“Cancel Culture” Is Pure Projection
It is another week in the United States, and that means we are again treated to a conservative — young or old, established or amateur — mewling about how they aren’t allowed to say the things that they are ostensibly saying.
The tactic is more than two millennia old, a rhetorical trick used to its utmost by famed speaker and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero: “praeteritio.” That which is said before. For Cicero, it was a way to insult political opponents by insisting that he would never spread the rumor that [terrible indictment of character here] because it’s not relevant to the situation, but…
The modern version has conservatives constantly taking to platforms with the reach of millions to say that their ideas are being suppressed — and then to outline or tilt at what ideas they are being prohibited from saying. It is a neat trick, disseminating concepts that are supposedly being stifled with the loudest megaphone possible, while simultaneously associating those concepts with countercultural cache and making the speaker a victim of “cancelling” — an idea so nebulous that it can encompass both every triviality and every horror that its listener can conjure.
On its own, this conservative praeteritio would be annoyingly effective at rhetorically laundering the self-negating argument of censorship on the nation’s largest media platforms, but paired with another set of tactics — DARVO — it becomes a full-fledged status-quo reactionary movement.
DARVO stands for: Deny Attack Reverse Victim and Offender. It is an acronym developed out of studying the tactics of abuse and abusers, wherein someone perpetrating harm refuses to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions and instead puts the culpability for what is happening on the victims.
The harm isn’t really happening.
We are assured that the downsides of these conservatives speaking their minds, dehumanizing marginalized communities (like trans people), arguing for policy built atop these assumptions, and confirming old hierarchies of power, are just in the liberal mind. There is no connection between feeling like you can’t say that it was good to own people and enslave your own children in a classroom with Black classmates and the governor of the state the classroom is in deciding to strip Black history out of the curriculum.
The environment is stifling and impossible to live under.
This is the attack being leveled at liberals, making the people who think about the harm they could do reflect on themselves rather than lash out. It also has the effect of making anyone who sees through this argument and gets frustrated with it seem like the aggressor. To be unemotional is to seem callous to the possibility these conservatives are experiencing harm; to be furious at the obvious lie is to be an example of the accusation.
It is conservatives who have to fear liberals, and the oppression these “woke crusaders” want to institute.
And finally, we reach the projection that ties it all up with a little bow. It is not liberals who have to be afraid of conservatives, deflecting away from the very tangible damage it is doing to marginalized communities (from having our books banned for the color of the protagonists, to making gender-affirmation subject to a police state, to state-funded monitoring of the womb of every could-be-pregnant person). It is conservatives who must be afraid of liberals, which takes the focus away from measurements and evaluations and answers, and instead centers the feelings of alienation one gets from being a person arguing that all of the damage is Good, actually.
The machine is well-oiled and utterly effective, looping back in on itself like the circular argument it naturally is. Liberals can’t get frustrated or annoyed with “cancel culture” nonsense without being subsumed within the “backlash” that the author is describing. Even good faith dismantling of the arguments (of which there are way too many, at this point) just gets wrapped up in the noise of conservatives squawking about their natural right to shit on the humanity of non-tribe members.
Meanwhile, in the real world, marginalized communities struggle to survive, find themselves targeted and undermined by the state that is nominally supposed to represent them, and see their rights — the natural ones listed by the Declaration and affirmed in the Constitution — stripped away under the guise of “fairness.” Our words are disappearing, our language coopted, our options narrowing, our autonomy chained away. We are less worried about our feelings in a college classroom or a lecture circuit or an international anglophonic platform with the real harms of poverty, incarceration, and death that come with making our way in the world.
Because the real cancel culture? Is never being allowed to speak to begin with.
