When will it stop, we wonder? Is there no limit, we ask each other upon reading of the latest Cancel Culture outrage. Can nothing be left untouched?
Outside of the laments, we need a new way of thinking about this beyond simply highlighting its absurdity and waiting for the next episode. I hereby recommend we retire the term ‘Cancel Culture.’ We need to stop seeing what’s happening as a function of the old school culture wars where we worried about the design of Starbucks cups or edgy music corrupting our youth. Nor is this only political correctness run amok. What we’re witnessing the past few years is something new and different, and any hope for respite from the madness: that’s outmoded too.
Instead, in a bitterly divided nation – one in which political allegiance is often the defining characteristic of many Americans’ lives – this is now what politics at the ground level looks like. The political is now personal. Where’s the new battleground? Everywhere. What’s the new battleground? Everything.
With that proper understanding we can recognize that no one gets “canceled.” These are not cancellations; they are small-scale political assassinations. And we’re all potential targets. You didn’t get canceled, you got targeted for political assassination and economic assault, and usually it’s carried out.
No way, that stuff’s only for DC, I hear. Political assassination is only for the House of Cards wannabees on the Hill and the congressmen who wade into national issues on big cable news shows. Wrong. Political assassination happens in your town. You don’t even have to hold a public position, let alone be a politician. This is what a politically cleaving country looks like. We now live in an era of blacklists and mobs with digital pitchforks.
The Pennsylvania teacher removed for posting anti-Biden memes on her private Facebook page. The Mexican-American utility driver in San Diego fired for allegedly making an obscure white power hand sign while sitting in traffic, a gesture he claims he didn’t know existed. The Long Island pizzeria owner who faced an unsuccessful boycott for hanging a flag for the wrong presidential candidate near the back entrance of his store. Forget about the rare harassment by Antifa types of restaurant patrons in places like DC and Brooklyn, this – the small-town, small-scale attacks – are what the mob looks like. And just like any other political assassination, the mob just needs to dig up dirt or the semblance of it and let the outrage do the rest.
The other reason we should retire the term is there isn’t really an obscure, ill-defined culture around cancellation. These are specific, identifiable members of the Activist Left. They work for a reasonably small number of advocacy groups and media companies. They hunt for and collect names of those who engage in wrongthink. Then they put them on Twitter threads or websites with attractive layouts and try not to say the word blacklist out loud.
When many Americans hear that word – blacklist – they think about the McCarthy era and the rise of Communist sympathizers in Hollywood. Yet America’s history with blacklisting extends much further back and often involved not the government but – much like today – corporations responding to perceived threats. Workers in mining and other industrial towns faced the threat of blacklisting by dominant companies that could inhibit their ability not just to work for them, but to make a living in a town at all.
What we have today is closer to that, but the goal here is not for the companies to punish the employee, it’s for the Activist Left to punish the offender by threatening their livelihood. The companies respond not because the employee is the threat, but because the activists will threaten the companies’ livelihood if the company doesn’t perform as instructed. The activists are the ones planning and conducting the political assassination, the company is often just the reluctant executioner.
You may be a Midwestern town clerk, you may be a small market podcaster, you may be a Little League coach, but that does not make any of this low stakes. When your livelihood and position in your community is at risk, the stakes are about as high as they can get. Retire the term Cancel Culture, because it’s insufficient for the gravity of the moment.