People have been doing cancel culture from time immemorial. It seems to be a default in human behavior unless there are ideas specially saying, “don’t do this.” These ideas used to be called “liberalism.”
What seems to have changed, from my perspective, is that liberalism has stopped being the values system championed by the left, and instead what we have are two different visions that are both more or less authoritarian.
There is a need to negate the narrative attributed to the phrase "cancel culture" - said narrative is that liberals are censoring conservative voices. (IE, it's often discussed as a directional issue, and not a systemic one.)
I'm not defining cancel culture (a phrase I avoid; it's the opposite of culture), but people who use it have a working definition and it's not just "liberal complaints". Anyway, Liberalism is dead, Patrick Deneen wrote an (overlong) obit.
This just flew by on Apple News: "Cancel culture strikes again: Mumford & Son banjoist steps away from band after praising anti-Antifa book". Whatever you call it, this is not classical liberalism. Something new has emerged with social media combined with Critical Theory, etc. It's worth studying, not dismissing as little different from past boycotts or campaigns.
I have trouble seeing "cancel culture" as something other than shots at overton's window on the liberal side (not really "left" tbh), and a dose of boycott.
I find it disturbing that the far right, followed by the conservative right and more recently by the economic liberals could do this as they wished for almost 15 years, and when social liberals do this, there is that much pushback.
I mean it is not fair. I understood what the fascist where doing five years ago, and pushed anarchists friends from my youth to do the same on their side, and they did. And i was probably not alone in this (hence the "eat the rich" and "property is theft" narratives coming back in MSM). Liberals probably understood it even earlier and started this "cancel culture" stint. It is just pushback. Why would you be worried for a political ideology pushing back?
"Cancel culture" is a recent term invented by the right as a pejorative for the left, so if you're going to use that loaded term you're signaling which side of the partisan divide you are on.
You're not familiar with the rise of "cancel culture" in the UK, USA, and Canada, and its association with "progressive" left-wing politics? I would love to not be familiar with that! Where do you live?
Cancel culture isn't a pursuit of legalized limits on free speech, it's an expression of free speech. Only conservatives are currently pursuing anything of the sort, by attempting to regulate social media, banning critical race theory, the discussion of gender identity and sexuality, etc.
American liberals runs the social networks almost everyone uses so whenever they decide to cancel stuff the whole world gets affected. Therefore it makes sense that many people all over the world learns to hate them and their cancel culture.
Far-right assholes are afraid of cancel culture. It's a bogeyman conjured by the right whenever the rest of us hinder them from what they want to do, like "be racist in public" or "take women's reproductive rights away".
I guess I'm so far to the left that I have a hard time believing in "cancel culture" as anything meaningful.
Take the example of Steven Pinker, given in article.
Those students explicitly said that they were not trying to cancel Pinker, and the goal was not to expel him from the association, but only to have the association withdraw special privileges that Picker was granted.
How is that "cancel"?
Now compare it to the calls to get Cheney out of office in WY. How is that not cancel culture? Or when Milo Yiannopoulos was de-platformed from the Republican convention - again, why isn't that called "cancel culture"?
My conclusion is that "cancel culture" is a made-up term used to minimize the negative influence of criticism from the left, even when valid.
> In every American community there are varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects, ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally. Here, then, is a lesson in safe logic.
and of MLK's grave disappointment with white moderates.
Cancel culture is a circumvention of democracy and justice. No trials, no votes - just a handful of loudest, most reactionary people stamping their feet and screaming until they get what they want.
Yes, free speech allows cancel culture to exist, but that in itself doesn't make it good.
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