In a recent Free Press article, best-selling author Ryan Holiday suggests conservatives are the new “snowflakes” because they have their own version of cancel culture.
I’m not sure whether conservatives have become snowflakes, but there is no doubt that both liberals and conservatives have a history of cancel culture. Liberals called for the cancellation of Dave Chapelle; conservatives called for the cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel. Liberals called for the firing of conservative Penn professor Amy Wax; conservatives called for the firing of liberal University of Kansas lecturer Phillip Lowcock.
But identifying what truly constitutes “cancel culture” is not as easy as rumor makes it. Is it cancel culture for people to quietly decide to no longer support companies whose policies they disagree with? Is it cancel culture for the LGBTQ+ community to avoid conservative churches, or for conservative Christians to avoid gay bars?
These questions highlight the primary tension in determining what is (and is not) cancel culture: Balancing (1) the right of individuals to live life free of censorship with (2) the right of individuals to choose what to do with their own time and money. Few Americans want to live in a world where we can be fired from work for a political tweet. But few Americans want to be forced to subscribe to either Netflix or Pureflix when they object to the content.
To navigate this tension, what we need are principles that can be equally and fairly applied to both sides. Below, I suggest three foundational principles as a starting point for our national discussion.
1. Consumers boycotting companies they don’t like is not cancel culture. Liberals once boycotted Amazon over its rollback of DEI policies. Similarly, conservatives recently boycotted Netflix over LGBTQ+ content for children. Neither case is truly cancel culture, because it turns out consumers should have freedom to choose which companies they use, on any criteria they want.
Suggesting that consumers cannot boycott companies if they perceive it is bad for their ideological ends is basically like saying they should be forced to indefinitely fund companies they don’t like. No one actually wants that. America thrives because it is a free market. Consumers have every right to do whatever they want with their own pocketbook.
What we do need, however, is a consistent standard. If you think liberals can boycott Amazon or Chi-Fil-A and conservatives are mean for trying to boycott Netflix (or vice versa), then you’ve crossed a line. As a conservative Christian, I’m sympathetic with those who want to abandon the liberal establishment’s woke stupidity. Even though I didn’t cancel Netflix for reasons you can read about elsewhere, I certainly have ditched some progressive companies that just went too far in jamming a political agenda down my throat. I confess what I really want is a public square where companies are focused on their business model and not their politics. I prefer to choose my chicken sandwich based on its quality and not on the political position of the person who made it. But it is often the companies themselves who put their own politics (for good or ill) into their products, and in any event, we have the right as consumers to reject them if they do that (or on any other grounds).
2. No one should lose their job for a political position or behavior that is irrelevant to their work. Gina Carano was fired for holding a conservative political view that Disney didn’t like. But it had no bearing whatsoever on her ability to perform her job. Similarly, a Home Depot employee was fired for stating a liberal opinion that had no bearing on her job. Our lab gave both incidents the worst possible (5-boot) authoritarianism ratings on our Authoritarianism Tracker. Regardless of which political side you are on, no one should be fired for posting their own political views.
However, the caveat is equally as important. These protections only apply when the political opinion is irrelevant to job performance. Sometimes, there is a direct line in one’s job between politics and performance. At one end are the above examples, where job performance is essentially unrelated to the political opinion. At the other end, professors who work at private Christian universities might be let go if they teach atheism, whereas professors who work at private atheist colleges might be let go if they teach Christianity. Those issues impact their ability to do their jobs effectively and might go against the mission and charter and statement of beliefs of the college. There is a lot of room in the middle of these extremes for discussion, but the principle is clear: Unless there is some clear issue relevant to job performance, people should not be fired for their political views.
3. The government should never play a role in censoring or firing people in the private sector.
The problem with the Jimmy Kimmel incident wasn’t the calls for people to stop watching his show. The real problem was the pressure the Trump administration put on networks to cancel him. It was fine for liberals to object to conservative content on (then) Twitter. But it wasn’t fine for the Biden administration to put pressure on Facebook to censor conservatives.
The distinction between the public and private sector is important here. The government represents us, and as such in a democracy does have the right to enforce rules in its own branches of government or weigh in on public institutions. For example, the Trump administration came under fire for wanting to alter public school curricula. But on its own, this is not authoritarian cancel culture, because the public school is run by the government and Trump is a democratically elected official. Suggesting that elected public officials should have no say in determining school curricula is tantamount to saying that we must permanently be ruled by an unelected bureaucratic class. We have the right to elect officials to make changes and, if we don’t like those changes, elect new officials.
In sum, while it may seem irrelevant to think more thoroughly about what cancel culture truly is, if we do not carefully articulate the key principles involved, we will continue to repeat the same mistakes. In an environment where the lines are poorly thought out and blurry, it is easy to decry your enemies’ cancel culture while hypocritically cancelling them yourself. When we define the lines more clearly, it forces us to apply the same rules to us and them. As I discuss in my book Liberal Bullies, when we do that, we reduce the likelihood of authoritarian cycles for everyone.