What Is Cancel Culture? (Part 2 of 3)

Three key differences between cancel culture and a traditional boycott.

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This essay is the second installment of a three-part series titled “What Is Cancel Culture?” Part 1 addressed the question of when firing someone for their political views constitutes standard business practice and when it crosses into an example of cancel culture. This essay, Part 2, explores what sets cancel culture apart from a traditional boycott by examining their very different aims.

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About the Author

Julian Adorney is the founder of Heal the West, a Substack movement dedicated to preserving and protecting Western civilization. You can find him on X at @Julian_Liberty.

Some commentators who want to dismiss fears of cancel culture suggest that cancel culture is just a new form of the traditional boycott. For example, Lisa Nakamura, a professor at the University of Michigan, describes cancel culture as “a cultural boycott.” While acknowledging its flaws, she also argues that it fosters a “culture of accountability” and represents the “ultimate expression of agency” for people who have been historically marginalized.

Boycotts are an essential feature of capitalism. From the Montgomery bus boycott to boycotts of Nike over their use of sweatshops in the 1990s, boycotting has been a powerful tool for consumers to band together to exert prosocial pressure on companies or individuals who behave badly. By suggesting that cancel culture is just another form of boycott, scholars like Nakamura lend it a veneer of legitimacy that it does not deserve. In this article, we’ll identity three key differences between cancel culture and a traditional boycott.

The first key difference is that boycotts aim to improve their target. When Martin Luther King Jr. launched the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, his goal was not to destroy the local bus company, but to pressure it into treating African Americans more fairly. As King wrote in Stride Toward Freedom, “Our concern would not be to put the bus company out of business, but to put justice in business.”

The same story can be seen with the boycott of Nike. In the 1990s, Nike came under fire for employing child labor and using sweatshops. Protestors rallied against the company. But crucially, their intention wasn’t to destroy Nike. Instead, they aimed to improve Nike by making it into a company that no longer utilized child labor or imposed brutal working conditions on its overseas employees.

To be fair to Nakamura, some cancel campaigns really do feel like a justified boycott. Actor Mel Gibson’s career took a huge hit after he was accused of making racist and abusive comments to his ex-girlfriend. Michael Richards’ career nosedived after his racist rant in 2006. When famous people say or do terrible things, it’s fair and even prosocial to hold them accountable. In these cases, perhaps regaining their public stature should be contingent upon their sincere repentance. Canceling someone can sometimes be an encouragement for them to do better and be better.

However, a lot more stories of cancel culture don’t fit this prosocial mold. Far more often, the goal of canceling is to destroy the target. For example, when Nathan Cofnas, then a graduate student in philosophy at Oxford, published a paper defending the study of racial differences in IQ, the sky fell down on him. Critics didn’t merely seek to change his mind; they tried to ruin him. One professor proudly proclaimed that he wanted to “ruin [Cofnas’s] reputation permanently and deservedly.” In his book The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch contends that “The goal [of canceling somebody] is to turn the target into a pariah, shunned by employers and professional connections and polite society.”

Here’s one way to recognize the difference. When the Montgomery bus company gave in to the boycotters’ demands and began treating African American riders with the basic decency mandated by federal law, King and his co-organizers called off the boycott. They didn’t try to drive the bus company into the ground; their aim was never punitive. They sought to exert public pressure on the bus company to change in a certain way and, when they succeeded, they stopped exerting that pressure.

If canceling someone was truly about trying to improve them, then cancel campaigns would end when the target apologized for whatever odious statement had drawn the cancelers’ ire. But this rarely happens. In 2020, political data analyst David Shor tweeted out a short summary of a paper suggesting that violent protest tactics could reduce voter turnout. The Twitter mob turned on him. They said his tweet “reeks of anti-blackness” and some even claimed that it threatened their safety. One critic tagged Shor’s employer saying “Come get your boy.” Shor offered a sincere apology (“I regret starting this conversation and will be much more careful moving forward”), yet his apology fell on deaf ears. A few days later, he was fired. 

Shor is far from the only example. In a paper titled “Does Apologizing Work? An Empirical Test of the Conventional Wisdom,” Richard Hanania, then a research fellow at Columbia University, examined the effects of apologies amid controversies. He presented respondents with two versions of a real-life controversy: Larry Summers and his controversial comments about female scientists and engineers. In the first version, respondents were told that Summers had subsequently apologized for his comments. In the second version, they were told that he had not. As Hanania reports, “liberals and females were much more likely to say that he definitely or probably should have faced negative consequences for his statement when presented with his apology.” Far from convincing critics that their work is done, an apology seems to signal to critics that there’s blood in the water. As Rauch writes:

The targeted person’s first instinct will be to apologize, whether out of shame or just to get her normal life back. But because the campaign’s objective is not to persuade her but to make an example of her, apologizing rarely helps. In fact, it backfires, proving to the shamers that their outrage was justified and that their tactics are working.

So if the goal of a cancel campaign isn’t to improve the target, what is the goal? Rauch argues that cancel campaigns are about “virtue signaling and bonding with your group: making a public show of defending sacred values against some perceived threat or impurity.” Too often, the point is the solidarity, the moral outrage, and (crucially) the punishment. When you whip up a mob to go burn a witch, it doesn’t matter whether or not she repents. The mob’s not interested in whether or not a lonely old woman finds Jesus. It just wants someone to burn.

This fundamental distinction between boycotters and cancelers shows up in another way too. Remember, boycotters want to improve the world. As a result, they often target society’s worst offenders for their improvement program. King targeted a bus company with a long history of abusing, insulting, and even stealing from African Americans. The Nike protestors’ heart strings were pulled by images of children packed in a factory and all sewing shoes until their fingers bled.

In contrast, the targets of cancel mobs are often chosen arbitrarily. Sometimes, they are truly awful people; but more often than not they are picked out of the crowd for the mildest of offenses. In 2020, a family-owned Middle Eastern business became the target of doxxing and death threats because the owner’s daughter had posted racist tweets in 2012 (at the age of 14). A recent college graduate was fired from his job after sharing a video making fun of himself for not knowing what a bodega was. Harvard professor Steven Pinker caught the mob’s ire because (among other equally mortal sins) he voiced support for David Brooks and tweeted “Don't abolish the police.” The point is not to put pressure on the target to give up their odious views; otherwise, members of the KKK would be the primary targets, and the victims in the above examples would be spared. Too often, the point is simply to punish someone.

In fact, many cancelers don’t even make an effort to understand the person they’re canceling. One of the people trying to cancel Cofnas was Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley. Stanley called on people to “denounce” Cofnas’ paper. However, at the time of his tweet, he hadn’t actually read the paper in question. He later tweeted “I just read your paper,” but then he walked even this claim back, saying that he had “read it in like 2 minutes.” While I’ll grant that an Ivy League professor might be able to read faster than mere mortals, I’m skeptical that 120 seconds is enough time to read and form a nuanced opinion on a 23-page paper. But, then, forming a nuanced opinion wasn’t really the point.

So that’s the first difference. Boycotts target the worst offenders with the aim of improving them. Cancel mobs can do this (see Michael Richards), but generally their aim is to destroy. From this first difference flows the second difference: boycotts have a built-in sense of grace. The implicit message conveyed is that while the target may be doing bad things now, there exists the potential for change. Nike may be employing children in sweat shops today, but they can be shown the error of their ways and encouraged to stop. 

Cancel campaigns lack this grace. They rarely admit that their target can ever improve. Instead, they find the worst thing that a person has ever said and try to destroy their livelihood based on that. Remember what one professor said of Cofnas: that he wants to “ruin [Cofnas’s] reputation permanently and deservedly.”

The third difference between a boycott and a canceling is what the campaign encourages bystanders to do. A boycott simply involves the private participant(s) no longer giving attention or money to a specific company or individual. The Nike boycotters did not try to stop Nike from selling shoes to anyone; they simply announced that they themselves would not buy Nike’s shoes until the company changed its practices, and they encouraged others to do the same. King phrased the Montgomery bus boycott in stronger terms but still made the distinction clear: he and his fellow boycotters were “withdrawing our cooperation from an evil system [i.e. segregation].” However, no matter how evil King thought the Montgomery bus company was, he did not attempt to coerce people who disagreed with him into joining. As the protest was gearing up, he wrote in Stride Toward Freedom that he “urged the people not to force anybody to refrain from riding the buses.” “Our method,” he told the other boycotters, “will be that of persuasion, not coercion.” He and the other boycotters refused to patronize the bus company, but they did not attempt to prevent it from serving other customers.

By contrast, the mob that tries to cancel John is not merely depriving him of their attention and money; they are actively trying to stop other people from hearing from John. When the literary journal Guernica published a heart-wrenching exploration of the violence in Gaza, protestors did more than just criticize the piece—they pressured Guernica to unpublish it. When Rebecca Tuvel published a paper in Hypatia defending the concept of “transracialism,” critics did more than point out flaws in her argument—they demanded that Hypatia retract it. The logic of a boycott is: “I don’t like XYZ, so I’m not going to give them my money or attention.” The logic of the canceler is: “I don’t like XYZ, so no-one should be allowed to give them money or attention.” That’s an enormous difference.

In a capitalist economy, boycotts are a necessary and prosocial force that holds the powerful to account and encourages them to be better. Although cancel campaigns can serve this role, the means and ends of the canceling mob generally push towards the exact opposite.

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