Member-only story
Virtue, Morality, Cancel Culture
Back when I practiced it, we didn’t call it “cancel culture.”
More than a decade ago, it wasn’t even “call-out culture” yet. My friends and I just called it “being an intersectional feminist.” We ran on moral outrage — our morality versus both the Christian Right and its moderate-liberal enablers. More than anything else, it was the other side’s hypocrisy that rankled us. How dare they call themselves “values voters” and “believers in traditional morality” when they were thrilled to get to mistreat immigrants, gays, women, and the poor? Where did they get off, claiming to represent a universal tradition of human goodness while invading countries, dropping tens of thousands of bombs, and inventing drone warfare? We took it to be self-evident that conservative morality was simply power — power coating itself in sugary-sweet syrup, claiming to represent goodness because it was too cowardly to acknowledge the truth of its own nature. “Traditional values” meant bald-facedly asserting control over the lives of essentially random, innocent scapegoats.
In the face of such an enemy, we had precious few weapons, but we made use of them. Feminists couldn’t end the war, but at least we could make life less pleasant for a stranger for a few hours if they tweeted a tasteless joke. And bit by bit, we found that we could do more. We could get people fired, make celebrities…