This is a worthwhile counter-perspective, but it largely misses the point in terms of which aspects of Cancel Culture agitate and even disturb people. https://twitter.com/JeffreyASachs/status/1280659268069462021

If the folks being “cancelled” were consistently racists of the type mentioned in this thread, the complaints would be much less pronounced.

Few are against holding folks to account for indefensible caricatures of entire racial groups.

To the degree that shifting cultural norms are more effective in rooting out racists from powerful institutions: good.

But the current climate goes well beyond extending existing norms into every nook and cranny; it creates an atmosphere that quells dissent from the prevailing progressive orthodoxy and wields the norms of a minority faction over the majority.

Steven Pinker was just targeted for engaging in wrongthink with respect to racism in policing.

James Bennet dared to let a sitting US Senator echo a majority opinion.

Emmanuel Cafferty made an appeasing gesture at an aggressor before he (a Latino) was accused of being a White Supremacist.

Progressive mobs sought to punish all three of these guys not on the basis of prevailing norms that the vast majority of us share, but on the basis of norms created and maintained within a small faction of the left.

And these aren’t fringe, one-off cases.

This cultural climate now extends beyond the corner offices of media firms and into the daily lives of average people. Many of us have seen these episodes with our own eyes without the need for Twitter to mediate the message.

Holding people to account on the basis of accepted norms is a good thing. Norms evolving over time through persuasion and an updated understanding of the world is a good thing as well.

But allowing an ideological movement to weaponize institutions in order to rapidly enforce the norms of a minority faction is a bad thing.

The latter of those is the impetus for the resistance to #CancelCulture.

Anyway, I think Jeff’s point is: even if you’re frustrated with some distasteful side effects, don’t lose sight of the fact that changing norms have brought forth some good things. Maybe so.

But for a movement to be sustainable it has to produce a total set of results that is mostly positive and it seems to me that that is very much in question right now.