A Leftist Criticism of Cancel Culture

Cancel culture is not a new phenomenon nor is it exclusive to the left but attempting to shun or exile someone to the fringes of society goes against every ideal we should strive towards. While it may come from a well-meaning place, it is anathema to the qualities of love, empathy, tolerance, and change, we talk about in the left and the objectives of cancel culture can be achieved by other alternatives. It might not have a glaringly obvious effect when used against celebrities or their careers, but can be devastating to the lives and careers of people especially those trying to build a public facing career. Furthermore, engaging in cancel culture is pointless and only serves to strengthen the political right by forcing people to socialize within the only spaces where they are tolerated, generally found within the right. To build any sort of meaningful change, and achieve unity on the left, we must move past cancel culture focusing on the potential every individual has to improve and change. Also spoiler warning for episodes 3 to 6 of Star Wars, also The Last of Us (video game), I reference some plot points in this piece, and despite hating cancel culture, I would probably cancel myself if I ended up spoiling Star Wars without a warning. I will tag the spoilers though.

Whenever, I think about cancel culture and my views on it, I can’t help but feel like a complete outsider to a large part of the left and sometimes even scared to bring it up. It’s why I’ve never written about cancel culture before this year or shared any post about it on social media. Cancel culture is something I used to deny the existence of, claiming that it was merely people in positions of power facing consequences and accountability for. I remember being extremely disappointed in bands or artists when they released songs criticizing social justice citing how everyone wants to be perfect and don’t look at themselves, comedians for criticizing cancel culture since I used to think they were completely misunderstanding the movement, anyone that disagreed with me really. And while I still don’t agree with every argument against cancel culture, I extend several arguments against it since I now realize that the only person I am disappointed in is myself for thinking that people are only worth respecting when they believe in the same issues I do. By extending this arguments, I hope to make the point that although the people cancelling others have good intentions, there is not one instance you can point to where cancelling an individual would be justified.

Contextualizing My Thoughts On Cancel Culture

As a starting point to rant about cancel culture, it’s important for me to define what I mean by being cancelled. And this is something that’s really difficult to define. We don’t have a book of every cancelled individual in the world for a set of pre-determined wrongs, the closest system that exists to that is the criminal system and the prison system. We probably have communities on platforms such as Reddit or 4Chan (reputable mediums to dispense justice, I know) going along the lines of “this person is wrong” and I can’t support them. Obviously, every person has different ideas of what wrong is worth cancelling someone for but when there’s a sizeable portion of society saying that a person has done something wrong, it might be safe to consider them cancelled. Now the consequences the cancelled might face may vary and I’ll address this in the next part.

When we cancel someone, we say this person did something we consider wrong (but probably isn’t illegal because then we wouldn’t need to cancel them to have them face consequences because the justice system already exists) and we want them to be held “accountable” for their wrongs. We believe that we can no longer support them and expect people who we consider good and still respectable that have associated with them in the past to denounce them and ignore whatever personal attachment they may have. We don’t care if they lose their job because they are facing the consequences of their actions.

I am fully aware that cancel culture is not a new phenomenon and that the “right” is capable of cancelling people too. People were quite literally physically exiled from societies when their views or status was deemed too radical or different from the society they lived in. Pop-culture and the stories we love are also filled with examples of exile and repentance, (Star Wars spoilers follow), sometimes self-imposed such as Yoda in Star Wars who exiles himself to Dagobah after failing to defeat the Sith. But like Yoda then going on to train Luke, the people exiled or cancelled today still have a role to play in society. And like Luke going on to defeat the Empire, this role can be used to achieve desirable things. Yes, the right cancels people and companies too. But I don’t love the ideals of the right (not saying I think anyone I consider to be right leaning should be cancelled either), my criticism of leftist cancel culture comes from respect for most of its practices and qualities.

Why Cancel Culture Hurts Individuals

While we don’t care if we hurt the emotions of the people we cancel and sardonically go “Oh boohoo, won’t anyone think of the privileged?” But when we consider hurting the “privileged”, some objections come to mind. I believe leftism is grounded on the values of love and empathy towards every human being, we seek to redistribute wealth “from each according to his ability to each according to his need” and allocate power on progressive principles. Yet, when it comes to cancel culture, we dehumanize the individuals we cancel and say that we are acting to ensure the “problematic” (Quick sidenote: thank you Bo Burnham for creating that amazing work of art that will forever be stuck in my head whenever I think of the word) face consequences for the problems they cause. Alternatively, we also have a lot of people on the left that contradict this position and say cancel culture doesn’t really have any consequence because celebrities often go on to find lucrative deals and have successful careers even after being cancelled. Both of these positions are wrong.

First, we usually consider celebrities when we think of cancel culture. We point to Dave Chapelle, to JK Rowling, to several other widely popular celebrities you are probably thinking of while reading this, who have gone on to hold wildly successful public careers while being cancelled, making more money than I could ever imagine wanting to make. But it’s important to remember they are not the only people affected by cancel culture. These are the people who are already famous enough to the point where cancel culture could not feasibly end their careers since they have a platform big enough or a reach wide enough where many people will ignore, be unaware of, or even side with the cancelled celebrity. If JKR gets cancelled and Twitter and Reddit decide they no longer want to financially support her, they will survive because there’ll always be parents and grandparents who still want to buy the new video game from her wildly successful IPs for their children. There will always be people who don’t care or even support them (either because they agree with their views or out of some sort of contrarian defiance to a mainstream status quo). Here’s whose career it does hurt though: struggling artists/content creators/public figures who rely on an audience’s support on their Patreon to pay their bills. This won’t be PewDiePie who has a fanbase so big you are bound to have people who support him or even agree with the things he’s been cancelled for just because of how massive the world is. This probably will be someone you’ve never heard of because they’ve been cancelled and isolated from society to the point where they don’t have that level of reach anymore and have lost friends, jobs, connections, family, and everything else someone starting a career wants. I hope I don’t have to explain how this might be harmful to someone’s mental health, notwithstanding every other thing they lose. Isolation is one of the scariest things in the world for anyone (The Last of Us spoiler coming up). That’s why the scene from The Last of Us where Ellie talks about her biggest fear being ending up alone hits home for so many people. Individuals need community that accepts them and how could a society that requires people to be isolated for the course of justice ever achieve it? How can an individual possibly change when wide communities of people refuse to acknowledge them?

While celebrities may not have a financial impact as much as people at the start of their careers who might have lost their fanbase or their jobs, it’s only dehumanizing to assume their mental health can’t be affected just as much, if not more. This is because with fame and popularity, there’s also a lot more people who know about you which exposes you to a lot more danger and death threats. Once again, death threats are not only associated with leftist cancel culture, they have sadly been a part of society forever (notably see Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses) but death threats are a part of cancel culture. While I unequivocally disagree with every view JK Rowling has on gender that I’ve come across, it’s a fact that she has received death threats for it and to see contempt on that level is scary to say the least. Now you might argue that a transphobic argument hurts trans individuals (and you’d obviously be right) but the harm she has caused doesn’t warrant her getting death threats or having to lose relationships or having it affect her mental health. Here, we might be getting into the territory of the idea of retribution (you might call it consequences) and the role it should play in justice which is probably the topic for another piece but I think we can generally agree that it is uncontroversial to say that the effects of trying to isolate someone is bound to hurt the person being isolated. Now you might say that isolating someone for doing something wrong might help them see their mistakes and apologize but I argue that this is not true in the next section as I talk about how isolation is likely to make people unsympathetic to the left.

Why Cancel Culture Hurts The Left

Moving apart from the effect cancel culture has on the individual it targets (which really cannot be understated), cancel culture does nothing but substantially weaken the position of the left within the political aisle. There are mainly two points relating to cancel culture that I want to talk about here.

The first is along the lines of “Political correctness gone insane/this is the future that the left wants/everyone’s a snowflake and easily offended these days and you can’t joke about anything anymore, etc.” Now this is usually laughed off as a meme within the left and you might argue that it is rightly so. A lot of these terms have lost their meaning because of how vaguely they are used by people who like them who really use it to point at any criticism they don’t like in society. However, my point is that these arguments very much exist in society and it should be of concern to anyone that engages in social movements because these arguments alienate a wide portion of society. Now you might think “Who cares? Who wants to work with them? These people are intolerant and you can’t tolerate intolerance.” But the funny thing about democracy is that even intolerant people are allowed an opinion.

Even if you think someone is intolerant, they can still participate in society, vote for another intolerant person in an election or run for election themselves. And they might succeed unless of course you form a majority that outvotes them (there are also other more extreme methods you might consider such as imprisoning intolerant people but are you comfortable giving any state or individual that much power and how will you find others to agree on who actually is intolerant?) and you have less chances of forming that majority if you can’t find solidarity with the people you disagree with on certain issues but agree on other issues. And when the people you consider intolerant participate in society, a society they consider insanely politically correct, a society that cancels people they admire for saying anything deemed offensive and they see a certain political ideology (broadly leftism) cancelling the people they admire, they will obviously point their finger at leftism as a whole and alienate not only themselves but also potentially other people from leftist ideals they might even agree with that would substantially change society and offer better protections to the marginalized. An example I like to use here is whether you would rather cancel or punish a homophobic person or ensure a socialist politician gets into power that would fund LGBTQIA+ centres so that these centre are able to receive better social funding and resources to help more queer people that might need protection from homophobic threats that very much exist in society and warrant protection. Yes, a homophobic person is, in all likelihood, not going to vote for a form of socialism that better funds LGBTQIA+ centre but they at least won’t be more alienated from the left than they already are and alienate more people in turn. They might even agree with this socialist politician on other issues and vote for them out of self-interest if they hadn’t been alienated by cancel culture.

My other concern regarding cancel culture and the left builds off the first and is about how much the left weakens itself when it cancels other leftists. Because a lot of the people we cancel on the left are in fact leftists who probably want the same things you do, in the exact same way you do, but have been misunderstood or denied the chance to come back from a thing they regret saying in the past. Here we also need to talk about the need for pluralism within the left. In order to be as inclusive and more appealing the left needs to have as many viewpoints on various issues as possible. We need to actually work with other leftists on the things we agree with, instead of looking for things we disagree on and using these as an excuse to disassociate with them. This unity is the only way we can hope to achieve change as it will make the left more accessible but will also improve the left because the only way our views can be stronger is if they are challenged constantly, by both ourselves and others. The people that have influenced my views on the topic of cancel culture the most are Clementine Morrigan as well as Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints). They were and continue to be leftists following their cancellation but have been associated with varying levels of controversy. And both of them as well as every other remotely controversial leftist influencer I follow talks about how once they are met with any controversy, their friends and families are targeted and anyone they have associated with in the past are asked to denounce them, their work is ignored and any positive reference to it is criticized due to the controversy surrounding them. If this is how the left treats its own and harasses socialist individuals who have actively done work to further the cause and have the potential to change the minds of people we need to form a political majority, then we aren’t just shooting ourselves in the foot, we’re shooting ourselves in the face and then asking the right to finish off any chance we might ever have to form a democratic majority as we alienate more people from our cause than ever before.

Closing Thoughts and Rants

There’s so much to say about cancel culture that I could never write about it all in one piece regardless of how much I write. For instance, I haven’t even touched on the problems with false accusations along quotes and actions being taken out of context. But in this piece, I have hoped to raise some of my biggest arguments as to why we need to move away from cancel culture entirely to achieve success on any of the issues we work towards. We’re either going against those very ideas of kindness and empathy by harming individuals we consider controversial and the people closely associated with them and we also work against ourselves as we do the political right’s work ourselves and push away people who would potentially support us by shunning others or silencing other socialists. I’m not naïve to say we should all get along with people who have the potential to violate our own safety in a very direct way and march together to overthrow capitalism. We already have a criminal justice system that tries to separate the people that might want to do that. But as far as possible, we should work together on the issues we all agree with each other on to maximize our chances of bringing about the progressive change we all want to see.