Cancellation at the Service of the Lie
31st May 2024
A striking feature of a debased democratic order is the alacrity by which long esteemed political figures, authors, works of art, and cultural practices can suddenly be subjected to vicious “cancellation” efforts. Fortunately, these attempts do not always succeed, at least completely and irrevocably. But they do serious damage to our capacity to admire excellence (and tried and true wisdom) and to sustain the vigorous debate and disputation that is essential to free political and intellectual life.
The examples are at once numerous and revealing. Icons of American egalitarian democracy such as Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson are treated as non-persons in elite circles today, caricatured beyond recognition. The new racialists confuse Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, with a run-of-the-mill racist, a potential candidate for membership in the Ku Klux Klan. The play Hamilton, which premiered in early 2015, went from being celebrated as the greatest musical of its generation, a moving tribute to multiracial democracy and the promise of the American Founding, to being denounced as racist almost overnight. It was even half-cancelled by the author of its book, music, and lyrics, Lin-Manuel Miranda himself, in a display of cowardice that taints his original achievement.