Imagine that a prominent conservative pundit tweeted "police misconduct lol." Then a few months later, he's attending a peaceful protest and fails to obey a police officer quickly enough and the cop beats the shit out of him. People say "what do you think about police misconduct now buddy?"
The pundit then writes a long piece explaining that there's no consensus about what counts as police misconduct—sometimes officers have legitimate fear for their life after all—and hence he still doesn't find the term "police misconduct" to be meaningful. Sure, *his* beating was unjustified police use of force. But in his view it's tendentious question-begging to condemn police misconduct in general, since the whole topic under debate is which use of force is unjustified.
Pejorative terms for human misbehavior—accounting fraud, police misconduct, cancel culture—always have this character. People disagree about the merits of individual actions and hence about which actions merit the application of a disapproving label.
This does not mean we should eradicate such morally loaded language from our vocabulary.
Police misconduct and accounting fraud are real problems! Having a label for them helps build a social consensus that they represent a problem and that people might want to work together to try to discourage recurrence of the problematic behavior.
Tim, I love you but you missed the point. No one doubts that "police misconduct" or "accounting fraud" is a thing, just as no one doubts that "managerial overreaction" or "underserved ostracism" or "overly severe punishment" are things. I think my central point was that we'll always disagree about what counts as misconduct, what counts as a fair sanction for violating a norm, etc., which does not at all call into question the utility of the whole idea of misconduct or disciplinary fairness. The advantage of using established language with a relatively settled public meanings is that it makes productive disagreement *possible* by making it mutually intelligible. However, newly-minted emotive slogans that have no consistent, explicable non-pejorative public meaning are excellent for opportunistic factional point-scoring, but draw us away from real disagreement that we to address and negotiate culturally and politically. If BLM activists were to re-brand their particular conception of "police misconduct" as "cudgel culture" or something and tried to derail any serious conversation about whether misconduct had taken place in a particular case by begging all the questions and accusing people those on the other side of this particular question of misconduct as being willfully blind to the damage wrought by cudgel culture and contemptuous of its victims, then this would be a good analogy.
I feel like this point applies to almost any political slogan. "Black lives matter" itself frames issues of police misconduct in an emotive way that some conservatives find irritating. It places the burden of proof on skeptics to show that a particular case of police violence against a black person wasn't motivated by racism. Which seems fine to me! Framing things in ways that's advantageous to your cause isn't some kind of dirty trick, it's a normal part of political activism.
Anyway, I don't really care if you like the term "cancel culture" or not. But I would be interested in a Will Wilkinson post on the substance of this issue. Is it the case that organizations too often mete out "severe sanctions for trifling transgressions?" I think people interpreted your "cancel culture lol" tweet as signaling that you didn't think this was a significant problem in today's world. And after you suffered a severe sanction for a trifling transgression yourself, people naturally wondered if that had caused you to re-assess how serious or widespread of a problem this is. I would like to know!
*No one doubts that "police misconduct" or "accounting fraud" is a thing, just as no one doubts that "managerial overreaction" or "underserved ostracism" or "overly severe punishment" are things. I think my central point was that we'll always disagree about what counts as misconduct, what counts as a fair sanction for violating a norm, etc., which does not at all call into question the utility of the whole idea of misconduct or disciplinary fairness. The advantage of using established language with a relatively settled public meanings is that it makes productive disagreement *possible* by making it mutually intelligible. However, newly-minted emotive slogans that have no consistent, explicable non-pejorative public meaning*
What are the non-pejorative public meanings of "police misconduct" and "accounting fraud"?
I'm pretty sympathetic to your argument, so let me try and challenge us both a bit. Put "cancel culture" or "call out culture" to the side for a sec, semantically. Let's see if we can identify some novel phenomena that's at least part of what people are getting at with those terms.
The bottom line is that the Internet overall, mass adoption of Internet connected devices, and social media, are all novel things, so pretty much anything that happens there is "novel" in some mundane sense. But I do think there's a way these things add up such that "more is different."
One tried and true method for getting attention is to denounce someone else. Ideally, this is someone who already has an audience of fans and haters, so you can pander to the latter and drum up hate-attention from the former. There are people who dig through social media post backlogs to try and find something they can use to this effect.
One silly recent example was the bean can dad guy. He had some posts for like 7-10 years ago where he was, as far as I can tell from the context, doing a bit where he was mocking conspiracy theorists, but doing the bit involved tweets in that thread where he was saying what they'd say. Put aside whether or not this is a correct reading of those specific tweets/that specific guy, point is, if that *is* the correct interpretation, what ended up happening was people saw that a guy's thread went viral, and went looking for a way to torch him in order to get attention for themselves, and succeeded by taking a tweet that looks pretty damn bad by itself and saying it was what the guy believed.
It's always been true that fame makes you a target, even fifteen minutes of fame. It's always been true that successfully torching someone famous can get you attention and potentially make you famous yourself. It's also long been true that the communication technology exists to, if you wanted to badly enough, contact someone's employer in order to try and get them fired. But if the barrier to entry for these activities falls low enough, if the marginal effort required to find past statements and share them, or find someone's employer and contact them, falls low enough, then I think you get into some cycles that are pretty toxic.
But I don't really see this as a *cultural* problem. It strikes me as more *structural*, stemming from our technological situation. You can probably reduce or increase this behavior on the margins via culture, but one thing I'd really like the "cancel culture" people to attempt more seriously is to look into how much of this is a cross-cultural phenomenon, not just across parties or regions of the US but like, around the world, for people who've adopted these technologies.
And ultimately, as you say, it does come down to whether or not you think the particular case is merited. Someone here also mentioned at-will employment, I think that having for-cause standards becomes much more attractive under the current scenario, but you know, it also seems like the fraction of people this impacts, even the absolute number, might be so small that even that needle needn't be moved much (and other considerations/justifications for for-cause vs at-will ought to be the main arguments on its behalf, if you're for it).
I think I agree with all of this. I think the salience of the issue is a consequence of polarization, pathological social media business models that should not exist, and the reactionary defensive impulses of dominant groups losing control of their power to make self-serving cultural rules. I don't think there's any reason to believe that there has been any increase at all in the application of disproportionate professional and social sanctions for norm-violating behavior. What's changed is which norm violations are considered important and actionable, as well as the visibility and intensity of debates about the seriousness of norm violations and the appropriateness of the consequences meted out to violators. Women get fired every day for spurning their boss' advances, and black kids are disproportionally suspended from school for "bad attitudes," despite no actual differences in attitude quality. But we don't yell at each other about these cases because they never hit the main feed and the chattering classes are far more likely to focus myopically on cases they can see themselves in rather than the domination and injustice constantly suffered by far more vulnerable people.
I really liked the OP; I appreciate the impulse to say, "let's take a broader view" and I generally agree with you feeling that concerns about "cancel culture" are (often) imprecise or misdirected.
I'd also hope that the comments provide a place to tease out some better working definitions, and I'd like to throw one idea into that mix -- the question of what is the role of an apology.
In your post you draw a contrast between, "hilarious trifle we ought to be willing to shrug off" and something which is, "egregiously demeaning." In neither of those cases is an apology a pivotal element. But there's a large area in-between those two extremes of genuine but not egregious violations of norms in which the appropriate response is an apology.
In this case, you did post an apology on twitter.
I think one of the elements that people are responding to when they think about "cancel culture" (but not Trump's impeachment) is that it's not clear how one would apologize.
In many of the most prominent cases the person involved didn't even attempt to apologize, which obviously simplifies the situation. But imagine that you genuinely wanted to say, "I have breached a norm; I think think that norm is appropriate; I feel badly, and I want to repair that breach."
That doesn't always work, but it's fairly straightforward to make the attempt in an in-person community. From what I see, it appears more difficult in a situation like yours.
"Bad judgment doesn't call into question good judgment. The prevalence of unjust and unmerited censure, sanction, and ostracism should not suggest to us that censure, sanction and ostracism, as such, need a hard second look."
I am sympathetic to much in this post and never would've chosen "cancel culture" as a term, but say that one believes in and wants to assert the existence of an alarming trend of "unmerited censure, sanction, and ostracism," partly rooted in a faction that mistakenly or maliciously esteems those things. Is that ever a permissible argument to make? And if so, may one invoke a term as shorthand for it, if willing to expound when pressed? If not why not? If so what term is acceptable?
I'm not sure what's wrong with a definition of cancel culture that appeals to a lack of proportionality. Yes, a disproportionate punitive response to transgressions can be part of a culture. And we have plenty of words to refer to excessiveness, such as "excessiveness."
Your case is a little tricky, because if someone sincerely read you as calling for violence against Trump--and some people seem to have, though obviously not anyone with any prior knowledge of you--then your being fired does not seem excessive (indeed perhaps it's inadequate).
However one suspects that the Nikanssen Center *did not really believe* you were making a threat of violence--since, again, no one familiar with you would have not gotten the joke. And this, I think, is part of cancel culture--when someone gets fired not because their organization truly believes they've done anything wrong, but simply because of the size of the howling mob outside. (Social media makes this possible because the mob doesn't even need to go to the trouble of gathering in person.)
So if you fire your employee for making a Nazi joke you honestly think is disgusting--even if they've otherwise seemed like a "great person"--then no, I don't think that's cancel culture. Cancel culture involves an element of "jumping on the bandwagon"--punishing someone because that's what everyone else is doing, since (this is the underlying worry) if you don't join in, you might be next to suffer.
Sure, there's concept creep, hard cases, sloganeering, etc., but I think that, at its core, the concept is reasonably clear: it's an attempt to use the methods of public shaming to turn the target into a social pariah (not just to make them unemployed but unemployable), and in response to a statement that the listener finds offensive. So your case, I think, isn't a paradigm case of cancellation. Neither is the holocaust denial case you describe, but it would be if you used your mighty perch to make your former employee persona non grata.
"Cancel culture" would be more useful as a term to describe a mode rather than a political orientation or disposition. The speed, ease, reach, and frequency with which people can shame others is pretty unique to the internet and social media in particular. But in practice a lot of writers focus on left-right origin stories that I don't think are very helpful, so the term isn't as useful as it could be.
Cancel culture is hard to pin down because different people view it differently. Same is true for rights, religion, free will, etc. But this doesn’t mean these concepts don’t exist or can’t be used constructively.
Do you think your tweet merited your removal? If not, you might have been canceled. If everyone agrees not, you probably have been canceled. If only people on the extreme left think so, you have almost certainly been canceled.
But I agree that cancel culture is used as an epithet by people who condone grotesque power relations I.e. using ethnic slurs, claiming bio cultural superiority, etc. If most moderates who stuck up for you (Douthat, Klein, Brooks, Haidt, etc.) would not stick up for them, then they have probably not been canceled. They have instead been correctly censured.
> If only people on the extreme left think so, you have almost certainly been canceled.
I think this actually gets to the heart of it. Descriptively, when people complain about "cancel culture" they are complaining about people being sanctioned from the left. People all het up about cancel culture don't think the Dixie Chicks were "cancelled."
Soave is trying to obscure that by calling Will's unjust firing a cancellation, but it's clearly not, in the the way that "cancel culture" is typically used.
So I don't think that Will is right that cancel culture doesn't refer to anything specific—it's about the enforcement of _new, left-wing_ social expectations. And there are some new left-wing social expectations, especially around race and sexuality.
Where Will is right is that people who complain about cancel culture like to pretend, for rhetorical reasons, that their objection is to something other than the left-wing content of the new rules. They like to pretend that there's some trans-ideological principle at play. That kind of "cancel culture" really doesn't exist.
Well said. I wonder if Will would agree that cancel culture refers to the enforcement of extreme left wing standards, and that people who use it in other ways are missing the boat and hindering constructive conversation.
Then there’s a question of whether calls for cancellation coming from the right wing (as in Will’s case) is cancel culture or not. To me it seems like a derived parody and is not the same thing.
Surely some of it is reaction to new (left-wing) social rules coming into effect? Some things that used to be generally considered trifling have come to be considered egregious, and the change has happened very rapidly. People who liked the old rules have come up with a term to express their discomfort with the change.
Now for my part and yours, it looks like the content of the new rules is good, so we tend to lol, but there's a coherent concept there we're loling at.
But like Will didn't run afoul of new left-wing social rules. He got fired because someone read a joke tweet in an uncharitable way. This exact thing couldn't have happened 20 years ago because Twitter didn't exist 20 years ago. And I'm struggling to think of analogous situations that would have happened in the pre-Internet world. If someone made a joke about lynching George HW Bush in a high school faculty lounge in 1990 would that have led to the person getting fired? I don't think so, but maybe I'm just not familiar enough with pre-Internet workplace norms.
Yeah, I think under the prevailing usage, Will wasn't "cancelled," because he wasn't fired over a left-wing social rule. He was just plain fired.
Not quite 20 (or 31!) years ago, but the Dixie Chicks suffered pretty extreme commercial sanction for expressing a much more banal left-wing view in 2003. Could you have been fired in 1990 for joking in the break room that the vice president should be killed? Maybe! Depends on the workplace. I don't think you'd be fired for it from most workplaces today, which is why Will's firing has led to pretty universal condemnation.
Thanks Will, if anything the bleak and absurd situation you were put through inspired one of the most clear eyed reflections on the term "cancel culture" and its ever more common usage for the purposes of concern trolling
I'm conflicted on this. On the one hand Will is right that there is no commonly understood definition of 'cancel culture' and its sometimes too broadly applied, often in bad faith by right-wingers. On the other hand Soave gave us his own definition and the behavior that Will himself was subject to seems like a clear case of how most reasonable people would define 'cancel culture' and is a bad thing in modern society and to quibble over the labeling of it seems pointlessly semantic to me.
I do admire Will for owning his mistake, apologizing for it, and sticking to his guns on being cancel culture skeptical rather than doing a u-turn and whining about it because it happened to him. Happy to subscribe to this substack and hope many others do too!
I think the crux of most cancellation laments I've seen refer to actions seemingly spurred by bad faith recriminations of right wing figures doing a good bit of pearl clutching. Here cancellation follows a fairly discernable (if incomplete) narrative of bad faith PC weaponizing against left of center figures bc such figures usually work for people or institutions that are susceptible to such.
IMHO, the better gotcha isn't whether you've come around on cancel culture, it's what your thoughts are on at-will employment. This might have played out differently if Niskanen had a union.
I'm going to write more about this in the future. I think the domination inherent in the nature of the employment relationship is vastly more important than a handful of comfortable, semi-notable public figures getting stung by twitter mobs and/or twitchy bosses.
I look forward to reading it! My initial thought is that I don't think these are necessarily two separate phenomena; the pundit fired for a spicy take might not be in as-dire straits as the minimum wage worker fired from a subsistence job because of an arbitrary boss, but they can engage in solidarity with one another.
Will I love you but you're being ridiculous.
Imagine that a prominent conservative pundit tweeted "police misconduct lol." Then a few months later, he's attending a peaceful protest and fails to obey a police officer quickly enough and the cop beats the shit out of him. People say "what do you think about police misconduct now buddy?"
The pundit then writes a long piece explaining that there's no consensus about what counts as police misconduct—sometimes officers have legitimate fear for their life after all—and hence he still doesn't find the term "police misconduct" to be meaningful. Sure, *his* beating was unjustified police use of force. But in his view it's tendentious question-begging to condemn police misconduct in general, since the whole topic under debate is which use of force is unjustified.
Pejorative terms for human misbehavior—accounting fraud, police misconduct, cancel culture—always have this character. People disagree about the merits of individual actions and hence about which actions merit the application of a disapproving label.
This does not mean we should eradicate such morally loaded language from our vocabulary.
Police misconduct and accounting fraud are real problems! Having a label for them helps build a social consensus that they represent a problem and that people might want to work together to try to discourage recurrence of the problematic behavior.
Tim, I love you but you missed the point. No one doubts that "police misconduct" or "accounting fraud" is a thing, just as no one doubts that "managerial overreaction" or "underserved ostracism" or "overly severe punishment" are things. I think my central point was that we'll always disagree about what counts as misconduct, what counts as a fair sanction for violating a norm, etc., which does not at all call into question the utility of the whole idea of misconduct or disciplinary fairness. The advantage of using established language with a relatively settled public meanings is that it makes productive disagreement *possible* by making it mutually intelligible. However, newly-minted emotive slogans that have no consistent, explicable non-pejorative public meaning are excellent for opportunistic factional point-scoring, but draw us away from real disagreement that we to address and negotiate culturally and politically. If BLM activists were to re-brand their particular conception of "police misconduct" as "cudgel culture" or something and tried to derail any serious conversation about whether misconduct had taken place in a particular case by begging all the questions and accusing people those on the other side of this particular question of misconduct as being willfully blind to the damage wrought by cudgel culture and contemptuous of its victims, then this would be a good analogy.
I feel like this point applies to almost any political slogan. "Black lives matter" itself frames issues of police misconduct in an emotive way that some conservatives find irritating. It places the burden of proof on skeptics to show that a particular case of police violence against a black person wasn't motivated by racism. Which seems fine to me! Framing things in ways that's advantageous to your cause isn't some kind of dirty trick, it's a normal part of political activism.
Anyway, I don't really care if you like the term "cancel culture" or not. But I would be interested in a Will Wilkinson post on the substance of this issue. Is it the case that organizations too often mete out "severe sanctions for trifling transgressions?" I think people interpreted your "cancel culture lol" tweet as signaling that you didn't think this was a significant problem in today's world. And after you suffered a severe sanction for a trifling transgression yourself, people naturally wondered if that had caused you to re-assess how serious or widespread of a problem this is. I would like to know!
*No one doubts that "police misconduct" or "accounting fraud" is a thing, just as no one doubts that "managerial overreaction" or "underserved ostracism" or "overly severe punishment" are things. I think my central point was that we'll always disagree about what counts as misconduct, what counts as a fair sanction for violating a norm, etc., which does not at all call into question the utility of the whole idea of misconduct or disciplinary fairness. The advantage of using established language with a relatively settled public meanings is that it makes productive disagreement *possible* by making it mutually intelligible. However, newly-minted emotive slogans that have no consistent, explicable non-pejorative public meaning*
What are the non-pejorative public meanings of "police misconduct" and "accounting fraud"?
I'm pretty sympathetic to your argument, so let me try and challenge us both a bit. Put "cancel culture" or "call out culture" to the side for a sec, semantically. Let's see if we can identify some novel phenomena that's at least part of what people are getting at with those terms.
The bottom line is that the Internet overall, mass adoption of Internet connected devices, and social media, are all novel things, so pretty much anything that happens there is "novel" in some mundane sense. But I do think there's a way these things add up such that "more is different."
One tried and true method for getting attention is to denounce someone else. Ideally, this is someone who already has an audience of fans and haters, so you can pander to the latter and drum up hate-attention from the former. There are people who dig through social media post backlogs to try and find something they can use to this effect.
One silly recent example was the bean can dad guy. He had some posts for like 7-10 years ago where he was, as far as I can tell from the context, doing a bit where he was mocking conspiracy theorists, but doing the bit involved tweets in that thread where he was saying what they'd say. Put aside whether or not this is a correct reading of those specific tweets/that specific guy, point is, if that *is* the correct interpretation, what ended up happening was people saw that a guy's thread went viral, and went looking for a way to torch him in order to get attention for themselves, and succeeded by taking a tweet that looks pretty damn bad by itself and saying it was what the guy believed.
It's always been true that fame makes you a target, even fifteen minutes of fame. It's always been true that successfully torching someone famous can get you attention and potentially make you famous yourself. It's also long been true that the communication technology exists to, if you wanted to badly enough, contact someone's employer in order to try and get them fired. But if the barrier to entry for these activities falls low enough, if the marginal effort required to find past statements and share them, or find someone's employer and contact them, falls low enough, then I think you get into some cycles that are pretty toxic.
But I don't really see this as a *cultural* problem. It strikes me as more *structural*, stemming from our technological situation. You can probably reduce or increase this behavior on the margins via culture, but one thing I'd really like the "cancel culture" people to attempt more seriously is to look into how much of this is a cross-cultural phenomenon, not just across parties or regions of the US but like, around the world, for people who've adopted these technologies.
And ultimately, as you say, it does come down to whether or not you think the particular case is merited. Someone here also mentioned at-will employment, I think that having for-cause standards becomes much more attractive under the current scenario, but you know, it also seems like the fraction of people this impacts, even the absolute number, might be so small that even that needle needn't be moved much (and other considerations/justifications for for-cause vs at-will ought to be the main arguments on its behalf, if you're for it).
I think I agree with all of this. I think the salience of the issue is a consequence of polarization, pathological social media business models that should not exist, and the reactionary defensive impulses of dominant groups losing control of their power to make self-serving cultural rules. I don't think there's any reason to believe that there has been any increase at all in the application of disproportionate professional and social sanctions for norm-violating behavior. What's changed is which norm violations are considered important and actionable, as well as the visibility and intensity of debates about the seriousness of norm violations and the appropriateness of the consequences meted out to violators. Women get fired every day for spurning their boss' advances, and black kids are disproportionally suspended from school for "bad attitudes," despite no actual differences in attitude quality. But we don't yell at each other about these cases because they never hit the main feed and the chattering classes are far more likely to focus myopically on cases they can see themselves in rather than the domination and injustice constantly suffered by far more vulnerable people.
I really liked the OP; I appreciate the impulse to say, "let's take a broader view" and I generally agree with you feeling that concerns about "cancel culture" are (often) imprecise or misdirected.
I'd also hope that the comments provide a place to tease out some better working definitions, and I'd like to throw one idea into that mix -- the question of what is the role of an apology.
In your post you draw a contrast between, "hilarious trifle we ought to be willing to shrug off" and something which is, "egregiously demeaning." In neither of those cases is an apology a pivotal element. But there's a large area in-between those two extremes of genuine but not egregious violations of norms in which the appropriate response is an apology.
In this case, you did post an apology on twitter.
I think one of the elements that people are responding to when they think about "cancel culture" (but not Trump's impeachment) is that it's not clear how one would apologize.
In many of the most prominent cases the person involved didn't even attempt to apologize, which obviously simplifies the situation. But imagine that you genuinely wanted to say, "I have breached a norm; I think think that norm is appropriate; I feel badly, and I want to repair that breach."
That doesn't always work, but it's fairly straightforward to make the attempt in an in-person community. From what I see, it appears more difficult in a situation like yours.
"Bad judgment doesn't call into question good judgment. The prevalence of unjust and unmerited censure, sanction, and ostracism should not suggest to us that censure, sanction and ostracism, as such, need a hard second look."
I am sympathetic to much in this post and never would've chosen "cancel culture" as a term, but say that one believes in and wants to assert the existence of an alarming trend of "unmerited censure, sanction, and ostracism," partly rooted in a faction that mistakenly or maliciously esteems those things. Is that ever a permissible argument to make? And if so, may one invoke a term as shorthand for it, if willing to expound when pressed? If not why not? If so what term is acceptable?
I'm not sure what's wrong with a definition of cancel culture that appeals to a lack of proportionality. Yes, a disproportionate punitive response to transgressions can be part of a culture. And we have plenty of words to refer to excessiveness, such as "excessiveness."
Your case is a little tricky, because if someone sincerely read you as calling for violence against Trump--and some people seem to have, though obviously not anyone with any prior knowledge of you--then your being fired does not seem excessive (indeed perhaps it's inadequate).
However one suspects that the Nikanssen Center *did not really believe* you were making a threat of violence--since, again, no one familiar with you would have not gotten the joke. And this, I think, is part of cancel culture--when someone gets fired not because their organization truly believes they've done anything wrong, but simply because of the size of the howling mob outside. (Social media makes this possible because the mob doesn't even need to go to the trouble of gathering in person.)
So if you fire your employee for making a Nazi joke you honestly think is disgusting--even if they've otherwise seemed like a "great person"--then no, I don't think that's cancel culture. Cancel culture involves an element of "jumping on the bandwagon"--punishing someone because that's what everyone else is doing, since (this is the underlying worry) if you don't join in, you might be next to suffer.
Sure, there's concept creep, hard cases, sloganeering, etc., but I think that, at its core, the concept is reasonably clear: it's an attempt to use the methods of public shaming to turn the target into a social pariah (not just to make them unemployed but unemployable), and in response to a statement that the listener finds offensive. So your case, I think, isn't a paradigm case of cancellation. Neither is the holocaust denial case you describe, but it would be if you used your mighty perch to make your former employee persona non grata.
"Cancel culture" would be more useful as a term to describe a mode rather than a political orientation or disposition. The speed, ease, reach, and frequency with which people can shame others is pretty unique to the internet and social media in particular. But in practice a lot of writers focus on left-right origin stories that I don't think are very helpful, so the term isn't as useful as it could be.
Cancel culture is hard to pin down because different people view it differently. Same is true for rights, religion, free will, etc. But this doesn’t mean these concepts don’t exist or can’t be used constructively.
Do you think your tweet merited your removal? If not, you might have been canceled. If everyone agrees not, you probably have been canceled. If only people on the extreme left think so, you have almost certainly been canceled.
But I agree that cancel culture is used as an epithet by people who condone grotesque power relations I.e. using ethnic slurs, claiming bio cultural superiority, etc. If most moderates who stuck up for you (Douthat, Klein, Brooks, Haidt, etc.) would not stick up for them, then they have probably not been canceled. They have instead been correctly censured.
> If only people on the extreme left think so, you have almost certainly been canceled.
I think this actually gets to the heart of it. Descriptively, when people complain about "cancel culture" they are complaining about people being sanctioned from the left. People all het up about cancel culture don't think the Dixie Chicks were "cancelled."
Soave is trying to obscure that by calling Will's unjust firing a cancellation, but it's clearly not, in the the way that "cancel culture" is typically used.
So I don't think that Will is right that cancel culture doesn't refer to anything specific—it's about the enforcement of _new, left-wing_ social expectations. And there are some new left-wing social expectations, especially around race and sexuality.
Where Will is right is that people who complain about cancel culture like to pretend, for rhetorical reasons, that their objection is to something other than the left-wing content of the new rules. They like to pretend that there's some trans-ideological principle at play. That kind of "cancel culture" really doesn't exist.
I think 2001 and the Dixie Chicks were "cancelled" and victims of "political correctness" even if those aren't the words I'd choose
Well said. I wonder if Will would agree that cancel culture refers to the enforcement of extreme left wing standards, and that people who use it in other ways are missing the boat and hindering constructive conversation.
Then there’s a question of whether calls for cancellation coming from the right wing (as in Will’s case) is cancel culture or not. To me it seems like a derived parody and is not the same thing.
Anytime there’s a new & complicated “thing” on the scene, it rates to be poorly named and ill-defined at first, and for some time.
If it’s “just culture”, then why now? Is it catching on just because of clever alliteration?
However poorly pinned down, and however abused the term might be, its existence seems like good evidence that there is a there there.
I think it's catching now because of the clever alliteration, yes. And because it's useful for people who want to avoid uncomfortable conversations.
Surely some of it is reaction to new (left-wing) social rules coming into effect? Some things that used to be generally considered trifling have come to be considered egregious, and the change has happened very rapidly. People who liked the old rules have come up with a term to express their discomfort with the change.
Now for my part and yours, it looks like the content of the new rules is good, so we tend to lol, but there's a coherent concept there we're loling at.
But like Will didn't run afoul of new left-wing social rules. He got fired because someone read a joke tweet in an uncharitable way. This exact thing couldn't have happened 20 years ago because Twitter didn't exist 20 years ago. And I'm struggling to think of analogous situations that would have happened in the pre-Internet world. If someone made a joke about lynching George HW Bush in a high school faculty lounge in 1990 would that have led to the person getting fired? I don't think so, but maybe I'm just not familiar enough with pre-Internet workplace norms.
Yeah, I think under the prevailing usage, Will wasn't "cancelled," because he wasn't fired over a left-wing social rule. He was just plain fired.
Not quite 20 (or 31!) years ago, but the Dixie Chicks suffered pretty extreme commercial sanction for expressing a much more banal left-wing view in 2003. Could you have been fired in 1990 for joking in the break room that the vice president should be killed? Maybe! Depends on the workplace. I don't think you'd be fired for it from most workplaces today, which is why Will's firing has led to pretty universal condemnation.
Thanks Will, if anything the bleak and absurd situation you were put through inspired one of the most clear eyed reflections on the term "cancel culture" and its ever more common usage for the purposes of concern trolling
I'm conflicted on this. On the one hand Will is right that there is no commonly understood definition of 'cancel culture' and its sometimes too broadly applied, often in bad faith by right-wingers. On the other hand Soave gave us his own definition and the behavior that Will himself was subject to seems like a clear case of how most reasonable people would define 'cancel culture' and is a bad thing in modern society and to quibble over the labeling of it seems pointlessly semantic to me.
I do admire Will for owning his mistake, apologizing for it, and sticking to his guns on being cancel culture skeptical rather than doing a u-turn and whining about it because it happened to him. Happy to subscribe to this substack and hope many others do too!
I think the crux of most cancellation laments I've seen refer to actions seemingly spurred by bad faith recriminations of right wing figures doing a good bit of pearl clutching. Here cancellation follows a fairly discernable (if incomplete) narrative of bad faith PC weaponizing against left of center figures bc such figures usually work for people or institutions that are susceptible to such.
IMHO, the better gotcha isn't whether you've come around on cancel culture, it's what your thoughts are on at-will employment. This might have played out differently if Niskanen had a union.
I'm going to write more about this in the future. I think the domination inherent in the nature of the employment relationship is vastly more important than a handful of comfortable, semi-notable public figures getting stung by twitter mobs and/or twitchy bosses.
Of course, such figures are not the majority of people who are stung by Twitter mobs...
I look forward to reading it! My initial thought is that I don't think these are necessarily two separate phenomena; the pundit fired for a spicy take might not be in as-dire straits as the minimum wage worker fired from a subsistence job because of an arbitrary boss, but they can engage in solidarity with one another.
I agree with that completely.