The heart of the matter is an Appendix listing 147 cases of mostly recent persecution in the US.īut there is a suggestion of an explanation here. More than explanations, Dershowitz presents case after case of individuals who really have been unjustly cancelled (and he includes himself). That model’s implicit answer is: ‘it was always like that’. Ultimately, the ‘nothing has changed’ model distracts us from the ‘why?’ question. Perhaps an historian might respond to Dershowitz’s heartfelt book by suggesting that both the major alternatives are true, in a modified sense. All these things manifestly take place, even in universities. We might look for the causes in other places, like the decline of the ideology of class war the frustration of the material ambitions of Western 1960s cohorts in the face of the globalised competition of the 2010s the spread of the ideology of universal human rights and the rise of the culture of victimhood that this has permitted the proliferation of social media and the ease with which the opinions of hate-filled nobodies can now be mobilised.ĭershowitz, who remembers McCarthyism, reminds us of the similarities, especially (for a lawyer) the denial of due process and free speechīut which? Dershowitz, who remembers McCarthyism, reminds us of the similarities, especially (for a lawyer) the denial of due process and free speech the erosion of the presumption of innocence the anonymity of the accusers and the threat to ‘constitutional rights’ (he adds Stalinism for good measure, though how this distant phenomenon feeds into US culture is not so clear). In this account, wokery is a very recent phenomenon with very recent causes. Since McCarthy, Soviet Communism has collapsed and US society has become significantly secularised. Cancel Culture: The Latest Attack on Free Speech and Due Process By Alan Dershowitz, Hot Books Indeed, an historian might go further back, and argue that McCarthyism itself was only the Communist-era version of a persecutory and intimidatory American culture that can be traced to its Calvinist origins in the New England colonies, a culture which had its Anglophone origins in England and which reached its persecutory extremes in Scotland and in Ulster.

Alan Dershowitz, an emeritus professor at the Harvard Law School, begins his latest book: ‘Cancel culture is the new McCarthyism of the “woke” generation.’ What he learned about McCarthyism then stands us in good stead now. Here are two rival explanations of what is going on around us.

Cancel Culture by Alan M. Dershowitz