Cancel Culture

Assignment: Jonathan Chait, “How Liberal America Came to its Senses,” The Atlantic (December 19, 2024), Thomas Chatterton Williams, “The Right is Changing the Rules of the Culture War,” The Atlantic (September 13, 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.

Thomas Chatterton Williams complicates that story by showing how similar tactics are increasingly being embraced by parts of the political right. His essay examines conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who moved from condemning social and professional punishment for old social-media posts to using those same methods against his ideological opponents. Williams argues that this is not simply hypocrisy. It suggests that some people opposed cancel culture because they lacked the power to control cultural norms, not because they rejected public intimidation or ideological enforcement as matters of principle. Perhaps every community establishes boundaries and imposes some consequences. But there remains a difference between criticizing ideas, enforcing established standards, and using fear and exemplary punishment to settle contested norms. We will ask how institutions should respond to public pressure, what fairness requires when evaluating past speech, whether the same principles apply when political power changes hands, and how accountability can leave room for context, proportionality, forgiveness, and change.