Helen Lewis overstates the alleged excesses of so-called cancel culture—which, really, is accountability culture—in much the same way as Jill Filipovic but Lewis has an economic argument here that, interestingly, also echoes something Filipovic had highlighted.
Our employers have colossal power over us, and workers have very, very little. The concept of “employment at will” — that your employer can fire you at any time for any transgression, or no transgression at all — is just not a thing in the saner democracies to which we often compare ourselves. A big part of this is waning union influence, but it’s generally a consolidation of nearly all workplace power into the hands of employers, to the detriment of employees.
Whereas an overlooked issue for Filipovic was the inequities in power between employer and employee and whether or not worker vulnerability was being leveraged by the left, Lewis looks to the idea that what she considers the excesses of “cancel culture” often are the result of corporations and other institutions performatively bending to progress only just enough to get activists off their backs.
In each instance here, I think we aren’t speaking of the excesses of “cancel culture” so much as exceptional and outlying errors (although not even in all the cases they raise, but setting that aside). And so, as I’ve said before, while it’s important to watch for errors it’s arguably more important to watch out for the cruel, the sexist, and the rapacious (ahem) using these outlying errors as a shield against accountability culture itself.
I think there’s something to be said for being wary of leaning into labor inequities as a means of punishing people, and for being wary of falling for performative wokeness by institutions, just not without also saying something about whether someone really did do something egregious or harmful; certainly not without also ensuring that we aren’t allowing those who punch down to use exceptions as a means of warding off potential accountability for themselves.