Discriminatory

I was talking with a conservative acquaintance about "cancel culture." Like many conservatives, he was up in arms about it, and the unfairness of it all. So I asked him just what was so bad about it. He replied that it was a form of unfair discrimination, and something that people should be protected against.

Then I reminded him that he opposed antidiscrimination laws, and believed that boycotts were how society should deal with people who behaved in ways they disapproved of, rather than empowering the state to use force to enforce norms.

The conversation went downhill from there. In the end, the whole thing reminded me of a line that I'd read in The Economist a few years ago.

Unfortunately, notes Jacob Mchangama, a Danish lawyer and free-speech advocate who regularly attends the Oslo Freedom Forum, most people are passionate only about the rights of people who think the same way as themselves.

I think that it's basic human nature, but I do find it to be interesting. "Cancellation," I think, hits the same nerve for some people that "cultural appropriation" does for others. It threatens a sense of personal significance and meaning by reminding them that, at any point, they can be deemed expendable. And without them, society will go on as if nothing had happened. Which is pretty much exactly what happens. That's what makes cancellation, especially for those people who hadn't made it into the ranks of the independently wealthy prior to their downfalls, so devastating. When brought to bear, the power of even a relatively small segment of society can simply erase a person as if they had never been; and resist the efforts of others to prevent that erasure. And I think that conservatives have come to fear (rationally or not) that fate befalling them.

Part of that fear is, I think, completely irrational. It doesn't take that large a group of people to support another person, and cushion them from the worst of the consequences. But that's part of the point, I think. What makes cancellation such a bugbear on the American political Right is that it plays into that idea that only cultural dominance can protect them. While the numbers of conservatives in the United States is not small, many people act as if it's positively minuscule. If one views society as kill or be killed, not being strong enough to kill is to be weak enough to be at the mercy of those around you.

Another thing strikes me as ironic about the conservative reaction to cancel culture. When I was younger, one of the conservative knocks on liberalism was over the latter's embrace of moral relativism. This was seen as an unwillingness to call out wrong when it was plainly obvious. It's now become a case of being careful of what one wishes for, I think, and it seems to place conservatives in the position of asking that others be less strident in their moral judgements.

In any event, this is not going to be a permanent state of affairs. I'm curious to see what follows it.