In Defense of Cancel Culture
“It is just as difficult and dangerous to try to free a people that wants to remain servile as it is to enslave a people that wants to remain free,” wrote Machiavelli. For all the labors of its best minds,...
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“It is just as difficult and dangerous to try to free a people that wants to remain servile as it is to enslave a people that wants to remain free,” wrote Machiavelli. For all the labors of its best minds, the modern American Right appears determined to remain servile — even if it comes at the cost of everything it claims to care about. Even the brief, fleeting whiff of victory is so foreign and alien to today’s conservatives that it can cause them to recoil in horror and disbelief, overwhelmed by the mere possibility of power. The Right, as it’s constituted today, is trapped in a psychological ghetto of its own making; and until that changes, nothing else will.
This self-disenfranchising tendency was on display this week, as a host of both high- and low-profile firings, cancellations, and various other recriminations came for voices on the Left who had opted to either celebrate the attempt on Trump’s life, or mourn that it had not been successful. A public school teacher in Oklahoma who “wish[ed]” the shooter “had a better scope” lost her teaching certificate; a school counselor in North Carolina who publicly mourned that she was “disappointed the shooter missed” resigned; a Dallas police officer who posted “aim better” in response to the news was placed on leave. Most notably, left-wing comedian Jack Black canceled his tour after one of his bandmates said — while on stage with Black — that he hoped the would-be assassin wouldn’t “miss Trump next time.”
But the most fervent debate within conservative circles centered around a Home Depot employee named Darcy Waldron Pinckey, who posted on Facebook in the wake of the shooting: “To [sic] bad they weren’t a better shooter!!!!!” Darcy was subsequently confronted at her job, on film, about her post; soon after, Home Depot confirmed that she was no longer employed there. (“This individual’s comments don’t reflect The Home Depot or our values,” the company wrote).
Many conservatives blanched. This, they declared, was “cancel culture” — and cancel culture is what the Left does. “This is a perfect example of cancel culture,” wrote the U.K. Spectator’s world edition editor, Ben Domenech. “Ruining a random person’s life because they said something inappropriate is wrong.” “Being against ‘cancel culture’ matters most when you have the power to cancel,” added the Manhattan Institute’s Colin Wright. “As the political Right gains more cultural and political power, it’s important to remain principled.” “I don’t care about political strategies, I care about doing the right thing (as I see it),” argued Federalist editor David Harsanyi. “Political strategists are generally craven, unprincipled people.”
It is entirely true, of course, that we should like to live in a country where Home Depot employees aren’t unceremoniously relieved of their livelihoods for ill-advised social media posts. But the simple fact is that we don’t live in that country today, and none of the conservative critics of these firings appear to have any viable ideas about how we might remedy that. Persuasion, “making better arguments,” and fighting nobly in the battle of ideas has been the conservative strategy for decades, but well-articulated arguments and pristine, sparkling principles mean very little in the absence of political power; and perhaps more importantly, they mean very little to those who have power. (One is reminded of Frank Herbert’s famous adage in Dune: “When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles”).
In April, I noted “a familiar choreography in American politics: Progressives flout norms, precedents, legal strictures, and the Constitution itself with impunity, and conservatives respond by gravely prophesying that someday, when the roles are reversed, their opponents will come to regret it. But recent history suggests that the Left has no reason to take the Right’s threats seriously — at least thus far.” For years, the Right has contented itself with grave warnings that someday, the tables would be turned, and the Left would experience the bitter taste of its own medicine. Now, the roles have been reversed — albeit in a very minor, and likely fleeting, way — and the Right is somehow more outraged than the Left.
No serious person believes that the Left would extend to the Right the same grace and charity as the Right currently seems intent on extending to the Left. The people who whipped up a virtual lynch mob against a high schooler for the crime of wearing a MAGA hat; who pushed for the termination of a blue-collar electrician who was photographed making an “OK” hand sign (allegedly a white supremacist symbol; in reality, just the man cracking his knuckles); who cheered on the physical assault of their ideological opponents; and who — yes — created the rhetorical environment for an attempt on a former president’s life have given us no reason to think they see us as worthy of compassion at all.
Nor, regrettably, are these attitudes confined to a small cadre of left-wing elites. (Although the elites tend to wield the power that allows them to “cancel” others.) According to polls from early 2022, 59 percent of Democrats favored house arrest for the unvaccinated; 45 percent believed that the unvaccinated should be put in temporary camps; and 48 percent believed “federal and state governments should be able to fine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications.”
But the fundamental argument for endorsing the “cancellation” of those on the Left has very little to do with vengeance, retribution, or a bloodthirsty eye-for-an-eye moral code. If you believe that our punitive, unpredictable, ever-shifting standards for public discourse are barbaric and untenable, as I do, you are obligated to consider how we might reach a more workable arrangement — or at least a kind of détente. As it stands today, the Left has every reason to continue punishing its enemies for the slightest infraction, and no reason to cease doing so. That must change; and it will not be changed by feeble protestations or principled appeals from the same people that the Left has demonstrated, via its various libel campaigns, that it views as beneath contempt.
What may actually succeed at forcing a change is a form of mutually assured destruction; a short-term escalation to force a long-term deescalation. There must be consequences — real, material consequences rather than choreographed outrage and strongly worded letters — for the reigning social arrangements. Progressives must be made to understand, at a visceral level, the penalties for the system that they themselves constructed — so much so, in fact, that they are no longer interested in perpetuating it. The stakes must be raised to the point where they come to feel that the negatives of that system outweigh the positives. Then, and only then, will the incentives truly change.
What that requires, realistically, will likely make some conservatives queasy. Many people on the Left — including some who are sympathetic figures — will have to face consequences for their speech, in the same way that any number of conservatives have faced consequences for theirs. This is what politics is, in a time such as ours. There is no particular shame in not having the stomach for it; but if you don’t, your services are likely better employed somewhere beyond the political sphere.
There is nothing “hypocritical” or “unprincipled” about this approach. Quite the opposite, in fact: It demonstrates a genuine conviction and commitment to one’s cause — a commitment that the Right has lacked, to its great detriment, for some time. “The problem with cancel culture is not simply that some opinions are seen as socially unacceptable, but that our standards for what those opinions are have shifted radically to the left,” I wrote back in 2021. “Conservatives should be seeking to move those standards rightward, not seeking to abolish them altogether in favor of a libertarian ‘live and let live’ morality.”
Conservatives must rediscover what it means to take their own side — without moderation, caveat, or apology. If our cause is just, we might at least try to act like it.
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