The Trump Dance Can Teach Liberals Something About Censorship. Yes, Really.
A case-study in what happens when your own tactics get turned on you.
One of the biggest post-election Ls for liberals has been the embargo lifting on public support for Trump, particularly among celebrities and athletes.
It used to be career suicide to express anything but hysterical contempt for the Orange Man. God help you if you said something even tepidly positive. Now, NFL players wear MAGA hats on the field and do the “Trump Dance” in between downs.
You’ve seen the Trump Dance, right?
It’s the half-assed, geriatric shimmy Trump does at rallies to the tune of “YMCA.” It’s become cultural shorthand to show support for the President-elect, and it’s popping up all over the place, most notably in athletics. From football to soccer to the UFC, it’s the end zone dance of a newly energized American right.
Hey, that was our thing!
“Hypocrisy much?” liberals shout at their conservative peers.
Not long ago, conservatives were the ones decrying the politicization of sports by leftwing causes such as Black Lives Matter. Right-wingers booed when players took the knee during the National Anthem, following Colin Kaepernick’s lead. They complained that ESPN had become the sportsball wing of MSNBC. They chafed at the Black National Anthem and told LeBron James to “shut up and dribble.”
“We just want to watch the game,” conservatives said then. Now, they cheer for blatant displays of partisanship from players on “their” side.
For many liberals, the takeaway is simply that conservatives never had any principles to begin with. For conservatives, it’s a sort of national coming out party. Maybe they’re both right.
But perhaps there’s a more important lesson to be learned.
Whatever weapon you give yourself will eventually be used against you.
The Trump Dance cultural phenomenon is a great example of the old axiom about power’s fleeting nature.
For the better part of two decades, liberals completely dominated every corner of entertainment outside of Fox News, and seemed to believe this state of affairs would go on forever. They interpreted their cultural hegemony as a mandate to overturn old norms regarding when and where political agitation was appropriate. Late night comedy programs, morning shows, award ceremonies, and even commercials became fair game for partisan tut-tutting.
And then there was sports.
Americans traditionally had a handshake agreement that sporting arenas were neutral territory, safe from political sermonizing (save for boilerplate patriotism, military reverence, and all things 9/11). But the left decided this state of affairs was no longer acceptable. Everything was political, whether you wanted to acknowledge it or not. No escapism allowed. “The things we have to say are too important, so you’re just going to have to deal with it,” was the attitude.
The implicit assumption was that this would only apply to one side of the conversation.
Trump’s blowout election and the subsequent gloating by public figures shows that conservatism has more cultural power than previously thought. Whether that’s good or bad is a discussion for another time. The point is you should never assume the status quo will remain forever — especially when you’re thinking about demolishing norms and traditions meant to safeguard everyone.
You never know when you’ll lose the throne.
Democrats ought to remember this cultural vibe shift when advocating for censorship.
Political cheerleading at sporting events is one thing, but there’s a much more important battle going on within the left over the righteousness and necessity of censorship.
Politicians, news organizations, and academics of the left have ratcheted up calls for speech suppression in recent years, citing rises in things like “hate” and “misinformation.” Their targets include everything from social media posts to media personalities to TV shows. And it’s all done from a position of perceived dominance in these arenas.
Just listen to the way they talk.
“If you don’t police your platforms, we’re going to hold you accountable,” Kamala Harris said during her 2019 presidential run regarding content on social media (and this was before Elon bought Twitter). Her running mate, Tim Walz, said numerous times this year that the First Amendment doesn’t protect “hate” and “misinformation.” (It does.) Hillary Clinton said, “If [social media platforms] don’t moderate and monitor content, we lose total control.” And let’s not forget the Biden-Harris administration’s failed attempt to create an Orwellian Disinformation Governance Board within the Department of Homeland Security, helmed by a woman guilty of spreading disinformation herself.
This is the stuff of parody and satire, the kind of lunacy you can’t believe people fall for in fiction, but it’s happening in real life.
The rot is cultural, not just political.
Savvy readers will, of course, note that terms like “hate” and “misinformation” are entirely subjective and can be redefined by whoever is in “control.”
Actually, that’s a lie. You don’t have to be savvy to understand this concept. It’s pretty fucking basic. And while you can expect politicians to capitalize on shallow vagaries, you’d think our self-proclaimed intellectual betters in media, academia, and journalism would see the obvious pitfalls.
You’d be wrong.
It’s not just politicians calling for more power to regulate what the rest of us can say or consume. Outlets like The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and the New York Times, which profit from the free flow of ideas, have also implied a need for more restriction on speech. So too have countless academics and students at universities supposedly founded on the pursuit of truth — in fact, a recent study suggests the majority of college students now think professors with “offensive” opinions should be reported (even if those opinions are supported by data).
Are people just pretending not to see the danger in this or are we really that dumb?
America is one amendment away from institutionalized thought crime.
In the United States, we have the luxury of toying with censorship because our Constitution mostly prohibits the police from getting involved. Mostly.
Thanks to the First Amendment, our would-be censors have to resort to extrajudicial tactics to shut people up. They do things like pressure media companies into removing undesirable content and users, or bully advertisers into boycotts of sites like X, where unacceptable speech is said to thrive. Other times, they try peer-pressure campaigns and reputation destruction against influential voices like “horse paste eating” Joe Rogan.
But across the pond, the UK offers a much more troubling example of where calls for censorship inevitably lead.
Police in Britain will show up at your door for tweets they don't like, and normal, working class people are currently in prison for lengthier stays than pedophiles and rapists for posts on the internet. This at a time when Britain is actually releasing convicted criminals because the prisons are too crowded. There’s also the “non-crime hate incident” which allows police to create official records of people who have not committed any crime but have reportedly expressed “ill-will,” “ill-feeling,” or “dislike” towards another.
It's amazing the society that produced Orwell and Milton and Rawls could fail to see the short-sightedness of all this.
It’s only a matter of time before the censor becomes the censored.
Aside from debate over the morality of censorship, there’s an insurmountable tactical problem.
The parameters of acceptable speech are vague and will always need to be defined and policed by somebody. The pro-censorship position depends entirely on the belief that you and your allies will be the ones in charge, always and forever. It assumes your opponents will never take the reins of power and use the tools of suppression against you. It’s a bad assumption, as any glance at a history book will tell you. That’s why a neutral norm that protects free expression for all is much better and worth defending.
Which leads us back to the Trump Dance.
Liberals in America got rid of a norm that kept sports relatively neutral. Now, Trump supporters are using the Trump Dance to exploit the vacuum where that norm once existed, and it’s been very effective at amplifying conservatives’ cultural cachet. Why wouldn’t we expect a similar sort of turnabout to happen in the realm of censorship too?
In fact, you can already see how something like that might play out.
When conservatives assume power, will it become “misinformation” to say trans women are women, as Rep. Nancy Mace would have it? Will it be “hate” to tweet about abortion rights? Will “fact checkers” pressure Elon Musk to ban left-leaning X users who questioned voter turnout numbers during this election?
I sure hope not. But the door has been left wide open.
As a satire writer who’s tired of losing great premises to reality, I beg everyone not to walk through it.