- Position‹3 of 4›
- Cancel culture must be cancelled
Democracy mediates different groups of people with differing viewpoints. Cancel culture upsets that balance, rejecting diversity of opinion and keeping one viewpoint in power.
The argument
Democracy is built on freedom of expression. In any democratic society, giving space to multiple perspectives underpins the health of the state, and it is the mediation of these perspectives through dialogue and other societal and governmental devices that forms the foundation of a democratic society. The argument's first step is therefore about what a democracy is made of rather than about what it permits: if the mediation of disagreement is the mechanism, then removing perspectives from circulation disables the mechanism rather than merely offending against a value. It is no surprise, then, that this formulation is threatened by the effects of cancel culture. Proponents define it as the refusal to acknowledge contrary views and, more damningly, the assumption that being accused is equal to deserving blame. That second element is what makes the practice a matter of procedure rather than of taste, since a settled equivalence between accusation and guilt removes the step at which a claim might be tested. The movement's growth, on this account, represents a shift away from democracy and establishes a witch-hunting culture whereby unpopular opinion is banished, putting societies on the road to ideological authoritarianism. Proponents hold that it is the same genre of control that Stalinist Russia used to turn government critics into "unpersons", invoked here as a description of the method, namely the removal of a person from public discourse in response to their views. The argument is careful about where it draws its line. Disagreement, and objection to others' views, is not in itself a bad thing; in fact, it forms the basis of a healthy democracy. The objection is not to criticism but to its conversion into a penalty: when disagreement becomes a crime, democracy dies. Unfortunately, proponents conclude, this is the trend caused by cancel culture today.
Premises
Counter-arguments
As mentioned elsewhere, cancel culture is not an oppressive force, but rather a means to fight that oppression. Cancel culture empowers the marginalized, and holds the people who don't respect them accountable. It is literally anti-oppression; it is about as far from white or supremacist as one can get. Most importantly, it is driven by the people, not the government; there need be no fear of, say, the White House suddenly using cancel culture in a tyrannical way.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] Freedom of expression protects speech from penalty by the state; it does not entitle a speaker to an audience, a platform or continued employment, so the withdrawal of those does not by itself show the democratic condition the premise names has been damaged. [Rejecting P2] The premise assumes what it needs to show. Criticism, boycott and withdrawn association are themselves exercises of expression, and the argument offers no way to distinguish an unfounded pile-on from an accusation that was examined and found to hold. [Rejecting P3] The Stalinist comparison turns on a distinction the argument passes over: a state can imprison and legally erase people, whereas the pressure described here comes from private individuals, employers and audiences — so the analogy attributes to their absence the coercive power of a government.