Cancel Culture Is Real — But Not in the Way You Think
Note: This post is adapted from a series I originally wrote in 2021 on a now-inactive blog. The arguments still hold, so I'm consolidating and updating them here.
Cancel culture is real. I want to say that clearly at the outset, because one of the most persistent obstacles to having a useful conversation about it is the reflexive denial from people who should know better. I have watched portions of the social justice community engage in targeted harassment and coordinated ostracism of individuals — behavior structurally identical to what occurred during the McCarthy era in the United States. This is a genuine problem, and dismissing it wholesale because the right has misused the term does not make it go away.
But here is what cancel culture actually is, and what it is not.
Cancel culture refers specifically to the targeted harassment and ostracism of individuals. It is the coordinated effort to destroy someone's reputation, livelihood, or social standing — often disproportionately, often without meaningful opportunity for the target to respond, learn, or make amends. When it happens, it is a form of bullying, and it should be named as such regardless of which political tribe is doing it.
What cancel culture is not is a synonym for censorship, boycotting, or cultural change. When a company decides to rebrand a product, that is not cancel culture. When a publisher makes editorial decisions about its own catalog, that is not cancel culture. When consumers choose not to buy something, that is not cancel culture. The term "censorship" already exists, is shorter, contains one fewer syllable, and describes those situations perfectly well. Conflating cancel culture with every instance of cultural evolution dilutes the term into meaninglessness — which, ironically, makes it harder to address the real thing.
This brings me to what both sides consistently get wrong.
The right's primary error is definitional. Conservative commentators routinely invoke "cancel culture" in response to things like the Potato Head rebranding or changes to Dr. Seuss publications — situations involving no targeted harassment or ostracism of any individual. When the term is stretched to cover every cultural decision they dislike, it loses all diagnostic value. It becomes a complaint about change itself rather than an identification of a specific harmful pattern. And this misapplication gives the left an easy out: if cancel culture means "Dr. Seuss got edited," then obviously cancel culture isn't real. The right's sloppy use of the term actively undermines its own case.
The left's primary error is one of denial and excuse-making. Because the right has so thoroughly mangled the term, many on the left treat any invocation of "cancel culture" as inherently bad faith — a conservative dog whistle that doesn't point to anything real. This is convenient, because it allows the left to avoid reckoning with the targeted harassment and ostracism that does occur within its own spaces. The fact that the right misuses the term does not mean the phenomenon it properly describes doesn't exist. And the fact that bullying is done in the name of justice does not make it less bullying.
There is also a pattern worth noting in how cancel culture operates across both sides: it tends to target people who are partially aligned with the cancelers rather than direct ideological opponents. The left's cancel culture most often goes after people who are broadly progressive but who deviate on a specific issue or fail to use the correct language at the correct moment. The right's cancel culture targets RINOs — Republicans In Name Only — who break ranks on a vote or express insufficient loyalty. In both cases, the harshest punishment is reserved not for enemies but for imperfect allies. This is not coincidental. Outgroups are already outside the circle; they can be ignored. It's the person inside the circle who dissents who threatens the group's cohesion, and therefore must be made an example of.
The Dixie Chicks — now known as The Chicks — remain perhaps the most illustrative case study of everything that goes wrong in cancel culture discourse.
When the band changed their name in 2020, conservative commentators heaped scorn on them while simultaneously attributing the name change to "cancel culture." This was confusing on its face. If they believed the band had been pressured into changing their name through targeted harassment, the appropriate response would have been sympathy, not mockery. When pressed, it became clear that these commentators were not claiming the band had been subjected to cancel culture — they were claiming the band was engaging in cancel culture by changing their own name. This is definitional incoherence. A band making a voluntary decision about its own branding is not the targeted harassment and ostracism of an individual. It is simply a decision.
But here is the part that makes the example truly instructive: nearly two decades earlier, conservative audiences did engage in textbook cancel culture against the Dixie Chicks. After Natalie Maines criticized the Iraq War in 2003, the band faced coordinated harassment, death threats, radio blacklisting, and public destruction of their albums. Their careers were nearly destroyed. That was cancel culture — real, documented, and devastating. And it came from the right.
The same people who enacted one of the most visible cancel campaigns in modern American cultural history then spent years insisting that cancel culture is exclusively a left-wing phenomenon. The irony would be amusing if it weren't so instructive about how selectively the term gets applied.
What all of this points to is that cancel culture is not a partisan issue. It is a behavioral issue. It is the human tendency to punish dissent through coordinated social destruction rather than through engagement, argument, or proportionate response. It occurs on the left and on the right. It harms real people. And it will continue to be misunderstood as long as one side pretends it doesn't exist and the other side uses the label for everything it dislikes.
The path forward is not to abandon the concept — it names something real and harmful. The path forward is to use it precisely, apply it consistently, and refuse to excuse it when our own side does it.
