People who complain about “cancel culture” should always clarify what they oppose. Using any one term to frame such varied controversies hides the actual lines of disagreement. One faction invokes the term cancel culture as shorthand for a range of complaints: for instance, that figures such as the political analyst David Shor and Emmanuel Cafferty, a California utility-company worker, lost their jobs after innocent acts that provoked unreasonable offense in others that universities have unjustly punished hundreds of scholars for protected speech in recent years or that so many Americans are self-censoring that deliberative democracy is threatened.Īnother faction dismisses complaints about cancel culture and reframes the status quo as “ accountability culture.” This shorthand encompasses what many regard as long-overdue consequences for figures such as Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, two entertainment-industry giants credibly accused by multiple women of sexual assault, and the former NBA owner Donald Sterling, who was pushed out of the league after recordings of his racist comments surfaced. The majority of Americans who insist that “cancel culture” is a problem and the minority who counter that it is a fraud, a myth, or a moral panic are too often talking past one another.
