The Inescapability of "Cancellation"

A theoretical reflection.

TLDR: Cancellation might be inevitable, but it’s not the same as “cancel culture.” But we should also worry about the form “post-cancel culture” is going to take, if conservatives pursue it on the grounds they currently seem to be.

In 2005, Ward Churchill was fired from the University of Colorado. In an essay suggesting that the 9/11 attacks were the inevitable consequence of American financial imperialism, Churchill called the victims of those attacks “Little Eichmanns.” Though he (astoundingly) published it one dayafter the worst terrorist attack on US soil in American history, it only came to national prominence four years later. Conservative pundit Bill O’Reillyled the attacks, but others (including the Republican Governor of Colorado) called for his firing. After Churchill was accused of plagiarism, the University investigated and summarily dismissed him. He would later win $1 million from the school after suing for wrongful termination, though the financial penalty was later vacated.

There was no term for “cancel culture” at the time—and the institutional dynamics behind Churchill’s termination were doubtlessly different than what we have seen in America over the past decade. Churchill’s presence in the academy was regarded by some (note the author) as a symptom of a lack of intellectual diversity in higher education. Firing Churchill did nothing to solve that problem. Yet as someone beginning to think about broader cultural dynamics for the first time, the episode confirmed that “cancellation” would be done by the Right just as easily as the Left—if they enjoyed the levers of social power. Conservative organizations have often been compelled to institute their own purity tests on contested social matters, and often for sound reasons: unanimity of opinion about contested moral matters can sometimes be important for group cohesion and identity. I think that the temptation to censor, though, is especially acute when the institutions upholding those norms are relatively weak and when the actual moral positions are not true. Progressives’ attempt to police the finer details of our language about sex and gender the past decade is, to my mind, indicative of the weakness of their view: strong institutions that uphold the truth can survive dissent in ways that weak communities upholding falsehoods cannot.

The enforcement of ‘correct opinions’ has an even longer and more distinguished history than our culture wars. My point in bringing up conservative forms of the practice is not to say that it is equivalent to our contemporary progressive manifestations, so much as to raise the question of whether societies can survive long without ‘canceling’ some members for publicizing positions they deem morally repugnant. Employment is not endorsement of a person’s views—except when that employment might require a person to act on those moral views, in which case they would become relevant. Such a principle is certainly subject to limits, which our thought-codes over the past decade have routinely ignored: the problem with “cancel culture,” we might say, is less the fact of cancellation and more its metastization as a culture.

We are currently in the midst of a reaction against it, as the kerfuffle over Vice President J.D. Vance’s defense of Marko Elez indicates. The twenty-five year old Elez had pseudonymously posted racist tweets in the last year, before being hired by Elon Musk at DOGE. When that bastion of liberal activism The Wall Street Journal reported on them, Elez resigned, only to be rehired after Musk and Vance came to his defense. As Vance wrote:

“I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life. We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever. So I say bring him back. If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.”

Musk opted to justify his support with the more succinct cliche, “To err is human, to forgive divine.”

Vance’s statement raises a number of questions. While the journalists who found Elez out might be trying to “destroy people,” they might also be trying to understand the views of the people who seem to be tasked with making some of the most consequential decisions in America right now. The impulse to “never reward” journalists who undertake such work is, of course, understandable—but I wonder what the principled difference is between the WSJ’s efforts and the efforts among the reactionary Right to find out whether any leader of a Christian organization is now, or have ever been a recipient of U.S. Government Funding. Vance says he disagrees with “some of Elez’s posts.” The more pertinent question, though, is what those posts mean for Elez’s views, and what the salience of those views is for the job he is being asked to do. A pseudonymous account might be a place where someone goes to say what they really think—or it might be a place where someone engages in trollery and “shit-posting”—a practice I think indicates both immaturity and a want of the obligations of family, work, and a real community, but which might not in fact represent a person’s reflective moral convictions (other than the dubious conviction that “shit-posting” should be a legitimate practice). If Elez should be given immunity from such scrutiny because he is not an elected official, then I (again) wonder whether that same standard would be applied to members of the “deep state” who sought to impede Trump’s agenda from within.

The principle Vance sets up undermines any of those questions—and it nullifies any need for Elez to account for his conduct in ways that might establish trust that he does not hold those views. The very idea of asking for ‘principles’ in a reaction against cancel culture is, of course, the kind of farce that only an eggheaded academic ethicist could possibly think to do. The “vibes” are shifting, which is justification enough: the effort to maintain consistency is simply a part of the “loser” mindset that led to “cancel culture’s” existence to begin with.

Maybe. Except our technologically-mediated, historicist ethos means that nothing is permanent and the “wins” of one day might be as quickly reversed the next. If everything is reaction, nothing is stable. As Oliver O’Donovan observed in Desire of the Nations, the collapse of morality into politics effectively undermines them both and reduces liberals to the impossible task of claiming moral license for their own views without sanctioning the other side. The effect of this is that each “movement of social criticism draws in its train a counter-movement, and there is no ground in logic for paying more or less respect to the one than to the other.” And then the kicker, in which O’Donovan explains American cultural politics from circa 1960-2025: “So Black consciousness, for example, requires (logically), invites (historically), and licenses (morally) a movement of White consciousness; feminism entails male chauvinism; homophilia entails homophobia, and so on.” (He wrote that in 1996.) If we have more or less intuitive discomfort with one side or the other, there is nothing we can appeal to for justification so long as ethics becomes a sub-species of social and political life.

That only to say: if you thought “cancel culture” was bad, then you might want to start figuring out how to avoid making “post-cancel culture” worse.

Around the Web

This was an amusing and not-inaccurate distillation of “every conservative Catholic thinkpiece.”

Not only has my advisor,

Nigel Biggar

, become “Lord Biggar,” he has joined Substack. My new favorite joke about this is that if my doctoral advisor becomes a Lord, then I think that makes me at least a “Squire.”

This was a good essay on ‘cancel culture’ by

Hugo Schwyzer

, who knows a thing or two about the process of public shaming and can really write:

When you threaten people with a whip, you will often get outward displays of compliance. If you are an ideologue of the sort who believes that people can be shamed and shunned, coerced or canceled into a genuine inner transformation, you will mistake compliance for acquiescence. You will imagine that the canceled and the de-platformed will have some sort of a change of heart. If you are slightly more realistic, you figure that those whom you held to bitter account may burn with resentment, but you assume that they burn impotently. You do not imagine that they can and will create coalitions of the cancelled, united in little more than shared trauma. You do not think it possible those coalitions can beat you. They can, and they will.

There’s a new documentary coming on in vitro fertilization that seems interesting. Here’s a demo reel. If you’re interested in learning more (or donating to it), you can do so here.

The Penultimate Word

“If we are good to the child and to other people, he will get from us directly a conception of goodness more profound and significant than all the words we may use about goodness as an ideal. If we lose our temper and give way to hard, brittle words which we fling around and about, the child learns more profoundly and significantly than all the formal teaching about self-control which may be offered him. If we love a child, and the child senses from our relationship with others that we love them, he will get a concept of love that all the subsequent hatred in the world will never be quite able to destroy.

It is idle to teach the child formally about respect for other people or other groups if in little ways we demonstrate that we have no authentic respect for other people and other groups. The feeling tone and insight of the child are apt to be unerring. It is not important whether the child is able to comprehend the words we use or understand the ideas that we make articulate. The child draws his meaning from the meaning which we put into things that we do and say. Let us not be deceived. We may incorporate in our formal planning all kinds of ideas for the benefit of the children. We may provide them with tools of various kinds. But if there is not genuineness in our climate, if in little ways we regard them as nuisances, as irritations, as things in the way of our pursuits, they will know that we do not love them and that our religion has no contagion for them. Let us gather around our children and give to them the security that can come only from associating with adults who mean what they say and who share in deeds which are broadcast in words.” — Howard Thurman