With “cancel culture” political correctness has indeed gone mad

Nostalgia is underrated. I remember when political debates were, well, political: about socialism versus liberalism, the state versus the individual, aspiration versus holding on to what you’ve got.

Now, as debate has moved online, ideology has given way to identity. The battle of ideas has become a fight for recognition. Agonism has been replaced by antagonism. A hyper-sensitivity has taken hold that manifests as aggression. These fights are about who is allowed to exist—and who becomes what the Stalinists used to call an “unperson.” Despite cyber-utopian promises of openness and freedom, progressives find themselves whispering in corridors.

Minorities feel that their existence is threatened by prejudice, and the prejudiced themselves are deemed beyond the pale. First there was the “no platforming” of controversial speakers, with students’ unions banning those they disagree with. Now those who say the wrong thing are boycotted (or “blocked”) on Twitter. They are “cancelled.” The opposite of intolerance was once tolerance. Now it is intolerance of intolerance.

Both sides of the political divide play their part. In one corner we have rabble-rousers headed up by the Tweeter-in-chief Donald Trump. In the other, the determined takers of offence. Racist or sexist statements are seized on as a sign of moral sickness and the mob rushes in to condemn, without pausing to think that they only achieve their online prominence as epiphenomenal froth atop a digital advertising model—fuelled by indignant clicks.

The offence-givers and offence-takers imagine themselves as enemies, but in truth they live in symbiosis. The word “outrage” is an auto-antonym: it refers to both cause and response. “Cancel culture” on the left is the mirror image of right-wing populism.

Democracy entails grimy compromise, the accommodation of objectionable views. But populism posits a division between an authentic “us” and an illegitimate “them.” In Nigel Farage’s referendum victory speech, the 48 per cent who plumped for Remain were written out of the demos, distinguished from the triumphant “real people.” Meanwhile, just as populism undermines democracy, “cancel culture” undoes the tolerance that ensures we don’t end up in hell.

Cancellers trawl through ancient speeches and social media histories for damning titbits to attack, combining the fine-toothed comb with the sledgehammer. But offensive gaffes are often the result of clumsy attempts to be right on. In March, Amber Rudd apologised after she referred to Diane Abbott as “coloured,” clearly an outmoded term, but a word used while highlighting the abuse suffered by black women on Twitter.

While Conservatives deploy race and gender awareness to evade the “nasty” tag, the centre tries to shame the left by beating it at its own game. Jeremy Corbyn’s centrist colleagues subject ambiguous individual lines he uttered long ago to microscopic semantic analysis to try and reveal a dark heart of antisemitism. Whatever its true scale in the party, it is striking that they seem to go at it with more gusto than countering electoral opponents or highlighting economic injustice.

The left has always been prone to hair-splitting: think the People’s Front of Judea. The internecine skirmishes are also partly generational: millennials toppling old-school feminists such as Germaine Greer and Julie Bindel from their pedestals.

Most of the alleged perpetrators, though, are low down the cosmic pecking order. Cancel culture’s zero sum game plays off disadvantaged groups against one another, rather as right-wing populism pits the blue-collar “left behind” against students and the intellectual precariat. Take the recent political correctness furores in Young Adult publishing. Earlier this year, Kosoko Jackson, a black, gay author who was literally a professional “sensitivity reader,” vetting manuscripts for problematic representation of minorities, was himself accused of insensitivity, for allegedly minimising the suffering of Albanian Muslims in his Kosovo war novel A Place for Wolves. A social media storm ensued, and Jackson asked his publishers to pull the book.

To much of the country, the participants in these debates look so politically similar that this infighting seems absurd—especially when it is governed by inconsistent rules. With transgenderism, the creed is absolute self-determination; with race, the reverse: absolute immutability. The #ownvoices campaign has denounced white authors who write black characters. Last year, the black singer Jamelia defended Anthony Lennon, a white theatre director who received Arts Council England funding for “people of colour” and claimed to be “African born again.” Jamelia argued that changing one’s race is the same as changing one’s gender, and was herself “cancelled.”

Political correctness made the valid point that reality is partly constructed by language. But combined with the internet it has indeed gone mad. It has spawned the illusion that purity is attainable. It’s as if we have given up on trying to improve the real world and instead just try to build perfect linguistic worlds, unmuddied by human error. Cancellation is the false hope that we can erase those we don’t like. The online zone of enforced hygiene becomes instead a sewer of animosity. Amid the left’s Twitter micro-wars, its real enemy—neoliberal hegemony—remains safely out of view. While black, queer, transsexual and feminist folk bicker, powerful white dudes carry on running the world.

The all-important factor missing from these cause celebres is context. The very organisations we rely on to establish context—universities, publishers and the media—are cowed not only by the “liberal elite” slur of the philistine right, but also by the left’s indignation about “privilege.” A few years ago, University College London failed to defend its former honorary professor and Nobel laureate Tim Hunt after his remarks about female scientists were reported out of context. The remarks were made during Hunt’s contribution to a meeting promoting women in science. He was subsequently sacked by the European Research Council. Today, publishers are reportedly steering clear of—or cancelling—books they fear will fall foul of the Twitter mob.

The irony is that nobody, however passionate, is going to win an argument this way. If you try to cancel disagreement, you start seeing it everywhere. Like Stalin’s proliferating “traitors,” there will soon be no right thinking people left.