Conservatives make a big deal out of “cancel culture,” the idea that liberals step on free speech by calling out people for political incorrectness.
It’s partly true: Some liberal fashions are ludicrous. Like all fads, they will fade in time. However, as a contributor to U.S. News and World Report pointed out recently, liberals can’t hold a candle to the cancellation happening now on the far right.
The Republican Party platform last year advocated the loss of federal funding for any school that teaches “critical race theory” or “inappropriate” sex education. The contributor noted that 23 states had rolled back DEI initiatives, 26 banned transgender youth from access to certain forms of care, 153 school districts in 33 states banned books, and 36 states canceled education about racism, bias and related topics.
In Florida and Texas, Republican Govs. Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott are leading a multi-state effort to punish companies that embrace so-called ESG policies, emphasizing corporate responsibilities to the environment, society and good governance. The war against this “woke” policy bears the fingerprints of the fossil fuel and gun industries, which some investors and investment advisers choose to avoid.
Cancel culture is old news. A new political phenomenon has appeared. Call it “capitulation culture” — the parade of companies, financiers, billionaires and politicians who once stood on principle but now bend to kiss the incoming president’s ring.
Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, is an example. The editorial departments of many newspapers are separate from their news operations and endorse political candidates. The Washington Post was one. But Bezos pulled the plug on the Post’s editorial endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris before November’s election. More than 300,000 readers canceled their subscriptions in response.
After Donald Trump won, Bezos-owned Amazon pledged to contribute $1 million to his inauguration celebration. Observers speculated that Bezos’s 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 Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Trump had claimed that Zuckerberg interfered with the election and threatened to throw him in prison.
But since the election, Zuckerberg has dined with the president-elect at Mar-a-Largo and announced that Facebook will stop fact-checking user posts. Instead, he’ll allow users to add their own responses to questionable posts.
Zuckerberg also reportedly called Trump a “badass” — a compliment in the hyper-manhood world — for the former president’s feisty reaction to getting shot during his campaign. And the Wall Street Journal reported that in November, “Zuckerberg stood, hand on heart as the (Mar-a-Largo) club played a rendition of the national anthem” sung by Jan. 6 defendants.
In mid-December, Time magazine named Trump “Person of the Year” for the second time. However, Time acknowledged that it fact-checked its interview with Trump — something it had never done with other honorees over the long history of the honor. It found problems with 15 of Trump’s statements. Nevertheless, the magazine’s owner, Marc Benioff, posted on social media that Trump’s election “marks a time of great promise for our nation.”
Since the election, Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs have quit the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, the financial coalition whose members were committed to aligning their loans and investments with global decarbonization efforts. ESG News called their departures the result of “growing tensions between climate goals and political pressures” from Republicans. Trump calls climate change a “hoax” and says he will withdraw America again from the Paris climate agreement.
In civil society, a poll just before the election found that 82 percent of White evangelical protestants, 61 percent of white Catholics and 58 percent of White non-evangelical Protestants intended to vote for Trump. They have capitulated to Trump, even though many of his behaviors contradict Christian teachings.
In December, Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times reported that the CEO of Apple, a co-founder of Google and other tech leaders had also visited Trump. “In the first term, everyone was fighting me,” Trump said. “In this term, everyone wants to be my friend.”
We can expect capitulation culture to dominate Congress now that Republicans control both houses. It happened in the last session but will be worse under the GOP’s trifecta.
In classic style, Trump has now said he’d consider using military force to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal to the U.S. He also talks about Canada becoming a U.S. state We should not be surprised if he decides the world has too many Americas, and so plans to combine North, Central and South into one.
This is the magician’s trick of distracting the audience’s attention from what he’s really doing. He is preparing to finance 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 their incompetence as proof of Ronald Reagan’s dictum that the government is the problem, not the solution.
After her review of capitulation culture, Goldberg concludes, “Different people have different reasons for falling in line. Some may simply lack the stomach for a fight or feel, not unreasonably, that it’s futile. Our tech overlords, however liberal they once appeared, seem to welcome the new order. … There are CEOs who got where they are by riding the zeitgeist; they can pivot easily from mouthing platitudes about racial equity to slapping on a red MAGA hat.”
“But all these elite decisions to bow to Trump make it feel like the air is going out of the old liberal order,” she wrote. “In its place will be something more ruthless and Nietzschean.”
It has been remarkable to watch Trump gain power these past 10 years. Every bent knee elevates him, allowing him to feel more powerful and less constrained. This would not be so disturbing if Trump were a principled man, but he is not. It did not seem possible that such a great nation could sink so low.
Now, capitulation threatens our constitutional order, but also something deeper: the social compact in which facts, truth, accountability and fairness matter. Capitulation is cowardice. It will take spines to save the republic’s soul.
William S. Becker is co-editor of and a contributor to “Democracy Unchained: How to Rebuild Government for the People,” and contributor to Democracy in a Hotter Time, named by the journal Nature as one of 2023’s five best science books. He previously served as a senior official in the Wisconsin Department of Justice. He is currently executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.
