Commentary
A few weeks ago, Sharon Osbourne, cancel culture victim and former co-host of CBS’s daytime talk show “The Talk,”
went on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to sound the alarm about the “thousands of people” who have been fired for deviating from left-wing orthodoxy in the workplace.
Her concern is justified. The number of people fired for making statements or expressing opinions—sometimes publicly, sometimes privately—that violate the moral code of social justice is not easily counted. Some have even been
driven to suicide.
Many contend that cancel culture is simply giving a voice to marginalized people and holding the powerful accountable for their words. But is this actually true?
It would be more accurate to think of cancel culture as a tool that a small number of wealthy, privileged people use to go after other wealthy, privileged people. The reality is that very few people participate in cancel culture (that is, trying to get people fired or deplatformed for expressing non-politically correct views), and the vast majority of Americans oppose it.
According to a landmark 2018 study of 8,000 Americans across the political spectrum called “Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape,” (
pdf) 80 percent of Americans across the ideological spectrum agreed that “political correctness is a problem in our country.”
This view is held by 87 percent of Hispanics, 82 percent of Asians, and three-quarters of African Americans. The perspective that political correctness is a problem is shared by large majorities of six of the seven ideological groups that the report studied, ranging from Devoted Conservatives (on the far right) to Traditional Liberals (the second-farthest-left group).
If you say that political correctness has gone too far, you’re unlikely to support cancel culture in practice—say, by trying to get someone fired for
tweeting #IStandWithJKRowling.
But there’s one group that largely supports political correctness: Progressive Activists, the farthest left group that the “Hidden Tribes” study identified. Only 30 percent of Progressive Activists said that political correctness is a problem.
If the folks canceling people for heterodox tweets are giving a voice to anyone, it’s these Progressive Activists.
So who are the Progressive Activists? They’re
overwhelmingly likely to be white, wealthy, and educated. Eighty percent of them are white, compared to 69 percent of Americans overall. A quarter of them earn $100,000 per year or more, compared to just 13 percent of Americans overall. Progressive Activists are less than half as likely to earn under $20,000 per year as the average American, and twice as likely as the average American to have completed college.
Only 3 percent of Progressive Activists sampled were African-American, compared to 12 percent of the nation overall.
The idea that cancel culture would be driven by educated elites makes sense. First, many cancelings happen on Twitter. As Jesse Singal
notes, if you’re going to be active enough on Twitter to find dissenters and engage in pile-ons, “you either need a relatively leisurely life, a job where you’re already at a computer or on your phone most of the day and can tweet without getting in trouble with your boss, or both.”
In other words, spending tons of time on Twitter relies on a level of privilege that already makes cancelers unrepresentative of marginalized people in pretty substantial ways.
People who cancel others also have a very specific worldview, which is the product of education and privilege. This worldview tends to be hyper-focused on inequity and social justice. As Angel Eduardo, director of messaging and editorial for the
Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR) and a strong critic of cancel culture says, cancelers actually do have good intentions.
“These people care deeply about justice, fairness, and protecting those who have been historically (and presently) mistreated, marginalized, and silenced,” Eduardo told us in an interview.
But funneling a commitment to fighting injustice into getting someone fired over a tweet or a joke in a comedy club requires a very specific worldview.
Second, you have to see heterodox speech as an existential threat. This requires a
lack of perspective that primarily comes from people who have never had to face real injustice.
Eduardo asks a poignant question to help folks understand the mindset of cancelers:
“If you walked into work one day and saw the literal devil sitting in a chair, would you just carry on with your business [or would you cancel him]?”
The idea is that almost all of us would try to deplatform the Literal Embodiment of Evil; we just disagree on where the line is that demarcates evil from harmless words.
But the only way to see non-liberal tweeters as “the literal devil” is if you’ve never encountered actual devils. Once you’ve grappled with poverty or real injustice, it’s much harder to convince yourself that JK Rowling’s latest “
transphobic” tweet represents Evil Embodied.
People will continue to debate whether cancel culture is simply “holding people accountable” or a toxic, postmodern ritual in which privileged people seek to punish and humiliate others by calling them out publicly for moral and social speech transgressions.
What’s clear, as psychologist Jonathan Haidt has noted, is that this illiberal culture is built on a broken conception of social justice and has the effect of constricting free speech and thought.
“There’s no forgiveness,” Haidt
said of the cancel culture movement early in its genesis. “Everyone’s on eggshells and this doesn’t help anyone.”
Many may disagree with Haidt, which is perfectly fine. But if they do, odds are they are white, highly educated, and privileged—and probably not big fans of Sharon Osbourne.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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