In the West, a hallmark of the right, at least before Trump, is its love of free and unencumbered commerce, which includes a distaste for regulations, a hatred of tariffs and scorn for anyone or anything that may inhibit Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market. This reveals the contradiction, or even double standard, committed by the right in its dismissal of cancel culture, and the left in its embrace. And if we agree on this description of what it means to cancel someone, we should note that to cancel is “to stop supporting” the offender, not to legally ban their work or fine them. This means no longer reading what they write, listening to or watching what they create, or enjoying what they produce.” Implicit in this definition is that the cancelee is being deprived of making money from the sales of the product or intellectual property that made him or her famous enough to be vulnerable to cancelation in the first place. The Merriam-Webster website states that to cancel someone is “to stop supporting them or their work. An important distinction between the general arguments on either side of the debate is that the left’s take is in line with its past political philosophy, while the right has abandoned some of its bedrock ideas in its demonization of cancelation. And the left is less repelled by cancel culture, as it has long been willing to accept a certain curtailment of free speech in the furtherance of its stated goals of tolerance and inclusivity.īut the issue is more complicated than this rough configuration describes. The right tends to attack cancel culture as yet another liberal plot to quash free speech and force the whole world to embrace their moralizing politically correct agenda. Judging by history, it was easy to predict how the battle lines of this issue would be drawn between the right and left. Sometimes people are canceled for crimes for which they’ve been convicted (Weinstein, Cosby), alleged crimes for which they were acquitted (Jackson), alleged crimes for which they were never indicted (O’Reilly, Allen), offending the sensibilities of broad swaths of the public (Carlson) or for being a vocal supporter of Donald Trump (West). Rowling, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby and Kanye West, just to name ten of the dozens that could make this sentence even longer. It’s safe to say everyone reading this knows – and probably admires or once admired – at least one personality famous in Germany and around the world who to a greater or less degree has been cancelled: Michael Jackson, Kevin Spacey, Mel Gibson, Harvey Weinstein, Bill O’Reilly, Tucker Carlson, J.K. But how is cancel culture reflected in the free markets of advanced capitalist systems? And, in particular, if wealth and profit continue to be determined by the natural forces of supply and demand, then what are people on the right still complaining about? And these same venues give near-immediacy to the cancellation of a person or group that runs afoul of a critical mass of media socializers. The fact that this old practice has been given a fresh name is a reflection of today’s political polarization and the heightened sensitivities of those at either extreme – as well as the fact that the internet and the collective social media allow for new ideas, or really new spins on old ideas, to spread like wildfire. “Cancel culture” – or sometimes “call-out culture” – is a new term for the ancient phenomenon of ostracizing a person or group for behavior that a certain number of others (not always a majority of others) find to be beyond the pale. There’s a new buzzterm in Western politics, culture and media, and it should come to no one’s surprise that it’s also a trigger for both sides of the ever-hardening left-right ideological divide.
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