How cancel culture lost its power The Right should be wary of norm enforcement

The question is not whether such a pivot is hypocritical — which frankly is true of all but a handful of participants in these debates — but whether the mechanisms of cancel culture, as we currently understand it, may serve these conservative ends.      

Right-wing supporters of tactics such as Raichik’s don’t seem to agree on what is meant to be achieved by them. While some admit they are mainly interested in revenge, others have claimed a détente could be achieved in the culture war through “mutually assured destruction”. The thinking seems to be that if Leftists fear that culture will come for their own, they will think twice about deploying such tactics against the Right. We might think of this as a pursuit of classically liberal ends — the protection of viewpoint diversity and free speech — by illiberal means. For others, conversely, the objective seems to be to forge a new cultural consensus in which Left-wing views are suppressed through stigma. 

Regardless, the assumption appears to be that the Left’s pursuit of cancellation has been effective at enforcing its norms, ergo the Right should follow suit — whether to achieve equilibrium or total cultural dominance. But there remains a question: has cancel culture really been a boon to Left-wing dominance? 

There have been other cancel cultures, of course, but this one has risen from the media environment forged by digital technology roughly a decade and a half ago. Consider the paradigmatic 2013 ordeal of Justine Sacco, a PR executive with 170 Twitter followers who posted the following joke while en route to visit family in South Africa: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” Unfortunately for her, this clumsy attempt at wit came to the attention of reporter Sam Biddle, who amplified it on the site Valleywag. The rest is history: Sacco became, for a moment, the main character on Twitter and beyond, lost her job, received death threats, and so on. 

This incident illustrates several features specific to the 21st-century cancel culture phenomenon. First, while a media outlet played a role, the key factor was the activation of the online swarm. It follows from this that the impetus for Sacco’s dismissal and reputational destruction did not proceed from any explicit rules of behaviour but from the spontaneous consensus of an emergent mob. Although this conviction reflected the view, often associated with the Left, that racism is a particularly condemnable offence, participation wasn’t limited to one political group. None other than Donald Trump joined in, declaring “Justine is fired!” and promising to donate to Aid for Africa. 

Another essential feature was what has been called context collapse. In a pre-social media age, someone like Sacco might have been fired from her job for telling a joke that offended a supervisor — but the power to do this was limited to a particular institutional context. Alternatively, she might have lost a friend for making an off-colour joke at a bar. In both cases, the consequences would have been limited to particular settings. Under the reign of cancel culture, they can amount to a near total reputational destruction, cascading across all realms of individuals’ lives while according them an unwanted public profile.

In the early social-media era, it wasn’t clear that the media dynamics that enabled the rise of cancel culture — those that combined context collapse with rapid mob activation — had any clear ideological valence. Take the case of Lindsey Stone, who faced similar consequences to Sacco after posting a photo on Facebook in which she made an obscene gesture at Arlington National Cemetery. The norms Stone violated, needless to say, weren’t exactly those of the Left. Making a racist-seeming joke could lay waste to your reputation, but so could making an unpatriotic-seeming one. 

Even if we fast-forward a few years into the Trump era, when cancel culture had become more obviously Left-coded, Left-wingers weren’t immune from its effects. In 2017, the academic George Ciccariello-Maher was forced to resign by a conservative mob outraged by a tweet he later — like Sacco — excused as a joke: “All I want for Christmas is a white genocide.” To be sure, it might have taken a far milder anti-black tweet from an academic to produce a similar impact — but fall Ciccariello-Maher did. There is also the fact that plenty of progressives have fallen victim to purity-obsessed denizens of their own ideological camp. See Ciccariello-Maher’s second cancellation: a post with a youthful-looking girlfriend incensed Leftists about the “problematic age gap”. 

The rise of cancel culture, all of this suggests, was not some strategic Left-wing scheme to achieve ideological hegemony, but the chaotic emergence of social dynamics in a new media landscape. The norms enforced in the early cases just discussed — disapproval of racist jokes and disrespect for fallen soldiers — predated this development. Social media had incited the violation of these norms as a means of accumulating the currency of attention, but also created chaotic new mechanisms for policing such violations by exposing them to a broader public that could be easily galvanised into a virtual mob. 

But far from stifling norm-violating speech in a totalitarian manner, the rise of the digital panopticon induced new incentives for engaging in it — as the career of Milo Yiannopolous illustrates. The fact that mob actions, whatever individual scalps they were able to claim, failed to enforce Left-wing consensus in such a manner as to prevent, say, Trump’s election, explains why overt top-down censorship by digital platforms became so common after 2016. Although in some cases these actions enforced the same values asserted by cancel mobs, such actions took us out of the realm of horizontal norm enforcement — the realm in which cancel culture operates — and into that of indirect state tyranny.

If cancel culture were ever effective at enforcing a given set of norms, there is reason to think this efficacy has been on the wane. We have also seen a disaggregation and re-fragmentation into new platforms, meaning that becoming the main character of the entire internet for a day, as Sacco did, is now nearly impossible, and so is enforcing the same set of norms across the digital public sphere. Aided by this development, many ostensibly cancelled figures have reemerged unscathed and often very successful. 

As we hurtle toward a second Trump term, the future of public discourse will look less like a reversal of Left-wing hegemony into Right-wing hegemony, than an even more chaotic and incoherent version of the fractured present. The dissolution of shared norms into competing normative and digital spheres will proceed apace alongside the continued erosion of localised institutional procedures in the face of viral media. Whatever such a society might look like, it won’t be well-ordered or pious. 

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Geoff Shullenberger is managing editor of Compact.

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