The other day I watched a terrific documentary on the work of Iain McGilchrist and his theories about culture and the divided brain (it’s called The Divided Brain, and you can rent it on Vimeo — I strongly recommend it). In it, there’s a line from Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, who says that you cannot legislate culture. His point was that when a culture begins to fall apart, you can’t pass laws that restore it. If memory serves, the context of his point was that laws depend on culture for their authority and effectiveness.

This is why we are in a lot of trouble today. The culture that undergirded classical liberalism has deteriorated, possibly past the point of no return. Our media constantly gripe about how this is what Donald Trump did to us, but they downplay or ignore entirely the fact that the Left — both activists and institutional leaders — are leading the charge. Perhaps because they are so immersed in the world of the Left that they don’t see it. They have become soft totalitarians.

Did you hear that AirbnB has banned Michelle Malkin and her husband from using its services because Malkin attended and spoke at the American Renaissance conference, which Airbnb, following the standards of the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center, considers to be a hate group? She wrote about it here. Excerpt:

Airbnb’s ideological witch hunts have claimed an unknown number of victims since 2016 as part of a woke company initiative to root out “bias” and expel anyone deemed an “extremist” with a “dangerous organization affiliation.” Press coverage of previous purges strongly suggests that the aforementioned character assassins of the Southern Poverty Law Center are involved through use of their far left, anti-white, anti-right “Hatewatch” list. Ever since I wrote my first book, “Invasion,” in 2002, the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League goons have sought to stifle my voice.

But this latest salvo crosses the line. It’s not enough that I — a “woman of color” (the left’s own descriptive label, not mine) and mother of two multiracial children — was pronounced guilty of “hate” crimes and “promotion” of “white supremacist” ideas for delivering a speech whose full content Airbnb didn’t even bother to obtain from me. The Airbnb bullies also banned my equally nonviolent, nonhateful husband — who did not attend the conference and who is not a public figure or activist.

Welcome to Guilt By Secondary Association.

“As we can see that your Airbnb travels are typically reserved via your husband’s account,” Airbnb’s “Trust team” member “Cedar” told both my husband and me, “we will also proceed in removing his account.” Neither of us had ever had a negative review, complaint, or policy violation of any kind. Are my kids next? Are yours?

This is a jaw-dropping thing, and it cannot be swept under the rug. I haven’t read Michelle Malkin in years, and I wouldn’t speak at or attend AmRen because I have strong philosophical differences with that group. But that is beside the point! Here we have a citizen being denied the use of a service not because she engaged in criminal behavior, but because she associated with people the service provider hates. And not only that, but the service provider has banned her husband! This is truly outrageous, and extremely illiberal.

Where does it stop? Because you know good and well this won’t be the end of it. Are we going to have woke hotels banning Republicans? Restaurants refusing to serve Southern Baptists? (Or, on the other side, hotels refusing to host people who attended Black Lives Matter events, and restaurants refusing to serve Unitarians?) Will left-wing activists start boycotting businesses unless they agree to a written policy refusing to serve conservatives? Again, get this straight: this has nothing to do with whether or not one likes Malkin or AmRen, or approves of their message. This is about living in a diverse, pluralistic country where we have to tolerate people with whom we strongly disagree, as part of what it means to live in a liberal democracy. But Airbnb, in its progressive ardor, is demolishing classical liberalism, which is what makes it possible for us to live together in peace.

You may say: Airbnb is just exercising its right to run its business the way it chooses. And you are probably right. Correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that if it doesn’t discriminate on the basis of a protected class, they can do what they want. But should they? If I’m running a coffee shop, and someone whose politics I hate comes in, I feel that I have a moral obligation to serve them, and treat them no worse than I would treat anybody else. That approach is what makes it possible for us to live together peaceably. The Left makes it clearer, day by day, that it has abandoned liberalism in favor of a moralistic, censorious, soft-totalitarian progressivism. They want a country in which Christian bakers are compelled by law to provide wedding cakes for gay couples, but the relatives — the relatives! — of conservative controversialists are denied the right to sleep in a rental apartment.

Make no mistake: what they’ve done to the Malkins is a rudimentary move to a social credit system, where access to goods and services depends on your politics. Do you really want to live in a country in which people with Biden stickers on the back of their cars are told that they are not welcome to shop at a small-town Alabama supermarket? That’s what the Left is bringing about. In my hometown, the beloved coffee shop is owned by a kind, caring liberal, and patronized by kind, caring conservatives, and all kinds of people. That’s the world I want to live in, not a world in which public and semi-private spaces are increasingly purified of Wrong Thinkers.

When Republicans gain control of Congress again, and get a Republican back in the White House, can they legislate against this? Perhaps. But this is where Rowan Williams’s comment comes in: the law is only of limited use when the culture has shifted. I haven’t thought about it closely, and perhaps I would change my mind, but I think we probably should have laws limiting the ability of businesses to discriminate on the basis of hating a customer’s politics or religion. These laws weren’t necessary when we lived in a country in which merchants did not wish only to do business with customers it considered to be morally pure, but the Left’s cultural revolution is changing things profoundly. If defending the principle of being free to operate one’s business as one sees fit (within civil rights laws) requires conservatives accepting without protest being excluded from buying goods and purchasing services that left-wing business owners wish to deny them, that is not going to work. Conservatives will not accept being made into dhimmis in their own country by arrogant leftists in power. What I don’t know, though, is whether to defend ourselves against people like them, we have to become like them. That is to say, is there any liberalism left to defend?

This commenter correctly sees the threat in this absurd attack on Joe Rogan:

The success of this organized assault on Joe Rogan goes to show that the right to free speech is meaningless in a society that no longer values free expression, or worse, is terrified by it.

— Lafayette Lee (@Partisan_O) February 5, 2022

It’s the same principle at stake as the Malkin affair: we have here left-wing artists who have suddenly decided that they cannot share a platform with a talk show host who interviews people they dislike. Check this out:

Full text of Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s note to staff: pic.twitter.com/3FHlmzV3UW

— Peter Kafka (@pkafka) February 7, 2022

If you read the whole thread, you’ll see that Ek talks of “user safety” — as if hearing words endangered people — and promised to throw $100 million behind producing content for minorities. So basically, a good old Jesse Jackson-style shakedown. In the future, companies like Spotify will be loath to hire figures who stand to get into the crosshairs of leftist agitators. Which is precisely the point.

Again, if we do not have a culture that supports free speech, it’s going to be very hard to figure out how to legislate our way through this. The haughty illiberalism of woke capitalists like Airbnb, and the craven unwillingness of corporations to tell the progressive pirates that they won’t bend to extortion, is going to force the hand of Republican legislators. What the Left is doing, by creating a de facto social credit system based on politics, is intolerable. They are making our country unlivable, all in the name of purity. They don’t actually give a rat’s ass about Joe Rogan, or Michelle Malkin. They simply want to crush opposition. It starts with Rogan and Malkin, but it ends with you and me and our children.

UPDATE: In the comments section, Michelle Malkin posted a link to her AmRen speech. I’m posting the clip here, not because I necessarily agree with it (I haven’t yet watched it), but because it’s important to know what we are talking about: