Cancel culture can be a very, very real evil. It has gotten adults fired for Halloween costumes, cost people charity partnerships over old tweets, and bullied universities into withdrawing admissions offers from teenagers over years-old videos.
But punishing a vile politician by a party pulling a politician’s committee assignments, or Congress impeaching a president for committing high crimes or misdemeanors, are not evils or even examples of cancel culture. Instead, they can be necessary correctives.
More than a week into the Biden administration, Republicans’ biggest problem isn’t the president now in the Oval Office. It’s his predecessor. Or, rather, it’s a threefold problem, including former President Donald Trump, the senator who enabled his incitement of the Capitol storming, and the QAnon crazy in the House who claims to have his backing still.
The senator is Missouri’s Josh Hawley. The QAnon aficionado is Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene. They deserve rebukes, not as acts of censorship or “canceling,” but for very real transgressions.
Yet, that hasn’t stopped some prominent people from saying that efforts to rein in those three problems might amount to unacceptable cancel culture.
Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, for example, doesn’t understand the difference. While most Republicans have defended Trump from conviction in his second impeachment trial on the procedural grounds that doing so would be unconstitutional, Gaetz went further. Even though Gaetz suggested impeaching Barack Obama after his presidency, he now has claimed that doing so to Trump could constitute cancel culture.
Impeachment is the zenith of cancel culture.
— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) January 25, 2021
Hawley, who faces friendly fire for saluting the mob that stormed the Capitol before voting to overturn the election results, has relied on the cancel culture defense for himself. In a New York Post op-ed, the Missouri senator claimed that calls for his resignation and corporations diverting their donations to him as a result of him trying to destroy our democratic process are tantamount to the social credit scores issued by the Chinese Communist Party or social media censorship.
And now, even mainstream Republicans are using the “cancel culture” defense for the outlandish Greene. House Democrats are asking the GOP to strip Greene, a freshman member of Congress, from her committee assignments after further embarrassing revelations. She has pushed anti-Semitic tropes and has promulgated 9/11 trutherism and the lie that the Parkland, Florida, high school shooting was a false flag operation. Most Republicans have tried to ignore the Georgian, but when asked on CNN about Greene’s calls to execute Nancy Pelosi, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, while calling her remarks “unacceptable,” also said, “I’m not for this cancel culture.”
To be clear, it’s not cancel culture to impeach a president for inviting a maskless mob to Washington, D.C., during a pandemic, telling them he would lead them to the Capitol to “stop the steal” while Congress was finalizing Joe Biden’s victory, and then refusing to deploy the National Guard while said mob storms the Capitol in the hopes of executing former Vice President Mike Pence. It’s not cancel culture to call for a senator to resign after he tried to overturn an election and cheered on the mob that soon later tried to kill his colleagues. And it isn’t cancel culture for Pelosi to want to evict from the Education and Labor Committee a congresswoman who harassed school shooting survivors, especially after discovering that the congresswoman wrote that Pelosi should be executed for treason.
These aren’t cancellations; they are simply consequences.
Consider, there is an obvious difference between expelling a student for poor academic performance or threatening violence against another student versus expelling the student for something that has nothing to do with school, such as idiotic old tweets or a viral video. Cancel culture means punishing someone for wrongspeak or wrongthink or associating with someone the wokesters have deemed a Bad Person.
But here, the issue isn’t the conservative political preferences of Trump, Hawley, or Greene. No, they all just failed spectacularly at their jobs. Facing workplace consequences for workplace failures isn’t cancel culture. When misbehaving politicians are forced to face such consequences, it just means that the elected officials who are supposed to serve us must indeed still answer to us.
