The Core Error Of Cancel Culture: You Can Befriend People Who Think Bad Things

Hounding people for mere thoughts is deranged

As I’ve written about recently, left-wing censoriousness is a major blight on the Democratic party. If, in leftist spaces, you say or think the wrong things, you’re liable to be ousted in a deeply Orwellian process that makes the Salem witch trials look like the OJ trial. But even those who criticize the excesses of cancellation tend to accept the legitimacy of the underlying framing, thinking that people who believe bad things should be cut off. This is a mistake: there is no reason to terminate associations with people who hold bad views and plenty of reasons not to.

Those with bad views are treated, by cancellers, as if they carry a fatal disease, liable to spread if not aggressively contained. If, for instance, you deny that trans women are women, many members of the left will call you a deplorable bigot and seek to cut ties with you. Yet few spell out explicitly why your supposed defects—generally rather mild compared to those of most of the population—justify terminating ties.

People’s political beliefs are hugely shaped by those of their friends. If you think that trans women aren’t women, and then spend lots of time around cool left-wing trans people who think they are, you’re far likelier to change your mind than if you never interacted with them. While it’s possible that people with non-left-wing views will change the minds of those with left-wing views, it’s far more likely, in predominantly left-wing spaces, that things will go the other way. At worst, both sides will influence the other and everyone will get more moderate!

Suppose that I wanted to work for a left-wing advocacy group. Now, as it happens, I’ve been critical of various dearly-held left-wing ideas. For this reason, I’d be likely to face considerable censure. Likely if I joined my local DSA group and they found out about my blog, there’d be some insane meltdown ending in me getting kicked out. I became among the most hated people in high school debate for noting that debate had nearly-universal obsequious deference to woke bullshit.

But what would their purge of me accomplish? It would allow lots of people to get a kick out of expunging a “bigot.” But it wouldn’t change my view or the view of anyone moderate. It would simply serve to make people who oppose them more dogmatic, more convinced that the far-left is filled with disloyal vipers.

Now, it could be that the justification for disbarring those accused of wrongthink from their group is simply to punish bad people. The reason people advocate jailing Jeffrey Dahmer isn’t to shape his views to be more anti-cannibalism, but instead to punish him for doing bad things. Perhaps the justification is similar for leftist witch-hunts.

But left-wingers tend to reject this justification. They tend to think the purpose of punishment is to contain, rehabilitate, and deter, not simply punish people for performing evil actions. As already discussed, extirpating people from your movements for believing the wrong things does not contain or rehabilitate them. It does not deter them, for one doesn’t control what they think.

In addition, even if one believes in retributive punishment, the crimes for which people are punished obviously do not reflect very badly on their characters. Most of those cancelled by woke mobs are not so evil that their misery is a good thing. Retributive justifications for punishment do not apply to generally well-meaning activists who simply have different views from those of the far left.

If this is correct, if there is no reason to stamp out those who have mildly wrong beliefs, then the entire edifice of left-wing cancel culture is built on sand. Left-wingers often search through old Tweets to find bad things a person once said. But who cares if someone once thought bad things? What is merely in a person’s head does not make it proper to cancel or punish them. What matters is how they routinely behave. It obviously makes sense not to hire someone who would engage in routine wrongdoing if they were hired, but so long as a person’s crimes reside merely in the confines of their mind, cancelling them is utterly senseless.

If, as occurred in the recent drama, a person commits an alleged microaggression (noting that black people who were yelling were, in fact, yelling), there’s no reason at all to cancel them. What good will possibly come out of cancelling them? Will they grow more sympathetic to your ideas? Will you look sane to outsiders? Of course not! It’s all performative—all done because no one wants to hit the brakes on a supposed effort to stamp out racism, no matter how idiotic, ill-thought-out, and prone to backfire the effort is.

Richard Hanania used to be, by his own admission, a vile racist. But he changed his mind in large part because he found reasonable people who made good arguments. If the people who changed Hanania’s mind had refused to interact with him because of his vile views, it’s hard to see how that could possibly have changed things for the better. Hanania might not be the loveable anti-MAGA libertarian that he is today if not for finding people who didn’t villainize him. And Hanania is far less emotionally driven than most people—other people are even more likely to be influenced by those around them who treat them well than he was.

Joe Rogan thinks some things that are false and harmful. This was seen as such an egregious offense that AOC stopped working with the Bernie campaign over the Bernie campaign surfacing clips of the interview. Even if you don’t like Rogan, this is a completely terrible policy! Because so many members of the left anathematized Rogan, he became surrounded by right-wingers. This resulted in a profound rightward shift.

To figure out whether to go on Rogan’s show, it shouldn’t much matter what he believes. The entire premise of cancel culture is wrong. There’s no reason not to interact with people who believe bad things. Distancing yourself from your political opponents is both politically suicidal and totally pointless. The fact that its legitimacy is treated as a dogma—rarely questioned, seen as too obvious to need defending—is quite alarming.

The next time there’s some censorious smear campaign that tries to get a person fired, one shouldn’t merely dispute it on its merits, any more than one should merely dispute whether a person falsely convicted of illegal sodomy did something wrong. The entire enterprise is illegitimate. Even if they made some mildly infelicitous utterance, even if they believed something bad, the cancellation campaign would be unjustified. The foundational premise of cancel culture is conclusively in error.