Adrian Daub, in his fascinating and timely study of the public conversations about cancel culture in the United States and around the world, points to 2018 as the beginning of a broader public debate about cancel culture. That was the moment when the term cancellation stopped being used by online leftists in a lightly ironic manner and started being treated as an explicit political project. Think-pieces about cancel culture appeared in that barometer of bourgeois mores, the New York Times’s Style section, followed by what Daub calls a ‘discursive explosion’ across US media.
The Cancel Culture Panic is a book about the fear of cancel culture in the United States and how that fear has been exported to other countries. Daub isn’t interested in debating whether or not a phenomenon called cancel culture exists; ‘far more real than an existing cancel culture is cancel culture as an object of discourse’. Since 2019, it has been impossible to tune out of the public conversations about cancel culture, about wokeness, deplatforming, and silent majorities. Cancel culture is now everywhere, it seems. Who hasn’t heard a second- or third-hand anecdote about good intentions gone too far? But where did this anxiety come from? What Daub does in this book is trace the origins of the cancel culture panic, registering its defining contradictions. Rather than letting cancel culture float free as a signifier, he gives it a history, and in doing so, helps us to understand ‘why various global publics were so quickly convinced that cancel culture exists, that people knew what it was, and that it posed an existential problem’.
This is a useful book for understanding how in 2019 cancel culture got itself named as the word of the year in Australia, and why it has so dominated public discourse since then. If it is difficult to offer as succinct a definition of cancel culture as the Macquarie Dictionary did, this is because it is a slippery concept, one that has changed over time, and one that, as Daub emphasises, relies heavily on anecdotes to draw universal conclusions. In conversation, I have found myself repeating one of Daub’s aperçus in lieu of a definition: cancel culture stories are ‘little morality plays that pointedly eschew considerations of political economy’.
We might start by thinking of cancel culture as an expression of censorious liberalism, which is the way it is framed by its many critics. This censoriousness is ascribed to, among others, advocates for social justice and inclusion, young people, artists, and activists. It is often associated with movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. Talking about liberalism lets us get to the core of the contradiction of the cancel culture panic. The cancel culture police see themselves as liberals crusading against illiberal incursions against free speech, and yet they themselves call for ever more onerous restrictions in response, whether through censorship, laws against protest, or curriculum reform. This contradiction has been apparent in Australia and the United States over the past twelve months in the responses to pro-Palestinian protestors, who are lambasted for their illiberalism, and whose right to public speech is simultaneously restricted. In Daub’s words, ‘oscillation between universalism (all speech needs to be protected) and a not-so-covert parochialism (in order to protect freedom of speech, certain kinds of speech I don’t like should be discouraged) is the central confusion of the cancel culture panic’. This confusion is compounded by a rhetorical mode that understands itself as courageous, even radical, for daring to give voice to what would otherwise be left unsaid.
Questions about proportion are a recurrent feature of the cancel culture panic. On the one hand, people who complain about cancel culture argue that the consequences of, for example, making lewd remarks to a colleague are disproportionate. On the other, as Daub shows in his quantitative analysis of cancel culture in the United States, cancel culture discourse drastically overstates the incidence of firings, job losses, book contract cancellations, and other measurable professional consequences of being cancelled. Self-styled martyrs of cancel culture such as Jordan Peterson have found cancellation a lucrative career development.
The result is a set of inversions that overstate the changes wrought by public discourses about race and gender and that ‘skew our impressions of societal power relations’. If you buy into the cancel culture panic, people making complaints about sexual harassment or racism in the workplace and scrawny student protesters are much more powerful than university leaders, politicians, and employers. ‘The cancel culture panic,’ he writes, ‘thrives on the assumption that those who hold power – from elected officials to editors to professors to mainstream writers – deserve that power to some extent.’ It follows that those who challenge existing structures of privilege and power do not deserve a hearing.
To many observers, the hand-wringing around cancel culture is very familiar. Daub writes, ‘the longer the discussion on cancel culture lasts, the more it reveals itself as a new iteration of the discourse on political correctness’. He shows how the cancel culture panic adapted to local conditions in France, Germany, and Russia, grafting itself onto existing debates about history and inclusion that had already been fed through the political correctness grinder. In France, cancel culture panic attached itself to conversations about laicity and French ethnic identity; in Germany, to the memorialisation of the Holocaust. In Australia, the grounds for cancel culture panic were prepared by the decades of disputation over the teaching of Australian history and an even longer tradition of suspicion of intellectual élites telling the man on the street how to think, speak, and feel.
As I read The Cancel Culture Panic in the early months of 2025, new contexts for Daub’s analyses emerged with galling frequency. Of course, there has been the constant drone of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s rhetoric about the woke and cancel culture, echoed in Australia by Peter Dutton, and also by many centrist politicians seeking to distance themselves from any perception of extremism. ‘Talking about cancel culture or wokeness,’ writes Daub, ‘always means not talking about other things.’
One of the things we don’t talk about enough in these endless conversations about cancel culture is where the power to hire and fire really lies. In early February, Creative Australia dismissed Khaled Sabsabi and Michael Dagostino as Australian representatives to the Venice Biennale. You could say they were cancelled. It was a cowardly and quick response to pressure applied from The Australian and an ambitious young conservative senator from Tasmania. The artist, the curator; the government bureaucrats; the media empire and the politician: together they provided a compelling lesson about freedom of speech in Australia, one that does not resemble the anecdotes that have fuelled the cancel culture panic.
