What to Worship, How to Obey: The New Rules of Cancel Culture
Peter Wood
Dec. 30, 2020
Cancel culture is what we call the effort by leftists to banish people who defy the edicts of political correctness. The idea extends to the inanimate, as when statues of George Washington are toppled, buildings renamed, and innocent objects such as plastic straws are outlawed. But cancel culture has a flip side, consisting of mandates to celebrate people who have achieved little or nothing, to create monuments to leftist ideas and heroes, and to turn banal objects into icons of virtue. Think of George Floyd, Vladimir Lenin, and face masks: career criminal, mass-murdering dictator, and practically useless protection against COVID-19.
We lack a concise term for this impulse on the left to require us to knee to the symbols of its social power. “Virtue-signaling†is part of what is happening, but that doesn’t capture the effort to make everyone else adopt the message or at least pretend to go along. For the moment, I will call these the insignia of “uplift anger.†The idea is make those of us alive today rectify perceived current and past injustices by displaying our deference to the symbols of the new order. Uplift anger aims at forcing the public to submit to its idols. The flip side of cancel culture is compliance culture. ...
Or, if you use the title “doctor†mainly for a medical practitioner and are suddenly thinking that maybe you should address the recipient of doctorate in education with the same august title, you are bowing to compliance. ...
Getting angry has become America’s favorite form of self-validation. What was once seen as a sign of weakness has become a signal of empowerment. Through much of American history, Americans championed self-control and regarded those who gave in too quickly or too easily to provocations as lacking character. We have turned that around and made the hot-headed who participate in cancel culture into champions of righteous indignation through. ...
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