It’s been 10 years since Alec Baldwin wrote his famous, “Good-bye, Public Life” confessional in the February 2014 edition of New York Magazine. As bad as it’s gone for Baldwin since then, it’s been worse for the country — and looking back at the piece after a decade sheds some insight on what happened.
You may remember some of Baldwin’s earlier scandals, which by today’s standards seem quaint. In 2013, as national deference to the LGBT movement was building towards critical mass, Baldwin came under fire for calling a reporter a “toxic little queen,” accusing the man of targeting his wife with false accusations that she was tweeting during James Gandolfini’s funeral. Gay groups demanded accountability for what Anderson Cooper called the use of a “gay slur.” But the ax finally came down later that year, when he was filmed chasing down a paparazzi, reportedly calling the man a “cocksucking fag,” although Baldwin denied the allegation.
In the wake of the controversies, he made the usual attempts at atonement. He issued a public apology, penned an open letter to the activist group GLAAD, and hit all the right buzzwords about listening and learning; it didn’t save him. His once ubiquitous Capital One ad campaigns came to an abrupt end and MSNBC pulled the plug on his talk show just as it was getting off the ground. The LGBT mafia had taken one of its first scalps.
tomorrow marks the tenth anniversary of Alec Baldwin retiring from public life, which he announced in a long personal essay in New York mag. i know we all miss him so much!!! pic.twitter.com/t7gFKL8zBe
— Tyler Coates (@tylercoates) February 23, 2024
Clearly fed up with the emerging phenomenon of cancellation, Baldwin penned his farewell to public life in New York Magazine a few months later. The letter is partly a consolidated apology, but mostly it is a defensive attempt to set the record straight and skewer the social forces that led to his downfall. On its face, it’s amazing that such a “respectable” and “sophisticated” liberal outlet gave him a platform to defend himself. That could never happen today, as a corporate media terrified of guilt-by-association would uniformly treat him as an outcast. As a critic of left-wing tactics, he’d be relegated by default to the right-wing.
But as a well-established liberal, it’s more interesting to look at what Baldwin himself found acceptable to say given the unique cultural strictures of the moment. Today, much of it would be enough to get him cancelled in its own right. (RELATED: REPORT: Alec Baldwin Files First Official Response After Involuntary Manslaughter Charge)
Baldwin rejects Cooper’s moral high ground, ripping him as the “self-appointed Jack Valenti of gay media culture.” He discusses sexual orientation sympathetically as a social phenomenon, an outgrowth of “macho fathers” and “religious mothers.” He makes the “I have gay friends” argument to explain why he can’t be homophobic. He describes a meeting with the head of a gay activist group, an “F-to-M tranny,” who asked him “Are you here to get dry-cleaned?” Baldwin took this to mean “I could do some mea culpa, write them a six-figure check, go to a dinner, sob at the table, give a heartfelt speech, beg for forgiveness,” and rejects the entire shallow performance. Instead, he unashamedly (or perhaps shamelessly) declares he’s not going to “beg for forgiveness for something I didn’t do.”
“I’m not a homophobic person at all,” he wants the world to know, and resents being seen as such.
He goes on to rip the corporate media for their role in creating this “toxic” environment. “The TV networks [have changed for the worse]. New York has changed. Even the U.S., which is so preposterously judgmental now. The heart, the arteries of the country are now clogged with hate,” he writes, first skewing right-wing media. But “liberals have taken the bait” as well and “it’s just as corrosive.”
“MSNBC, in its own way, is as full of shit, as redundant and as superfluous, as Fox,” he concludes.
Of course, all of this would be unspeakable for a self-respecting liberal today. Just saying the word “tranny” would be enough to get him canned, let alone all the other comments that would now be deemed “harmful stereotypes.” Worst of all, he commits the grave sin of not bestowing the LGBT movement with the moral genuflection it demands. Perhaps they are not victims; perhaps I have nothing to atone for, Baldwin openly ponders. These questions border on blasphemy today when the only appropriate response is to confess your sins to your accusers. To deny the “lived experience” of the “victim” is to inflict “harm” all over again.
On the media question, he does the unthinkable, drawing a moral comparison between the so-called respectable press and misinformation peddlers on the right. There is no equivalence between truth and lies, fact and fiction, good and evil, the media assiduously assures us today. To deny this is a sure sign of unsophistication at best, and at worse, a demonstration of malicious intent toward “our democracy.”
So in a way, cancel culture is much worse today. These are all sanctimonious, self-interested compulsions of the last several years; Americans only recently began to think in this contorted way. Despite his cancellation, Baldwin was still able to air his grievances in a fairly free-thinking manner in one of the nation’s preeminent culture magazines.
On the other hand, we’ve seen a marked improvement. While readers of New York Magazine may have gotten a lot more uptight, the rest of America has learned to tune all of this out. Accusations of homophobia, along with other identity-based transgressions, have lost much of their shock value, and thus their ability to mobilize public opinion. They’ve been revealed to be exactly what Baldwin instinctively saw them to be a decade ago — crude, political cudgels.
Interestingly, much of the original calls for accountability — i.e. cancellation — came from the right. An executive with the conservative Media Research Center ripped Baldwin for his “homophobic comments” in a story for Fox News. GOProud, a gay Republican group, and Rightwingnews.com both mounted pressure campaigns for Capital One to end its partnership with him. The duo got face-value coverage from Breitbart. (RELATED: ‘Shut Your F*cking Mouth’: Anti-Israel Protesters Unleash On Alec Baldwin)
Of course, this was partly an opportunistic attempt to take down Baldwin, long an outspoken liberal, for hypocrisy. But the charges were made on leftist premises, assuming so-called homophobia to be a grave sin worthy of exile. For a right-wing outlet to traffic in leftist identity politics today would be inherently disqualifying. People have learned to ignore these types of opportunistic attacks now that they have been used to the point of exhaustion. If anything, the right today would rally to Baldwin’s defense, particularly after he drew hysterical media fire.
So we now find ourselves in this strange twilight zone of the culture war where things are simultaneously both better and worse. We are less free to speak our minds, but face less repercussions when we do. Given Baldwin’s fall from grace in recent years, he surely would have been better off if he maintained his retreat from public life. But for the rest of us, there’s reason for encouragement. The arc of cancel culture is long, but it appears we have made it through the worst already.