Why Cancel Culture Won’t Last

“This is the thing about moral panics—while threatening, they can be illuminating.”

Every moral panic has an expiration date. The Salem Witch Trials are now remembered as an outbreak of superstition, fear, and cruelty. Today’s students learn that McCarthyism was a period of rampant paranoia and injustice. And the illiberal moment we are living through now—the emergence of cancel culture, the groveling apologies and online heresy hunts, the strange capitulations of elite institutions to various mobs—will someday be a cautionary tale as well.

While it may seem like the woke mobilization has all the momentum right now, its march will inevitably be slowed by several inescapable realities. The first is that the bizarre moment we are living through—with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office amid a pandemic, a recession, and an explosion of civil strife—will come to an end. It is difficult to imagine a more powerful force multiplier than President Trump, who has aggravated the situation in every conceivable way with his disastrous failed response to the Coronavirus (COVID-19), his demagogic obsession with cultural and political flashpoints (monument desecration, street violence, fringe groups like Antifa, and so on), and his cynical declarations that he is the “law and order” candidate. Now President Trump wants to deploy 75,000 federal agents to American cities— a move that will only inflame protests and lead to even more rapid civic dissolution (the effect of the deployments that have already taken place has been to redirect protesters’ attention to the presence of federal officers in their cities).

This toxic cocktail of factors—the fear and anxiety generated by political upheaval and disease, a stratospheric unemployment rate and a devastating economic contraction, and a president who is uniquely ill-equipped to handle all of the above—has made for an exceptional historical moment. When things are this bad, people often have illusions of permanence. But some semblance of normalcy will eventually return, as it always does— a future that will arrive much more quickly if President Trump is dislodged in November.