Rumors of Cancel Culture’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

If I could choose two words to describe the phenomenon they would be: Degradation and Revolution. Canceling is what sociologists call a “degradation ceremony,” a means whereby a society makes a person “other,” demotes them from a member of society, or places them outside society altogether. Cancel culture is the social milieu that enables cancellations to happen. The impetus for many canceling attempts is the tenets of what the sociologist Robert Nisbet called “the revolutionary community.” Its goal is to overturn our society and create another through degradation, the formal social exclusion, of dissenting persons.

Canceling as Degradation Ceremony

In 1956, the famed sociologist Harold Garfinkel described the elements of a successful “degradation ceremony,” an act of public denunciation resulting in severe diminution of social status. Degradation ceremonies are not a problem per se. Every society has them and must have them to be a society at all. Our criminal justice system is a “degradation ceremony” whereby we publicly denounce those who violate our fundamental rules, make them “other” and remove them from proper society. Problems emerge either when the degradation ceremony targets unproblematic behavior or when it too harshly punishes mildly problematic behavior. The criminal justice system, as essential as it may be, would be seriously dysfunctional if it jailed people for violations they did not commit or passed down draconian sentences for minor infractions, degrading members of our society unnecessarily in one way or another. Centuries of due process protections accrued precisely to avoid these outcomes.

Garfinkel describes three parties to a degradation ceremony: the perpetrator, the denouncer, and the witnesses. The perpetrator allegedly committed the infraction, described as the “event.” The denouncer is the one naming the perpetrator and the event. The denunciation must be public, in front of witnesses, i.e. the rest of us. The denouncer must demonstrate moral indignation “to effect the ritual destruction of the person denounced.” The destruction is “literal.” Before the degradation ceremony, the perpetrator is a member of our community. Afterward, he is not. The person we knew as a member of our society in good standing no longer exists and a new person has been constituted. Garfinkel writes, “[T]he former identity stands as accidental; the new identity is the ‘basic reality.’ What he is now is what, ‘after all,’ he was all along.” We thought the perpetrator was our friend and colleague, at least our interlocutor. We have now found he was a fiend.

Eight conditions make for a successful degradation ceremony. First, the event and the perpetrator must be seen as extraordinary. What the perpetrator did was not routine, a mere off-color joke, maybe regrettable, perhaps even requiring an apology. It is an outrage.

Second, the event and perpetrator are a type that is opposed to the type preferred by society at large. The event is not a one-time occurrence, an event we notice but where we can require an apology, offer forgiveness, and move on. Rather, the event is paradigmatic of what our society stands against. The perpetrator stands in relation to the denouncer and witnesses as the criminal to the citizen or the traitor to the patriot. There is no nuance or qualification. The event is despicable and so is the perpetrator.

Third, the denouncer is acting as a public figure, a representative of the moral values of society at large shared by the witnesses. Hence, the accusations of racism and sexism. We have rejected these as a society. Denunciations made in their name strike the core of what we are as a liberal and democratic society.

Fourth, these moral values must clearly be the driving force behind the denunciation. If the motivation is obviously personal gain, then the denunciation fails as a degradation ceremony. We must believe that the perpetrator violated our sacred values and the denouncer is speaking on their behalf.

Fifth, the denouncer must have legitimacy to speak in the name of the community’s values, not for personal reasons. This is why we so often hear reference to one’s race, sex, sexual orientation, or role as an ally in the denunciations.

Sixth, the witnesses must understand the denouncer as devoted to the community’s values, which they too hold. The accusations must be something that nearly all in our society facially reject, even if we disagree upon definitions or appropriate contexts. We have long rejected racism and sexism, so these values are the reference point for cancel culture.

Seventh, the denouncer and witnesses must distance themselves from the perpetrator. He is now the “other.” Finally, this distancing must be public. “The denounced must be ritually separated from a place in the legitimate order,” Garfinkel writes, “i.e. he must be defined as standing at a place opposed to it.” The ritual is literal separation. For the canceled, it means firing him, unfollowing his X account, and scrubbing his articles and bio from your webpage. Let everyone know that you have nothing to do with him through a public ritual of separation.

In the criminal justice system, we carry out the degradation through the ritual of trial, conviction, and sentencing. These processes and results are drawn from both legal tradition and contemporary legislation, but they have broad social sanction. Democratically elected legislatures passed the laws under which we punish criminals, or they have the imprimatur of common law or some similar endorsement. The procedures arose through centuries of pursuing justice. When canceling, on the other hand, we carry out these processes through social procedures where a crowd of witnesses joins in the denunciation, creating in great part the punishment through the act of public denunciation itself and the various ritual separations that follow (deleting articles, unfollowing, etc.).

Garfinkel notes, “Factors conditioning the effectiveness of degradation tactics are provided in the organization and operation of the system of action within which the degradation occurs.” We live in the age of social media. The technology, barely two decades old, provides unique circumstances for widespread social degradation on a scale nearly impossible as late as the last century.

Status degradation ceremonies are unique in their aim to annihilate the social being of the perpetrator. Society has means other than degradation ceremonies to deliver status defeats. Personal insults may humiliate, firings may economically damage, and so on. But the aim of degradation ceremonies is not merely to hurt emotionally, to embarrass, or even to humiliate, but to utterly annihilate social status.

Cancel Culture as Community

When we talk of “cancel culture,” we are speaking of a community, more or less coherent, through which canceling can take place. A paradigm that can help us understand this culture is Robert Nisbet’s concept of “the revolutionary community.”

In Nisbet’s woefully neglected book, The Social Philosophers (1973), he describes a series of communities—ways of organizing a culture’s values to make sense of community and its decline. The basic premise is that with the fall of kinship as the sole source of community, other forms took its place organized primarily around war, politics, and religion. When these basic motifs fail, the result is withdrawal (think: St. Benedict, the Amish) or revolution. Social philosophy, from Plato to Marx and beyond, is largely the history of a defense of these forms of community.

Seven elements define Nisbet’s conception of “the revolutionary community.” His description was key to understanding the riots of 2020, as I wrote in this space, and explains much of the woke phenomenon. I think it also describes the motivating features of cancel culture to a great (and disturbing) degree. Nisbet connects the revolutionary community to the totalitarian states of the twentieth century and their precursors, especially the French Revolution. Cancel culture is not totalitarian in this sense. Rather, cancel culture and totalitarian societies are variations of the communal motif of Nisbet’s “revolutionary community.”

First, the revolutionary community is premised on the myth of human goodness. Core to any society is a founding myth of how the world works. For cancel culture, all problems in society are the result of some oppression, which can only be removed through “the liberative action of revolutionary violence.”

Second, such liberating violence is necessary. Only through force will our society be freed from its oppressions. Peaceful change through persuasion is to bargain with the oppressors. This is manifest in the bloodshed of the French and Russian Revolutions. It manifests in cancel culture as the vicious attack upon the perpetrator. This is not traditional violence, but the intent is the same: destruction of a person’s life. A wayward tweet results in doxing, ruining one’s economic and social prospects for life. It may not be literally burning down one’s house, but it is intended to have the same effect. Jonathan Rauch has gone so far as to compare literal assassination attempts such as those targeting Salmon Rushdie with the character assassinations of cancelations. This tenet of the revolutionary community is the reason.

Third, the holiness of sin. Nearly all consider violence under certain circumstances necessary, if regrettable. Public denunciations may be appropriate in certain circumstances, likewise cutting off friendships, firings, and so on. They are a last resort when other measures to bring repentance and change have failed. Not so for the revolutionary community. “Acts such as murder, kidnapping, treason, torture, mutilation, vandalism, and arson” are holy when carried out in the name of revolution. So such social violence wrought by cancellations are holy, they are noble, the very essence of righteous rage. Hence, celebrations when the canceled attempt suicide.

Fourth, the revolutionary community values terror. Fear has long been used to achieve certain behavioral outcomes. The crucifixion, public floggings, stake burnings, and the like were effective because they instigated fear. For the revolutionary community, terror is an essential part of the community because for revolutionaries it is a species of justice. It is the means whereby both the targets of terror get their comeuppance and everyone else is shown what lies in store should they dissent. The message is clear: silence or your life. Evidence of self-censorship indicates that this tenet is effective.

Fifth, the totalism of the revolutionary ideology. The revolutionary community seeks to advance its vision to every nook and cranny of life. Cancel culture is aimed at any communication through any medium at any time. The efforts of “offense archaeologists” work only because of the totalism inherent in cancel culture. Nothing said or done at any time anywhere—public or private—is beyond the reach of its total account of good and evil. It is why years-old comments lead to firings and forgiveness is impossible. Apologies, no matter how groveling and demeaning, are only proof of unforgivable guilt. 

Sixth, the principles and tactics of the revolutionary community are always derived from an elite. Relatively few scholars at elite universities dictated the terms of woke ideology and its antecedents undergirding cancel culture. While a single Twitter warrior, student, or disgruntled citizen may spark a canceling campaign, the ideological basis upon which they do so is derived from the elite.

Seventh, centralization. This is the element from which cancel culture diverges and it is cancel culture’s most salient distinction from a totalitarian society. Cancel culture lacks the centralization of a totalitarian state, although some think it is a precursor to such a society. For now, cancel culture remains decentralized. Those who carry on canceling campaigns have no discernable central command, but they do have a totalist vision of how their doctrines dominate all of society.

Proper diagnosis generally precedes an effective cure. What I’ve outlined here gives us what I think is a sound description of cancel culture and should, I hope, aid in its dismantling. We might begin by valuing the inverse of the principles of the revolutionary community. Against the myth of human goodness, let us begin with the assumption of human fallibility. Instead of the celebration of violence and sin, the literal destruction of our foes, let us thrill to the agon of debate. Rejecting totalism, let us embrace pluralism in Nisbet’s meaning of the term, including functional autonomy, decentralization, hierarchy, and tradition (explained and tentatively translated into public policy proposals here and here). Most of all, let us begin with strong suspicion toward any attempt to instigate the ceremonial social destruction of a human being.

This article is adapted from “Degradation and Revolution: A Taxonomy of Cancel Culture,” in International Comparative Approaches to Free Speech and Open Inquiry, ed. by Luke C. Sheahan (Palgrave, 2022).