Higher education is in crisis. A week rarely passes without an incident on a college campus in which cancel culture manages to shut down a speaker or an event. And while this sad state of affairs on campuses is now too familiar, self-censorship has moved well beyond leafy quads, lecture halls, and student unions and into the mainstream.
Cancel culture is no longer reserved for celebrities and public officials; free speech is now under threat for most people. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s recently-created National Speech Index disturbingly shows that people are actually canceling themselves at levels higher than students, and this puts our democracy in real danger.
Engaging in debate with peers and freely criticizing elected officials is a bedrock principle on which this country was built. However, at the start of 2024, the National Speech Index shows that 69% believe that the country is heading in the wrong direction “when it comes to whether people are able to freely express their views.”
The public, when seeing this number, should be outraged. Yet, free speech isn’t a priority for most.
When asked about how secure the right to freedom of speech is in America, roughly 76% of respondents thought their First Amendment right was “not at all secure” or “somewhat secure.” Only 25% believe their free speech rights are “very” or “completely secure.”
The public’s perpetual state of insecurity is impacting life at work. Almost 40% of respondents are worried about losing their jobs for saying something offensive. While many employees do not have explicit free speech rights in their workplaces, people also know that expression outside their jobs, particularly on social media, has the potential to derail their careers.
More broadly, 25% now report that they fairly often (i.e., a couple of times a week) or very often (i.e., nearly every day) watch what they say and censor their comments, questions, or words in their interactions. It is no secret that people are aware of cancel culture and know that views in the wrong space or community can destroy lives.
This figure is actually worse nationwide than on college campuses. When undergraduates were asked in 2023 how often they felt they could not express their opinion on a subject because of how students, a professor, or the administration would respond, 20% of students reported that they self-censor either very or fairly often.
And yet the epidemic of self-censorship is not a priority for most people because we are amid a loneliness epoch and our networks are already so narrow and homogenous. So many have turned inward since the pandemic, and we have been living in self-imposed, ideologically-segregated echo chambers.
We do not know others, we do not move around as much as we used to, and we are not meeting a wide variety of people from whom we can learn to navigate and appreciate differences. In many cases, we have avoided or not interacted with others enough to comprehend, empathize, or process alternative points of view, ideas, and lifestyles. The social networks of so many people now have little disagreement and self-censorship is minimal, as there is no disagreement and little real difference.
Compounding these social trends is the fact that an increasing amount of human connection is mediated through digital spaces. Social media, in particular, is fracturing society into echo chambers. Rather than connecting in the real world, we have become increasingly isolated and distant from others who could be diverse; we do not know our neighbors, we do not eat meals together, and we do not attend religious services and community meetings together.
We are no longer a nation of joiners and we are not particularly embedded within our physical communities. The more we inhabit our digital communities, the more we risk not seeing what is going on around us. And when we do finally engage, real numbers of people no longer speak freely.
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These sobering numbers should be a wake-up call as our politics become even more polarized and likely to threaten healthy discourse leading up to November’s election. America has gone through severe social changes that have profoundly affected our politics and discourse for the worse. We are alienated from our communities and are socially fractured such that difference is rejected.
Cancel culture is threatening one of America’s greatest traditions and virtues, and we must act to stop this. There is still time to reject censorship and promote dialogue and debate, which is what made America truly great at its very beginning.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.