At the 2020 Republican National Convention, for example, numerous speakers, including President Trump, addressed cancel culture directly, and one delegate resolution even explicitly targeted the phenomenon, describing it as having “grown into erasing of history, encouraging lawlessness, muting citizens, and violating free exchange of ideas, thoughts, and speech.”Īctually ending someone’s career through the power of public backlash is difficult. To many people, this process of publicly calling for accountability, and boycotting if nothing else seems to work, has become an important tool of social justice - a way of combatting, through collective action, some of the huge power imbalances that often exist between public figures with far-reaching platforms and audiences, and the people and communities their words and actions may harm.īut conservative politicians and pundits have increasingly embraced the argument that cancel culture, rather than being a way of speaking truth to power, has spun out of control and become a senseless form of social media mob rule. Then come the calls to cancel the person - that is, to effectively end their career or revoke their cultural cachet, whether through boycotts of their work or disciplinary action from an employer. A public backlash, often fueled by politically progressive social media, ensues. The rise of “cancel culture” and the idea of canceling someone coincides with a familiar pattern: A celebrity or other public figure does or says something offensive. Within the turbulent past few years, the idea that a person can be “canceled” - in other words, culturally blocked from having a prominent public platform or career - has become a polarizing topic of debate. See Vox’s 2021 explainer on the cancel culture debate for more on the issue. This look at the origins and mainstreaming of cancel culture has continued relevance, but the discourse around cancel culture has evolved. Editor’s note, May 10, 2021: The information in this story was last updated in August 2020.
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