Notes on Right-Wing Cancel Culture

And Further Thoughts on 'Viral Hegemony'

This week, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo published chat logs from an internal employee messaging service at the National Security Agency. “These logs,” he wrote, “dating back two years, are lurid, featuring wide-ranging discussions of sex, kink, polyamory, and castration.” Within days, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had fired over 100 participants in the chats. The grounds for their dismissal seemed to be, first, that NSA employees sign an agreement during onboarding that “publishing non-mission related material on Intelink [the internal chat service] is a usage violation and will result in disciplinary action”; and second, that the gender doctrines espoused by participants in the chat suggest that some in the NSA are “prioritizing left-wing activism over national security.”

A few days later, The New York Times published an article identifying the names and backgrounds of 45 individuals working in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. On X, the conservative commentator Byron York accused the paper of “outing” these employees; apparently even the most normie “facephag” conservative pundits now share the online right’s ethics, in which “doxxing” amounts to a kind of soul murder. Similar complaints have been made ever since DOGE’s inception about attempts to shine light on its operations; publicly identifying those working in the nebulous entity, invariably described as “kids,” is treated as a cruel violation of privacy. The Wall Street Journal’s revelation of the racially incendiary posts of DOGE employee Marko Elez was treated by the vice president himself as cancel culture run amok.

You can probably see where I’m going with this: The rules of the new MAGA regime seem to be that depending on which part of the government you work in, your posts to an internal chat may be grounds for immediate dismissal, but the public posts of the poor beleaguered “kids” of DOGE are at worst minor indiscretions that it is objectionable to even draw attention to. I’m less interested in pointing out hypocrisy or inconsistency here—there’s so much of that to go around on all fronts of every culture-war battle it’s barely worth remarking on—as to expand on last week’s observations on the new cultural moment and the extent to which it replicates aspects of the prior dispensation.

Obviously, the simplest explanation of what’s going on is Schmittian: The new ruling coalition is now pursuing pretty openly McCarthyite tactics against “enemies” (Rufo would clearly not have campaigned to fire the NSA employees just for inappropriate use of a workplace comms channel had the content of the chats not been ideologically left-coded), even as the most maximal free-speech protections are being demanded for public officials who code as “friends” (shitposting dudebros like Elez). (Notably, Vice President Vance made a similar observation about the other political camp last year: “The thing that I kept thinking about liberalism in 2019 and 2020 is that these guys have all read Carl Schmitt—there’s no law, there’s just power.”) It is worth adding that the Trump administration’s apparent intervention on behalf of Andrew Tate merely extended the logic of Elez’s exoneration further: Anyone who violates liberal cultural norms, even in more egregious ways that offend many conservatives as well as liberals, is now being treated as a presumptive cancel-culture victim who must be given the benefit of the doubt.

Rufo, however, attempted to offer a more high-minded account of what he is up to a few days after leaking the NSA chats. Defending the re-hiring of Elez at the instigation of Elon Musk and JD Vance, Rufo wrote that “forgiveness, loyalty, and a sense of proportion should be part of the decision-making process in such controversies.” The insertion of “loyalty” between two ostensibly universal values seems to reassert the basic Schmittian outlook by limiting the extent of the other, otherwise ostensibly universal values (the forgiveness and sense of proportion apply only to friends to whom one is “loyal”). However, a slightly subtler point is also at issue here.

The right often presents itself as the aggrieved victim of the cancel culture that peaked around 2020, but the reality is that conservatives mostly observed those struggles from the sidelines. Last year, the libertarian X personality Jeremy Kauffmann posted a viral thread compiling a list of 20 most egregious cases; none seem to involve cancelations of actual straight-up right-wingers, and the majority are of overt progressives or liberals punished by their fellow partisans for wrongthink.

To be sure, many on the right saw such actions indirectly as an attack on them, since if even mild dissent from progressive orthodoxy was punishable as heresy, that cast their positions much farther outside the ambit of polite society. But the ability of the progressive left to enforce such dogmas on conservatives was quite limited. Hence, Milo Yiannopolous (now a proponent of cancel culture) could only actually be driven from the public sphere by the right, because that was the institutional realm on which he depended.

Rampant cancel culture on the left, then, was indeed often a manifestation of “disloyalty” on the part of its perpetrators: Time and again, they turned on former friends and comrades for falling foul of recently erected taboos. So a question for the proud right-wing advocates of cancel culture is whether they intend to be “loyal” only to those who offend their enemies, or whether those who ruffle feathers within their own coalition will be given more leeway to dissent. That will go a long way in determining whether the culture they foster is any less stifling and sterile than the one that preceded it.

Well before the rise of 2010s cancel culture, conservatives resented liberal control of the major institutions, which was what enabled liberals to set the terms of shared “common sense” for culture as a whole, thus affording them hegemony in the Gramscian sense. Hence, for instance, open expressions of racial animus became subject to social stigma well before the “racial reckoning” that began a decade ago. Conservatives will themselves often describe the 1990s and 2000s as a halcyon era of racial comity. Yet this was an era in which at least the soft version of liberal racial norms mostly prevailed. (It isn’t difficult to imagine a pre-Twitter Elez equivalent losing his government employment over comparable offenses in a less public way.)

In his apologia for right-wing cancel culture, Rufo writes that “culture is a way for society to establish a particular hierarchy of values and to provide a way to police the boundaries.” This is true. But the hierarchy of values asserted by pre-2010s liberal culture when it comes to various culture-war areas continues to hold broad cultural sway. Rufo himself has stated his support for “colorblind equality, fair play, and judging individuals on their own merit,” over and against the racialists within his own coalition as well as those on the left. But it is precisely through the cultural mechanisms that stigmatize statements like Elez’s that such values are promulgated.

To build on my post from last week, I think Rufo and others in his camp are confusing what I called “viral hegemony,” which they seem to enjoy right now, and the more durable form of hegemony described above—the one by way of which post-’60s racial attitudes still hold sway. As I wrote previously:

Viral hegemony is arrived at not through a “long march through the institutions,” but a rapid stampede across the algorithmically mediated public sphere, which the logic of the attention economy tends to push far more rapidly into cycles of extremist one-upmanship.

I’d add that the mimetic pressures of platforms often create a false consensus that evaporates as rapidly as it is formed. The often bizarre racial ideas that were briefly embraced by a seemingly broad liberal public around 2020 (see Kendi, Ibram X.) seem to have almost entirely subsided, which has laid bare the persistence of the more conventional late-20th century liberal racial framework as the shared common sense of the culture.

If the right, as River Page argued, is “high on its own supply” in much the way the left was last decade, which will lead to overreach and eventual breakdown, one thing that stands out is how much of its current excess seems to be driven from the top down. The extremes of the 2010s awokening came out of the collision of certain high-pressure ideological monocultures—academia and journalism—with the mob dynamics instigated by online platforms. Conversely, Rufo’s NSA campaign had the feel of a sort of show trial coordinated with the White House to create the impression of “cleaning house” (perhaps to distract from foot-dragging on promised high-profile declassifications). It was also the White House that sought Elez’s reinstatement; and now, the intervention on behalf of the Tate brothers.

While the Democratic coalition over the past decade often seemed to be held hostage by the extremism of its activist “groups,” the “group” pushing the GOP into overreach seems to be the Trump administration itself. In all of these cases, especially the Tate affair, I have been heartened to see conservatives online object. One of the main problems with left-wing cancel culture was the destruction of a culture of healthy self-criticism. Let us hope, with due wariness, that “loyalty” doesn’t lead to the same on the right.

This week in Compact

• Hamilton Craig on why Trump is a moderate—but not in a good way.

• Leila Mechoui on the global housing bubble, and how it will burst.

• Mark Krikorian on why immigration is a foreign-policy issue.

• Brad Wilcox on why Elon’s polygyny is still the exception in the GOP.

• Ted Reese on how the drive for profit leads to warmongering.

• Dan Hitchens on populist leaders falling back into Thatcherism.

• Justin Vassallo on why Democrats must be the anti-monopoly party.

• Christian Parenti on the left-wing origins of “deep state” theory.

Thanks for reading!