The Victim Complex at the Heart of Conservative Cancel Culture
Source: NBC News
The debate over “Cancel Culture” has been a big discussion in recent years. At a glance, canceling is the practice of using public shame to diminish the social or material capital of someone who says or does something problematic. A classic example of this is film producer Harvey Weinstein. He is now serving prison time after many women came forward about the sexual harassment and assaults he committed against them.
There is no unified consensus on the efficacy of Cancel Culture. Some people think it’s a morally correct form of justice in the face of a system that refuses to punish its worst offenders. Others (mainly conservatives) believe that it has gone too far and is now ruining the moral fabric of society. There are more still between these two points, arguing that Cancel Culture exists but is not as effective or as pervasive as these two parties claim.
We will sidestep the conversation of whether Cancel Culture is right or wrong and instead discuss its narrative purpose in the larger discourse. Regardless of whether Cancel Culture can be problematic, it serves as a way for conservatives to continue a narrative of persecution that allows them to justify bigotry and intolerance — a trend that has been going on for hundreds of years.
The contemporary usage of the phrase “canceling” seems to have its origins in a misogynistic joke in the 1991 film New Jack City. The character Nino Brown (Wesley Snipes) breaks up with his girlfriend, who is in tears about all the destruction he has caused in the film, by saying, “Cancel that bitch. I’ll buy another one.” Rapper Lil Wayne would later reference this scene in his 2010 song I’m Single, singing: “Yeah, I’m single. N***a had to cancel that bitch like Nino.”
Canceling rocketed in popularity several years later due to the reality show Love & Hip Hop: New York. Character Cisco ended an argument with love interest Diamond by telling her that she was canceled. Cisco would later say that New Jack City served as inspiration for the one-liner. You’re canceled immediately blew up online on sites such as Twitter, where people joked that certain brands and people were canceled. Some of these statements were more serious (i.e., requests to unfollow them if they liked person x or thing y), but most of them were simply jokes.
Allegedly, this has turned into a new movement of needlessly dragging people, both online and offline, for the most trivial offenses. As conservative commentator Harry Hurley writes hyperbolically for WPG Talk Radio: “Their concept of “Cancel Culture” is that if they don’t agree with you … they will take away your social media platform … your record of accomplishment, fame, business, reputation, or, any combination of the above … because they have decided that you’ve done something unforgivable…”
Yet, it’s difficult to trace the alleged shift from cracking jokes about canceling brands on Twitter to the mobs' Harry Hurley is talking about here, mainly because mobs have always been with us. Mobs were with us during the Salem Witch trials helping to burn women alive. They were there during the Red Summer of 1919, stringing up people of color. Mobs were also there during the Scarlet Scare terminating LGBTQIA+ people from their jobs. A lot of what we consider to be Cancel Culture is taking our society’s collective weaponization of “shame” (i.e., casting ourselves in a negative light for transgressing a norm) and “guilt” (i.e., casting our actions in a negative light for transgressing a norm)— something that has existed in society for thousands of years — and retrospectively rebranding it as this new force.
For example, men such as Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby were allegedly “canceled” because they sexually harassed and assaulted women. However, they broke the law. They were made liable by the government for those actions and were then scrutinized by the public for them. The only significant shift here was not the punishment itself (people are punished and judged for sexual harassment and assault all the time) but the targets. Rich men are not normally held accountable in our society for these kinds of behaviors. We do, however, routinely scrutinize and shame poor and brown individuals for breaking these norms.
The same goes for canceled celebrity Louis C.K. who faced intense public scrutiny (though no legal consequences) for sexual misconduct. Many have been keen to paint this as part of the new Cancel Culture, but this was by no means the first time the public turned on a celebrity for expressing an opinion the mainstream public disapproved of. Over 17 years ago, the country band The Dixie Chicks faced an intense backlash for criticizing President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, and unlike Louis C. K., their reputation was dinged for years. Fans boycotted their albums, and they were blacklisted from the airwaves by many members of the industry.
Clearly, harassment and abuse from “mobs” existed back then, and they continue to exist now. Millions of people face unfair harassment every year, especially on social media platforms where such behavior is rampant. This is a problem. It’s just not a new problem. Neither is it one exclusively limited to the left.
The idea of publicly shaming and sometimes harassing and abusing people for violating perceived norms has been going on for a long time (again, see the Salem Witch Trials). There is even ample evidence that ganging up on someone for violating social norms isn’t a uniquely human experience. Bullying-like behavior has been found in other animals such as Chimpanzees. As Hogan Sherrow wrote in the Scientific American about why three Chimpanzees were bullied to death:
“In all three instances the males that were killed appeared to have broken social rules or norms, and bullying-like behaviors that erupted into violence were used to attempt to get them to conform. Among chimpanzee, and many other primate societies, proper socialization and conformity are critical for maintaining social order and consistency, just as they are in humans. Individuals whose behavior challenges, disrupts or are considered unusual are often the targets of aggression, and that aggression continues until those individuals change their behavior.”
This narrative of collectivized harassment being a new phenomenon is nonsense. The thing anti-cancel culture people are “suddenly” reacting to is not the tactic of shame and harassment itself — that’s been with humanity for a while. Conservatives continue to weaponize shame quite readily for topics such as preserving “traditional” norms and family structures. We have seen conservatives support the burning of John Lennon records and destroying Keurig coffee makers. We have also witnessed conservatives advocate for doxxing and harassment campaigns against members of the left.
The issue here is more about what cancel culture rhetorically lets these men (and a few women) accomplish — i.e., it lets them pretend that they are persecuted. Cancel culture paints their movement as one under attack, and when someone is attacking you (as conservatives claim that leftists are doing to them), that gives you social permission to strike back.
Conservatives believe that they are victims, or, at least, they spend a lot of time broadcasting this belief everywhere in the media. There are articles lamenting how conservative students cannot express themselves in universities, how conservative teachers are ignored, and how conservative workers live in fear. A Hill-HarrisX survey in 2019 found that 78% of GOP respondents believed conservatives suffered discrimination (and that figure has not gone down).
Conservatives as a group, though, are not a persecuted minority within the United States. Some individual conservatives may be having a hard time, but as a group, they are overrepresented in political institutions such as the Senate, the House of Representatives, state legislatures, and the courts. They have a disproportionate amount of power over the political discourse, which does not appear to be going away anytime soon.
It’s true that many conservative Americans may claim to feel oppressed, but feeling persecuted is not the same thing as being persecuted. It’s common for people who are called out for harming others to conflate that feeling of shame with being hurt themselves. As author Nora Samaran writes of white defensiveness when examining racism in her essay Own, Apologize, Repair: Coming Back to Integrity:
“If we cannot feel ‘comfortable’ while grappling with the reality of colonization, or if we cannot have our bubble of ego preserved and coddled while we learn the hard facts about racism, we expect that it is somehow normal that we can go on the attack, and expect the people experiencing harm to coddle and apologize to us, rather than being responsible for our own feelings…”
We see this turnaround constantly from people of privilege when they are criticized. They will call people who criticize their racism as reverse racists. They will decry trans people asking them to respect their identities as the true bigots. This trend of recasting oppressed people as aggressors has been a tactic of oppressors for centuries, and it doesn’t start and end with defensiveness. It ultimately can be used to preserve and reinforce power structures.
For example, during the 19th and 20th centuries, it was common to see white people lynch Black men for allegedly having sex with white women. It often didn’t matter if the relationship was consensual or real. Many times the accusations were false. It was merely propaganda white people used to justify their place in the hierarchy, and they readily employed it whenever that position was threatened.
Activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett recalls in one example of going to verify an extra-judicial killing of a black man (described by authorities as a “brute”). He was accused of raping a local Sheriff’s 7-year old daughter. When she got there, she learned that the Sheriff’s daughter was actually in her late teens and that the lynched man was a farmhand well-known by the family. The Sheriff used the myth of the black predator to save his daughter’s reputation — a myth that would pop up time and time again to justify white violence (see the Tulsa Race Massacre and the Rosewood Massacre).
We see the same power dynamic again in how LGBTQIA+ people were treated for most of our history. Authority figures would treat queer Americans as active threats to be reviled and feared. An infamous 1961 PSA created with the help of the Inglewood Police Department, and School District depicts “homosexuals” as active threats that prey upon children. As the narrator hyperbolically claims in the video, “What Jimmy didn’t know was that Ralph was sick. A sickness that was not visible like smallpox, but no less dangerous and contagious. A sickness of the mind. You see, Ralph was a homosexual.”
It should go without saying (though sadly doesn’t for many) that these ideas were false. There has been no evidence proving that LGBTQIA+ people are any more predatory than heterosexual ones. This narrative was not an objective fact but a salve that allowed mainstream society to actively discriminate against this community without feeling bad for doing so. After all, it’s far easier to criminalize people when you don’t see them as human beings, but rather as monsters looking to take away everything you hold dear.
Conservatives are employing this tactic again with the Cancel Culture debate. They are using the image of false victimhood to ignore responsibility and perpetuate harm. They are insinuating that trans people are predators and that elections won because of high voter turnout from Black and brown people are invalid. Conservatives are portraying marginalized people as aggressors, using this rhetoric as a pretext to advance discriminatory policy.
As of writing this, many conservative polities within the United States are using the specter of Cancel Culture to attempt to pass bills that deny trans youth access to medical care and advance laws that make it harder for individuals to vote. This legislation will do untold harm to the people living within those communities, and it would not have been possible without the enemy of “Cancel Culture.”
America was a country founded on injustice. We genocided many of this continent’s first inhabitants and pushed the remainder into reservations. We built up our economy using enslaved people and never compensated the descendants of that travesty with the money they deserve. We also continue to let millions languish in poverty to maintain unjust hierarchies.
Those truths are hard to swallow for those in power, and, from the beginning, they generated the same projection we experience today with the Cancel Culture debate. We have seen how victimization has been used as a cudgel for oppressors to ignore accountability. It has allowed the majority to paint the people they are oppressing as the true monsters, so they can pass laws against them and still believe themselves to be in the right.
This does not mean that mob mentality is a topic unworthy of discussion. Mobs (i.e., collective harassment) exist, and we should be figuring out social tools that allow us to mitigate that abuse. Now more than ever, we need to have more productive conversations. We need to improve as a society so that all of us can communicate more effectively and clearly. It’s apparent that platforms such as Twitter do not achieve that end. If anything, they seem to worsen outcomes.
Conservatives bemoaning cancel culture, however, are not looking to have that conversation in good faith. They are trying to build a narrative that paints them as victims so they can continue being the oppressor. It has nothing to do with accountability and everything to do with overstating harm to perpetuate violence onto others.
If anything needs to be canceled, it’s that.