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Perhaps triggered by my own previous article, I have come to think of movement politics as a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. The “moves” are Justice, Freedom, and Tyranny. The rules are simple: Justice suppresses Freedom, Tyranny hijacks Justice, and Freedom overthrows Tyranny.
Marxists movements exhibit the flow of the game. A revolution is mounted against injustice. In the process, the “bourgeois” or “negative” freedoms like free speech are supplanted by “positive” freedoms — freedom from oppression, freedom from hunger, etc. But somehow, the movement always gets hijacked by people who know that in the absence of negative freedom, there is no limit to the power flowing from the muzzles of their guns. The Bolsheviks silence the Mensheviks, and the economic class structure is replaced by political class structure.
Because movements are led by the self-righteous, they tend to brook no debate, first from outside but eventually from inside. The defense of cancel culture is that the relevant questions are settled, the truth is known, and dissent is just evidence of evil. But the cancel-culture mindset is not selective: any view held by the leader is ipso facto true, so dissent from inside the movement is also unworthy of airing. In the end, dissent must be extinguished, because it serves no useful purpose when nothing is…