to save the soul of the republic.

william s. BakerHe is co-editor and contributor to Democracy Unconstrained: How to Rebuild Government for the People, and a contributor to Democracy in a Hotter Time, which Nature named one of the five best science books of 2023. He previously served as a senior official in Wisconsin Department of Justice. He currently serves as the Executive Director of the President’s Climate Action Project.