Enmity and argumentative strategies for legitimizing cancel culture

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World (London: Constable, 2022), p. 37.

2. Pippa Norris, ‘Closed Minds? Is a ‘Cancel culture’ stifling academic freedom and intellectual debate in political science?’ Faculty Research Working Paper Series (Harvard Kennedy School, 2020), p. 2. accessed August 26, 2021. www.hks.harvard.edu,file:///C:/Users/dyrberg/Downloads/RWP20-025_Norris.pdf.

3. Wikipedia, ‘Cancel Culture’. accessed August 18, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture.

4. Merriam-Webster. ‘What it means to get “canceled”’. accessed August 27, 2021. https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/cancel-culture-words-were-watching.

5. Pop Culture Dictionary. ‘Cancel culture’. accessed August 27, 2021. https://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-culture/cancel-culture/.

6. Andrew Doyle, Free Speech and Why It Matters (London: Constable, 2021), p. 25, p. 63.

7. Kenneth Dantzler Corbin, Cancel Culture: A Modern form of Ostracism (Independently published, 2021), p. 17, p. 27.

8. John McWhorter, ‘Academics Are Really, Really Worried About Their Freedom’, The Atlantic, 1 September 2020. accessed August 19, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/academics-are-really-really-worried-about-their-freedom/615724/.

9. Katie Roche, Idiots: How Identity Politics is Destroying the Left (Katie Roche: Kindle Direct Publishing, 2021), p. 42, p. 98.

10. Ligaya Mishan, ‘The long and tortured history of cancel culture’, (The New York Times Style Magazine, 3 December 2020). accessed 19 August. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/t-magazine/cancel-culture-history.html. See also Alexander Beiner, ‘Sleeping Woke: Cancel Culture and Simulated Religion’, (Rebel Wisdom, 17 July 2020). Retrieved August 24, 2021. https://medium.com/rebel-wisdom/sleeping-woke-cancel-culture-and-simulated-religion-5f96af2cc107; McWhorter 2020, op.cit.

11. Doyle, Free Speech, op.cit., p. 219; Frank Furedi, What’s Happened To The University? A Sociological Exploration of Its Infantilisation (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 78–80, p. 137, p. 152.

12. Aja Romano, ‘The second wave of “cancel culture”: How the concept has evolved to mean different things to different people’, (Vox, 5 May 2021). accessed August 18, 2021. https://www.vox.com/22384308/cancel-culture-free-speech-accountability-debate.

13. Meredith D. Clark, ‘DRAG THEM: A brief etymology of so-called “cancel culture”’, (Communication and the Public, 16 October 2020). accessed August 19, 2021. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2057047320961562.

14. Eve Ng, Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis (Champ: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Ch. 4 looks at the links between the Right’s conservatism, nationalism, and whiteness, and holds that criticism of social justice discourses/actions can be led back to the defense of this trinity.

15. Mishan, ‘The Long and Tortured History’, op.cit.; see also Romano, ‘The Second Wave’, op.cit.

16. Shamira Ibrahim, ‘In Defense of Cancel Culture’, (Vice, 4 April 2019). accessed August 19, 2021. https://www.vice.com/en/article/vbw9pa/what-is-cancel-culture-twitter-extremely-online.

17. Sarah Manavis, ‘“Cancel culture” does not exist’, (New Statesman, 16 July 2020). accessed August 27, 2021. https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2020/07/cancel-culture-does-not-exist; Romano 2021 op.cit. For a more nuanced discussion of the pros and cons of cancel culture, see Virginia Mathers, Celebrities and Cancel Culture: Biographies of Stars Called Out on Social Media (Wroclaw: Aronia Press, 2021), pp. 139–57. Whilst celebrities do relatively well because they are well known, there are numerous examples of other less known people who do not manage that well.

18. Mishan, ‘The Long and Tortured History’, op.cit.

19. Robin James, ‘Who Does Cancel Culture Serve?’, (Jezebel, 5 April, 2021). accessed August 19, 2021. https://jezebel.com/who-does-cancel-culture-serve-1846481257.

20. Ravi Chandra, ‘Don’t Decry Cancel Culture – Decry Cultural Rigidity’, (Psychology Today, 7 February 2021). accessed November 9, 2021. https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-pacific-heart/202102/don-t-decry-cancel-culture-decry-cultural-rigidity.

21. This type of argument has an affinity with the cultural backlash theory put forward by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

22. John Stoehr, ‘Censorship Is Now so Broadly Defined as to Mean Anyone Disagreeing with Me Is Censoring Me’, (Public Seminar, 26 July 2021). accessedNovember 11, 2021. https://publicseminar.org/2021/07/censorship-is-now-so-broadly-defined-as-to-mean-anyone-disagreeing-with-me-is-censoring-me/.

23. Clyde McGrady, ‘The strange journey of “cancel,” from a Black-culture punchline to a White-grievance watchword’, (The Washington Post, 2 April 2021). accessed September 1, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/cancel-culture-background-black-culture-white-grievance/2021/04/01/2e42e4fe-8b24-11eb-aff6-4f720ca2d479_story.html. See also Meredith D. Clark 2020 op.cit.

24. Manavis, ‘The Long and Tortured History’, op.cit.

25. LeVar Burton, ‘LeVar Burton Defends Cancel Culture, Says It Should Be Called ‘Consequence Culture’, (Newsweek, interview with Katherine Fung, 26 April 2021). accessed September 1, 2021. https://www.newsweek.com/levar-burton-defends-cancel-culture-says-it-should-called-consequence-culture-1586506.

26. Nesrine Malik, ‘The “cancel culture” war is really about old elites losing power in the social media age’, (The Guardian, 13 July 2020). accessed August 23, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/13/cancel-culture-elites-power-social-media-age-online-mobs.

27. Julia Hemmer, ‘Why the Harper’s Letter Got It Wrong’, Public Seminar, (16 July 2020). Retrieved August 19, 2021. https://publicseminar.org/essays/why-the-harpers-letter-got-it-wrong/.

28. Manavis, ‘The Long and Tortured History’, op.cit.

29. Chandra, ‘Don’t Decry Cancel Culture’, op.cit.

30. Ibid.

31. Stoehr, ‘Censorship Is Now so Broadly Defined’, op.cit.

32. Torben Bech Dyrberg, Radical Identity Politics: Beyond Right and Left (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars 2020), Part I.

33. Clark, ‘DRAG THEM’, op.cit.

34. Mishan, ‘The Long and Tortured History’, op.cit.

35. Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1970) p. 102.

36. Herbert Marcuse, (1969). ‘Repressive Tolerance’, in Robert Paul Wolf, Barrington More Jr. and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press), pp. 81–123, p. 101.

37. Ibid., p. 86.

38. Michael Rectenwald, Beyond Woke (Nashville Tn.: New English Review Press, 2020), pp. 100–101.

39. Robin Diangelo, White Fragility (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018).

40. Harper’s Magazine, ‘A Letter on Justice and Open Debate’, 7 July 2020. accessed August 26, 2021. https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/.

41. McWhorter, ‘Academics Are Really’, op.cit.

42. Doyle, The New Puritans, op.cit., p. 13.

43. Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (London: The Bodley Head, 2019), pp. 9–10.

44. Doyle, The New Puritans, op.cit, p. 36, see also p. 59; see similar arguments in Frank Furedi, What’s Happened To The University? A Sociological Exploration of Its Infantilisation (London: Routledge, 2017), Ch. 7; Frank Furedi, Why Borders Matte: Why Humanity Must Relearn the Art of Drawing Boundaries (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), Ch. 6.

45. Charles Pincourt, Counter Wokecraft: A Field Manual for Combatting the Woke in the University and Beyond (Orlando, Florida: New Discourses, 2021), pp. 29–30. See also James Lindsay, Race Marxism: The Truth about Critical Race Theory and Praxis (Orlando, Florida: New Discourses, 2022), pp. 13–14.

46. John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2021), pp. 40–43, p. 49, p. 148, p. 171; Peter R. Nelson, The Future of Wokeness (Wroclaw: Amazon Fulfilment, 2021), p. 59; Barrett Wilson, ‘I Was the Mob Until the Mob Came for Me’, (Quillette, 14 July 2018). Retrieved March 28, 2022. https://quillette.com/2018/07/14/i-was-the-mob-until-the-mob-came-for-me/.

47. Jean A. Laponce, Left and Right: The Topography of Political Perception (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), pp. 27–28.

48. John McWhorter, Woke Racism, op.cit., p. 55; see also p. 79, 172. In an interview, McWhorter mentions that whites agreeing entirely with whatever blacks say and do is condescending. CNN: ‘Does Antiracism Betray Black America?’, 30 October 2021. Retrieved March 28, 2022. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1074151656735361. There are several other similar instances where agreement/disagreement is ruled out by identitarian leftists. See Heather Mac Donald, The Diversity Delusion (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), p. 25; Kenan Malik, Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics (London: Hurst & Company, 2023), p. 236.

49. Doyle, The New Puritans, op.cit., p. 21.

50. Manavis, ‘“Cancel culture” does not exist’, op.cit.

51. Dyrberg, Radical Identity Politics, op.cit., Ch. 2–3.

52. Clark, ‘DRAG THEM’, op.cit.

53. Ibid.

54. Roche, Idiots, op.cit., pp. 26–27.

55. Marcuse, Five Lectures, op.cit., Ch.5.

56. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin, ‘Guerrilla Warfare’ (V. I. Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 11, June 1906 – January 1907, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972 [1906]), pp. 213–23. See also Ernesto Laclau, ‘On “real” and “Absolute” Enemies’, The New Centennial Review, 5(1), (2005), pp. 1–12.

57. Nelson, The Future of Wokeness, op.cit., p. 59.

58. Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (London: The Bodley Head, 2019), p. 18; see also DiAngelo, White Fragility, op.cit., p. 5, pp. 21–22;, Coleman Hughes, ‘How to Be an Anti-Intellectual’, City Journal, (27 October 2019). Retrieved February 20, 2023. https://www.city-journal.org/how-to-be-an-antiracist.

59. Both quotes in Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist, op.cit., p. 62.

60. Ibid., p. 19.

61. Doyle, The New Puritans, op.cit., p. 63.

62. Ta-Nehisi Coates, quoted in Malik, Not So Black and White, op.cit., p. 290. See also McWhorter, Woke Racism, op.cit., p. 27, p. 40, p. 84, p. 86, p. 113.

63. Furedi, What’s Happened To The University?, op.cit., pp. 57–60, pp. 63–64; Roche, Idiots, op.cit., pp. 113–15.

64. Doyle, The New Puritans, op.cit., p. 61; on ‘a legacy of slavery’ see Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals (New York: Encounter Books, 2005), pp. 34–35.

65. Ibram X. Kendi, ‘Pass an Anti-Racist Constitutional Amendment’, Politico. (2019). accessed February 17, 2023. https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politics-in-america/inequality/pass-an-anti-racist-constitutional-amendment/.