Cancel Culture

Assignment: Jonathan Chait, “How Liberal America Came to its Senses,” The Atlantic (December 19, 2024); Greg Lukianoff, “The Worst of Both Worlds for Campus Free Speech,” The Dispatch (December 30, 2025)

“Cancel culture” is an imprecise and politically contested term. It is sometimes used to describe any criticism, social consequence, or institutional response to offensive behavior. But criticism and accountability are unavoidable features of a shared moral and political life. Individuals and institutions must make judgments about what conduct they will tolerate, condemn, reward, or punish. The more difficult question is whether something distinctive happens when online outrage rapidly turns a disputed statement, old social-media post, or decontextualized mistake into a campaign for exclusion or professional punishment—often without much attention to context, proportionality, process, apology, or change. These campaigns do more than punish one person. By making an example of the accused, they can establish emerging norms and warn others about the costs of crossing them.

Jonathan Chait argues that the recent period of progressive cancel culture has largely come to an end. In his account, smartphones and social media—especially Twitter—made it possible for morally certain judgments to spread quickly and for relatively small groups of activists to appear more representative than they were. Political crisis, especially during the first Trump presidency and the upheavals of 2020, intensified the sense that hesitation, disagreement, or requests for context were themselves forms of complicity. Chait does not deny that many of the underlying concerns about racism, sexism, and unequal power were legitimate. His argument is that some of the methods used to advance those concerns became coercive and illiberal. He believes liberal institutions have now developed greater resistance to online outrage, although we should ask whether the phenomenon has actually disappeared, become less intense, or simply taken different forms.