There’s been another wave of cancel culture discourse following the Harper’s letter, so here’s my take on it.
There’s a series of rhetorical evasions that I’ve seen people perform whenenver the topic of cancelling comes up. The first is to say that cancel culture doesn’t exist; or if it does exist, the person cancelled deserved it; or if the person didn’t deserve it, then it doesn’t happen that often and very act of discussing it, which is taken to be a “symbolic” problem, makes you blind to real problems at hand.
I think these people make these evasions because of some uncomfortable resonances cancellation has with other things they clearly don’t like. Calling someone’s boss to complain about something that person did outside of their job is prototypical “Karen” behavior—and no one wants to think themselves of being a Karen. Of course, Amy Cooper calling the cops is especially egregious, but it is of a piece with trying to get someone fired.
The other, darker parallel you can make to cancelling is that it is an attempt to enact moral instruction using the market. You cancel someone to teach them a lesson, and for the lesson to stick they need to be humiliated in public, and to lose their livelihood. But this is the same principle that animates the push for means-testing in welfare programs, or for dismantling the welfare state altogether. Being on the government dole as “welfare queens” without incentive to look for work is a concern conservatives have that leftists see as an excuse to leave people in poverty. If we don’t like poor people to be taught by the market that they are lazy and only through grit can they rise above their station, why should we think that cancelling people and having them fired would make them learn to have the right opinions?
Also: sure, the people loudest about the dangers of cancelling seem to be doing just fine—the Harper’s letter signatories seem to be doing quite well!—or seem to center it as the most important crisis of the culture when there are obviously bigger and more important problems around. But regardless of what we think of the messengers, it is hard to deny the message is true, and that there have been plenty of cases to point to as examples of real, legitimate cancellations. People in precarous positions have been fired—this is not a “symbolic problem.”
Maybe people fear that admitting cancellations happen would give license to the people who are loudest in decrying them and would fuel their histrionics which seem to be clearly motivated by less than noble reasons of defending free speech. Maybe Bari Weiss or Bret Stephens have a point, but they’re still blowhards. But I don’t think it’s really that big of a bullet to bite. To deny cancel culture exists is to effectively deny that people try to get other people fired for having bad opinions. But put in that way, it’s obvious that cancel culture is real—it’s real in an almost banal way. It’s not a recent phenomenon, but something that has probably been going on since people had bosses to whom people can yell about their behavior. People like to complain, bosses don’t want the headache of bad publicity, and if there’s an easy scapegoat to make the problem go away, they get the axe. Hard to deny that’s real! Furthermore, this is an ecumenical phenomenon, something that groups of people have done forever, not just something particular to the contemporary left. Here’s where I remind you that the Dixie Chicks exist.
The only feature that is recent about cancel culture is its manifestation in social media, which I think has two effects. It’s now much easier to have lots of random people can band together and call your work, harass your boss, and so on. And, yes, maybe this has exacerbated the situation, and being cancelled in the age of the internet happens more frequently and with greater intensity than before. The second effect is that cancellation is now more public: as Ezra Klein points out, cancellations happened in the past, in meetings behind closed doors, but the idea of “cancel culture” can only be possible once we can witness it happening. So even if online discourse has indeed intensified the problem of cancellation, it has also probably exaggerated it.
But I’ll bracket that point for now. The real answer that you can make to the Bari Weisses of the world is that they are fighting cancel culture the wrong way. You can’t stop cancel culture: it’s an informal, distributed process, not a formal legal process. You can’t talk to the manager of a cancel mob even as they might be talking to your manager. It’s intensified by technology in the way that technology, in its instrumental way, makes a lot of things easier to do. You can’t stop random people from calling your boss, and as tweet begets tweet1, it’s even harder to stop a Twitter mob. It’s also quite optimistic to assume we can achieve consensus on what constitutes harmful speech. So for any particular thing that you might say or write, there will always be some people who find it harmful and complain to your boss about it.
I’m not trying to be fatalistic by pointing out this fact. Rather, consider: even if you try to make the definition of harmful speech as exacting as possible, what happens to those who get cancelled for speech that is very clearly harmful? To put too fine a point on it: what happens to Holocaust deniers? Clearly they should be shunned from polite society, and we should make no accomodations for their speech. But should they just not get a job so they starve and die?
To really stop cancel culture, it is not enough to expand the Overton window, or to minimize the boundaries of harmful speech. People will keep cancelling, and some of the cancelled will not deserve it. Rather, the real solution is to make people uncancellable—to make it so that the brouhaha over their bad opinions can’t prevent their access to fundamental goods that should be guaranteed for everyone. This means an end to at-will employment and employer-based healthcare, at the very least. Who cares if people yell at your boss about you, when you know that you can’t be fired just to make it go away? Even if you do get fired, you can be sure that you still have access to health care.
This move will have the double effect of ending the chilling effect that people worry so much about cancellations, and will advance the project of the left to secure goods through universal programs. It’s a win-win situation. The tiresome debates about “open discourse” can end, because the problem that the Harper’s letter signatories are complaining about would then be truly symbolic. Or they can continue, but as being purely the free play of meaningless chatter online—as all online chatter should be.
Footnotes
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As Robert Frost once wrote: “As tweet begets more tweets / So Eden sank in grief” ↩