2/19/21
America, conservatives will tell you, is under siege by “cancel culture.” What they won’t tell you is that they couldn’t be happier about it, since it gives them a handy comeback to any criticism, and helps feed their supporters’ sense of victimization. In short, any time you’re being criticized in a way you don’t like, you can just say you’re being “canceled.” This will always find a ready audience with Republicans, because they agree with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio)’s claim that cancel culture “is the most dangerous thing happening in our country today.” Republicans who stood up against Trump have indeed received fierce attacks from within their party, everything from letters of condemnation to formal censure to death threats. But that doesn’t mean they’ve been canceled. After all, they still have their jobs (as does Cruz). Whether you think a failure to support Trump is a good reason to vote against a candidate, nobody has an inherent right to win their next election. There’s no question that we’re in a time when people — both the famous and the obscure — are more likely than ever to incur consequences for things they’ve said or done. There’s also no question that in some cases it’s long overdue, and in other cases it can be excessive or unfair, with someone losing their job over a misinterpreted joke on Twitter.
For some a history of bigotry is a reason for you to be canceled; for others it’s criticizing Trump. The right, however, routinely makes, “Don’t cancel me!” an all-purpose defense to excuse any misdeed. And this has been many years in the making. Long before the phrase “cancel culture” existed, conservatives were complaining that they were constantly being scolded by censorious liberals wielding false accusations. Trump understood this. A big part of his appeal was that he promised the GOP base liberation from “political correctness,” the term that has now been replaced by “cancel culture.” Trump said, in so many words, To hell with that. He told them that not only is it okay to be racist and sexist and xenophobic, but that you should do so proudly and loudly, and he’d show you how. To voters who had never heard that from a politician, it was thrilling. This was what the late Rush Limbaugh said for a couple of decades: You should be able to say whatever you want, no matter how offensive, and if the libs didn’t like it then you should revel in their dismay. For all their faux outrage, nobody is more pleased to see the latest excess of cancel culture than Republican politicians and the conservative media, because it gives them plenty of material to work with, to stoke their audiences’ sense of victimization. But if it didn’t exist, conservatives would have invented it.
