I read a typical right-wing screed against “cancel culture” in our local newspaper on Sunday. As usual, the writer roundly condemned “the left” for its hypocritical lack of support for free speech.
Also as usual, the writer didn’t identify “cancel culture” with any prominent Democratic politician, because no such politicians exist. Joe Biden? Please! Bernie Sanders? He doesn’t even like the idea of kicking Trump off Twitter. Elizabeth Warren and AOC? They would rather own the cons than shut them up.
The bottom line is that, notwithstanding what you typically hear from devotees of Fox News, the mainstream of the Democratic Party has no interest in any form of “cancel culture.” “Cancel culture” is a product of a relative handful of Twitter activists: latter-day Rosas and Martins fearlessly waging war for social justice with their thumbs. They’re very noisy, but their importance mostly lies in their attractiveness as targets for the right.
The Democrats will at some point be required to put some distance between themselves and the Twitter left. This means making a concerted effort to clarify that they: do not support “defunding the police;” can live comfortably with the removal of Confederate statues, but not memorials to the Founding Fathers and Lincoln; do not agree with censoring the right on the internet, with the possible exception of speech that has no protection under First Amendment jurisprudence; and do not completely buy into the version of the history of America articulated in the 1619 Project, although they do not dismiss it, either.