Make America Canceled Again

Ever since the election I’ve had this recurring thought pop into my head, bringing with it a tiny post-traumatic tingle: Does another round of Trump mean a return to the high cancel times that marked the cultural landscape during his first term?

It’s no coincidence to me that the phenomenon known, for better or worse, as “cancel culture,” was peak from 2016-2020. Yes, it existed before then (and probably always has existed in one form or another), but Trump’s first term fed a rising tendency towards social media viral public shamings with a big dose of political outrage, intensified culture war rhetoric, and the explosive ingredient of bad sexual behavior. It was all made worse by Trump’s nearly mythic power to avoid political consequences and walk straight through sexual misconduct allegations unpunished. With every scandal survived, the urge to take down the enemy grew stronger, and if it couldn’t be Trump, anyone will do. In too many cases, it was the softer targets who were dealt the blows meant for the more powerful and the worse behaved. This dynamic can be considered a type of “horizontal violence,” a term Paulo Freire uses in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, when he describes the oppressed “striking out at their own comrades for the pettiest reasons” as a result of feeling powerless against their oppressors.

The problem with this horizontal violence is that the ones who were punished as a lesser stand-in for people in power, were often community members, friends, and in general, people of similar ideologies. Given that the particular brand of cancel/call-out culture during Trump was a predominantly leftist activity, the result was an all-too-common routine of the left eating the left.

I don’t think you get anywhere when the guillotine (which killed far more commoners than aristocrats during the French Revolution, by the way) you roll out for miscreants in power goes to work predominantly on people who share your beliefs, it just empowers those who don’t. Thus, after all that revolutionary canceling, eight years later we get Trump back, this time in a landslide.

I must admit, since being taken down by an entirely left-leaning arts community in 2017, I no longer identify as leftist, or a liberal or anything for that matter. Too disillusioned. My principles didn’t change much, just my outward alignments and my trust. I guess I have been un-allied. And I know that there are many others who have experienced a crisis of political identity after being part of a flaming overblown social scandal or just from being close to someone who has. Add to this the fact that if someone who experienced some type of cancelation wanted their side of the story heard, the only outlets that weren’t paranoid to touch such a piece were right-wing or left-critical media outlets (ie, my first published personal account published by Libertarian-leaning Australian magazine, Quillette). It made for some awkward temporary alliances. I’m not saying all this because I’m proud of it, I’m expressing it for the sake of others who have felt hurt and confused about being ostracized by people they felt some form of kinship with — an art scene, activist group, etc. I don’t think you need to (A) feel like you still need to have any allegiance with a group who has harmed you, and (B) feel like you need to identify with a political affiliation in order to have a personal ideology that you can practice in order to make the world a better place.

So anyway, with Trump’s second term, are we in for another historical time for justice and schadenfreude, accountability and vengeance? A resistance accompanied by the same degree of overcorrection and projection? Personally, I kind of doubt it. I honestly don’t think we’ll see a second term marked by the same level of CancelMania. Manifestations of these false allegation fueled moral panics — spikes of moralist Bacchanalias which can be traced back thousands of years from the Red Scare, to witch hunts, to blood libels — don't show the same face two waves in a row, like a virus avoiding immunity. So perhaps we won’t see the same brand of fire and brimstone punitive liberalism. Instead, from the looks of it we might be in line for the return of a classic: a right-wing Satanic Panic, moral panic in its most basic “good vs evil” form, stripped of all nuance and fearlessly batshit crazy. See you in hell!