On Cancel Culture

Some Brief Thoughts

Photo by Unseen Histories on Unsplash

Cancel culture was always a tactical disaster masquerading as moral progress. I worried about this years ago—privately, in safe conversations, because I knew it might be career suicide to critique these tactics openly. Everything I worried about has now come to pass. Now we're watching a reactionary right practice their own version of cancellation—backed by federal law enforcement, ICE raids, and systematic state persecution—while the left scrambles to figure out how to resist with muscles they've allowed to atrophy.

The original sin wasn't seeking social justice—it was abandoning persuasion for coercion. Instead of asking “how do we convince more people that LGBTQ rights matter?” the movement asked “how do we make it professionally suicidal to oppose LGBTQ rights?” They chose fear over conviction, intimidation over inspiration, punishment over the hard work of changing minds.

I watched this unfold from inside Silicon Valley, where I—a cultural liberal genuinely committed to equality and universal human dignity—became afraid of engaging in good faith discussions about tactics and strategy. The few times I got brave enough to confront people in my life about their approach, I was met with curious moral preening: "If you don't understand why that position is transphobic, it's not my job to educate you." Or the more shorthand dismissal: "Check your privilege." To be clear, I was not their political enemy.

When natural allies become afraid to contribute strategic thinking, when “it's not my job to educate you” becomes the response to good-faith engagement, you've created a movement that can only function through intimidation rather than democratic persuasion. They treated tactical criticism from committed allies as moral contamination requiring immediate dismissal rather than valuable input from people whose support they desperately needed.

The result was predictable: left-leaning university professors terrified of their own students, natural allies driven away through purity testing, and an entire political movement that lost the capacity for the kind of democratic persuasion that creates lasting social change. They became so accustomed to using cultural power to silence opposition that they forgot how to make arguments, build coalitions, or treat opponents as fellow citizens whose minds might be changed.

Martin Luther King Jr. didn't defeat segregation by getting segregationists fired. He defeated segregation by making segregation morally indefensible to people who weren't already convinced. He understood that sustainable progress requires winning hearts and minds, not just eliminating platforms and livelihoods. When people change their behavior out of genuine conviction rather than fear, the change lasts. When they change out of fear, they're just waiting for the power dynamics to shift so they can retaliate.

And now the power dynamics have shifted. The people who were silenced, deplatformed, and fired didn't disappear—they went underground, got angrier, and eventually voted for someone who promised to make their tormentors pay. The tactics that felt so powerful when wielded from positions of institutional control have been captured by people who have no interest in social justice whatsoever.

What we're witnessing now isn't moral equivalence. The right has taken the normalized practice of destroying people's livelihoods for political opinions and weaponized it through state power. What started as social consequences administered by activists has become government persecution administered by federal agents. FBI raids against political critics, university funding threats for ideological non-compliance, visa denials for social media posts—this is cancel culture with federal enforcement. It is fascistic and it’s terrifying.

The hypocrisy is obvious and infuriating. The same people who spent years screaming about free speech while building infrastructure for systematic oppression now wield the tools of cancellation with state violence behind them. But their hypocrisy doesn't change the tactical reality: the left normalized political persecution as an acceptable substitute for political persuasion.

Now, when building broad coalitions is literally a matter of survival for vulnerable communities, the left has lost the muscle memory for democratic engagement. They don't know how to make arguments that persuade the unpersuaded, welcome imperfect allies, or treat tactical disagreements as anything other than moral betrayals.

Without state power to protect those facing elimination, the only practical defense is building the largest possible popular coalition. That requires abandoning everything about the approach that got us here. It means treating potential allies with respect rather than subjecting them to purity tests. It means making the tent as big as possible rather than as pure as possible.

The stakes are too high for tactical incompetence disguised as moral righteousness. Democracy is a coalition sport, and it's time to remember how to play it—before we lose the game entirely. And we are certainly in danger of that.

We need democratic solidarity above all in this moment. We cannot allow liberty to go silently into the night.

Yes, it is your job to convince people. It’s my job. It’s all of our jobs—to turn as many people towards their better angels before the sun sets on this experiment in democracy. And it’s not going to be easy. But we must. We owe it to the civil rights leaders and activists who did that hard work in the past, and we owe it to our posterity to leave the world better than we found it. That’s our job. A meaningful and important task, I think.

This is not victim blaming. It is not a vindication of right-wing reactionary arguments. We can agree their free speech activism was not in good faith at this point. Clearly.

The reality is that we have fellow citizens who disagree with us, and unless we’re going to start shooting at each other—and I really think we should avoid that—we’re going to need to start having uncomfortable conversations with people we don’t normally talk to. Posting on social media isn’t going to cut it.

We are falling now. And the ground approaches.