"10 Theses About Cancel Culture/What we talk about when we talk about 'cancellation.'"

Well, you definitely got me with that title, Ross Douthat. Not only do you have the variation on the old Raymond Carver title — "What We Talk About When We Talk About [Blank]" (Carver's topic was "love," Murakami's was "running," etc.), you have the variation on "[Number] Theses" (Martin Luther's number was 95, and his theses were a "Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences").

Douthat notes a current disputation about the meaning of "cancel culture" and whether it exists at all and announces he'll make "10 sweeping claims" about it:

1. Cancellation, properly understood, refers to an attack on someone’s employment and reputation by a determined collective of critics, based on an opinion or an action that is alleged to be disgraceful and disqualifying....

The idea here is to narrow what counts as "cancellation." You need a "collective of critics" and it must be "determined." And their attitude must be that they find their target "disgraceful."

2. All cultures cancel; the question is for what, how widely and through what means....

The idea here is to broaden what counts as "cancellation." It's not something special that the left is doing. Conservatives do it too, Douthat says, they just do it for different "sins."

3. Cancellation isn’t exactly about free speech, but a liberal society should theoretically cancel less frequently than its rivals. The canceled individual hasn’t lost any First Amendment rights....

Freedom of speech is about much much more than what the First Amendment protects. It's important to fight for the freedom of speech that you can't enforce in courts. We need a culture of free speech, and the cancel culture threatens it. Which side are you on in this fight? I need some stronger commitment than the theory that we should "cancel less frequently" than societies that aren't free at all!

4. The internet has changed the way we cancel, and extended cancellation’s reach....

5. The internet has also made it harder to figure out whether speech is getting freer or less free....

We're sorely challenged to understand — in sped-up real time — what the hell is happening to us.

6. Celebrities are the easiest people to target, but the hardest people to actually cancel....

Hey, New York Times, invite Roseanne Barr to do an op-ed responding to Douthat's 6th Thesis. That was the greatest comedienne in the history of television, and she was crushed in an instant. For nothing.

7. Cancel culture is most effective against people who are still rising in their fields, and it influences many people who don’t actually get canceled.... [A] climate of cancellation can succeed in changing the way people talk and argue and behave even if it doesn’t succeed in destroying the careers of some of the famous people that it targets.... The goal isn’t to punish everyone, or even very many someones; it’s to shame or scare just enough people to make the rest conform.

That's what culture is. You only need a few victims to cow virtually everybody and to drain the vigor out of political and intellectual discourse. We're already so bland and weak we hardly notice.

8. The right and the left both cancel; it’s just that today’s right is too weak to do it effectively....

The right isn't doing it these days, but don't trust them. They would if they could. That's Douthat's point. He says after 9/11, conservatives were able to use cancellation to create a "patriotically correct climate" and that today there's some intra-conservative cancellation going on.

9. The heat of the cancel-culture debate reflects the intersection of the internet as a medium for cancellation with the increasing power of left-wing moral norms as a justification for cancellation.... It’s debatable whether these new left-wing norms would be illiberal or whether they would simply infuse liberalism with a new morality to replace the old Protestant consensus....

That's bizarrely bland. The "heat" of the debate just shows we're at an "intersection" — an intersection of the internet and left-wing norms — and it's "debatable" whether something awful is happening or whether we're just getting "a new morality." I'm gazing backward to Thesis #8 and getting more of an idea of what it means to say the right is too weak to be effective. The norm that is missing is freedom, and it's woefully inadequate to say, hey, maybe things will be fine without freedom, because — who knows? it's debatable! — the forces of repression might lock us into a good new morality.

10. If you oppose left-wing cancel culture, appeals to liberalism and free speech aren’t enough.

Left-wingers have never been fans of freedom as an end in itself. That's why they are so dangerous. Perhaps appeals to liberalism and free speech can be effective when they're addressed not at the extreme left but at the vast middle of Americans who vaguely value freedom but have devolving into a sickly mix of complacent and intimidated. But Douthat says the opposition to left-wing cancel culture needs substantive values to fight. In his analysis, freedom isn't good enough. It lacks substance. I'd say it's the emptiness of substance that makes freedom the highest value for us, the human beings.