What Is Cancel Culture? (Part 3 of 3)

Cancel culture can sometimes look like a social justice movement, but far more often it’s the opposite.

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This essay is the third and final 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. Part 2 explored what sets cancel culture apart from a traditional boycott by examining their different aims.

This essay, Part 3, examines the divisive nature of cancel culture, contrasting it with genuine social justice movements, and highlights its detrimental effects on individuals and society as a whole.

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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.

Cancel culture is sometimes defended as just another facet of social justice movements like the Civil Rights Movement. It’s seen as part of a groundswell effort by historically marginalized groups to come together and hold the powerful to account. Writing for Vox, Aja Romano argues that, “The idea of canceling began as a tool for marginalized communities to assert their values against public figures who retained power and authority even after committing wrongdoing.” Anne Charity Hudley, Associate Dean of Educational Affairs at Stanford University, elaborates on this idea: “for black culture and cultures of people who are lower income and disenfranchised, this is the first time you do have a voice in those types of conversation.”

To be fair, sometimes cancel culture can look like this. The #MeToo movement, for instance, was a grassroots effort of those harmed by sexual violence calling out their powerful abusers. But far more often than not, cancel culture is the opposite of a social justice movement.

One key difference is that social justice movements unify, whereas cancel culture divides. In Stride Toward Freedom, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote about how the Montgomery bus boycott brought tens of thousands of black Americans together. Forty thousand black bus riders all agreed to boycott the bus company, even though it meant many had to get up hours earlier and walk several miles to work. Black taxi cabs offered to ferry as many African Americans to and from work as they could, at rates far below what they charged before the boycott. When the city government cracked down on black taxis for selling their services at below-market rates, many black Montgomerians participated in ride shares, volunteering their cars and driving services for several hours per day.

The entire community came together. As a result, individual participants experienced an enormous upswell of dignity. King tells the story of an elderly woman who walked to and from work for several weeks. When asked if she was tired, she responded proudly, “My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.” Being part of a genuine social justice movement lifted the participants up. As King wrote, the "true meaning of the Montgomery story" was to give African Americans—not just in Montgomery, but across the South—“a new sense of dignity and destiny.”

By contrast, cancel culture divides the individual participants. A mob of cancelers isn’t united by a shared vision for a better world. Nor are they in it for the long haul. What binds them is the opportunity to express outrage. “Outrage,” writes Jonathan Rauch in The Constitution of Knowledge, “is not one-on-one, personal anger so much as shared anger.” It is a “social emotion” that courses through us and, while it does, binds us together. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes, “Shared anger bonds you together…If you’re outraged at President Trump and sharing that with other people, that’s pleasant.”

But outrage is fleeting. Once it dissipates, the group drifts apart, no more cohesive than before. A mob that comes together to burn a witch might feel united in the moment, but they aren’t creating something new; they’re merely united in their desire to destroy. The moment the witch is burned, they drift apart. By tomorrow morning, they will be no more unified than they were last week.

It’s not just that the bonding associated with outrage doesn’t last; members of cancel mobs tend to turn on each other. Sometimes the target is someone like Harvey Weistein or Matt Lauer, but far more often it’s an ordinary person who has committed some arbitrary social sin. People have been attacked for Liking tweets, supporting a center-right New York Times columnist, and for suggesting that political violence might not help win elections. Because the target is arbitrary, everyone in the cancel mob knows that it might just as easily be them in the crosshairs next time. The temporary solidarity of participating in a cancel mob isn’t true friendship; it’s a short-term alliance, and everyone knows their allies might turn against them at any moment.

Here’s how Yarrow Eady, a queer activist, described the culture on campus in 2014: “I watched what people said closely,” she explained, “scanning for objectionable content. Any infraction reflected badly on your character, and too many might put you on my blacklist.” She wasn’t alone; the entire far-left culture was one in which everyone was constantly monitored by everyone else. “Every minor heresy inches you further away from the group,” she warns. Consequently, “Groupthink becomes the modus operandi. When I was part of groups like this, everyone was on exactly the same page about a suspiciously large range of issues.” Everyone was waiting to stab everyone else in the back, and no-one felt that they could speak freely. The contrast between this and how the Montgomery bus boycott unified a marginalized people could not be more stark.

There’s also a big difference in terms of who’s participating in a genuine social justice movement versus who participates in a cancel mob. The civil rights movement brought together people from all walks of life. As King wrote:

The mass meetings also cut across class lines. The vast majority present were working people; yet there was always an appreciable number of professionals in the audience. Physicians, teachers, and lawyers sat or stood beside domestic workers and unskilled laborers. The PhDs and the no “Ds” were bound together in a common venture. The so-called “big Negroes” who owned cars and had never ridden the buses came to know the maids and the laborers who rode the buses every day. Men and women who had been separated from each other by false standards of class were now singing and praying together in a common struggle for freedom and human dignity.

In contrast, the primary participants in cancel mobs are the habitually online. It’s tough to get demographic data on cancelers, but there’s a certain privilege in being able to obsess over this stuff. A single mother working two jobs to make ends meet probably isn’t concerned about a children’s author changing her Twitter handle. Even if she did care, she’s unlikely to have the free time necessary to find and join a pile-on over the matter. Cancelers in general have a lot of free time and few enough worldly concerns that they can spare the brainpower to obsess over who Liked what tweet or who committed the latest microaggressions on Instagram. 

Cancel culture can sometimes look like a social justice movement, but far more often it’s the opposite. It divides people and instills fear. It’s generally bad for everyone, including the activists doing it.

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