On cancel culture: How our left-liberal politics is not leftist but rightist

Cancel culture is the guillotine without the revolution. It is morality, which enforces social norms, without ethics, which experiments with innovations to them. It is the comfort of knowing without the risks of thinking. It is policing instead of politics. It is a way for a dying society to imagine itself reborn. It is the closure of the mind anxious about every opening. It is the bourgeois and corporate alternative to social movements. It is right-wing liberalism pretending to be left-wing radicalism. It is not radical but only extreme, since radicalism goes to the root and the sin it searches souls to see is at the root of none of the forms of oppression or mistaken ways of opposing them. It achieves its purpose when no interesting thought goes unpunished, art and science are replaced with cynical journalism, and the life of the mind is destroyed. This is the secondary benefit from its main purpose, which is to appropriate the projects of the political left in a discourse that destroys it. It makes the political personal. It is corporate America's alternative to social change.

If the Nazis had only learned from today's American liberals, the Holocaust might have continued in the background while citizens who speak ill of their Jewish neighbors are blamed for the crimes of the state. Why not imprison both the oppressed and the oppressors?

The politics that has become a psychology can enforce its desiderata, but it is no politics. Injustice is not a psychological problem. Doctors, therapists, and spiritual healers and teachers cannot oppose it. If racism were a crime caused by an attitude ('prejudice'), it would have easily ended long ago. Injustice is not disease. Societies can be changed and improved, but not healed or repaired. Abnormal psychology and behavior, or vice and sin, are irrelevant to any politics that isn't.

There is a work of thinking that is relevant to any political will worthy of the name. The purpose of cancel culture, and leff-liberal social justice warrior identity politics generally, is to make that thinking too costly for most people to want to engage in it. What if along the path of thinking and experimenting with possibilities there was a risk of mistakes? If they are to be avoided at all costs, the result will be a conservatism, and it will benefit companies by limiting the risks of lawsuits. To secure this good, many companies will in exchange offer more berths to people with handicaps in their identities. Step right up and get your "Don't oppress or tread of me!" t-shirt.