Has cancel culture run amok? What counts as canceling? Who deserves to be canceled? Is there such a thing as “cancel culture” at all, or is this just a new derisive term for people facing consequences after being exposed as wrongdoers? These questions were hotly debated all week among the chattering class. The answers were internally incongruous.
On one side of the argument are people who think we should rein in cancel culture itself: fewer calls for firings, fewer past behaviors deemed offensive by ever-changing contemporary standards, less social pressure to hush up your unorthodox opinions.
On the other side are people who say we should stop using “cancel culture,” the words. For instance, Vox’s Matt Yglesias, who regularly defends “political correctness” as a positive, asked last week, “What is ‘cancel culture’?” — seemingly trying to prove that if random internet repliers don’t precisely agree on a definition, it must not refer to anything real.
Then, there are those who say, now that you mention it, “cancel culture” is good and, if anything, lacks sufficient punitive power. But only sometimes! Carlos Maza, also of Vox, tweeted, “I’m sincerely a huge fan of ‘cancel culture’ and dragging bad people in public, but … dear god Lauren Duca is not the enemy….” Translation: Cancel power for me but not for thee.
Meanwhile, a Saturday Night Live hire was kiboshed over some dredged up old racist jokes. A former judge who’d been fired for giving too lenient a sentence in a hugely public rape case was fired from his irrelevant new job as a tennis instructor. The producers of The Simpsons announced that they might uncancel the character Apu, who’d previously been canceled by a documentary claiming he was racist. Vox attacked Andrew Yang, the first major U.S. presidential candidate of East Asian descent, for joshing good-naturedly about ethnic stereotypes — er, “reinforcing toxic tropes.” And so on.
What exactly counts as “canceling” is amorphous. Any given “cancellation” might be a firing or just the placing of a public mark over someone’s moral permanent record, a scarlet letter P for “problematic.” But the cancel-ee is merely collateral damage. The real target is everyone watching, noticing they risk similar reprisals if they dare step out of the lines woke people continuously draw and redraw. The goal is to raise the cost of doing business for anyone who doesn’t conform.
“Cancel culture” may well be a sloppy phrase that means different things when different people use it. But, even without an exact definition, the thing “cancel culture” refers to obviously exists. The term is just the latest en-vogue way to refer to political correctness, wokeness, social justice, “the successor ideology” (as Wesley Yang sometimes calls it), or what have you. It means using personal attacks against dissenters from a moralizing, identity-obsessed, ever-updating orthodoxy. It means offering no forbearance for human failures. And it means using political tribalism to privately justify vicious, cynical power grabs.
So, should we cancel “cancel culture”? Sure, it’s imprecise, and terminological imprecision is a problem. But not having any acceptable term for discussing a concept is a much worse problem.
The people arguing most vociferously against saying “cancel culture” sure do seem suspiciously like they want no future term to replace it at all, rather than a more precise coinage. But there will keep being new terms for this, because it exists. Dissenters will always insist on making up their own terms to describe reality, even if official language doesn’t offer any.
