Cancel culture has been one of the banes of public discourse in recent years. But fighting against it doesn’t mean wanting a society that has completely lost the capacity to maintain and enforce taboos. Sometimes, people make deliberate choices that effectively cancel themselves. Kanye West is the latest example.
Every culture has things that are not acceptable to do or say, and has methods of shunning people to enforce those taboos. Indeed, as conservatives, we believe that culture matters, and that the primary job of defending it comes from civil society, not from the outer guardrails maintained by the government. But Americans have also long been wary of the Puritanical streak in our own culture – there’s a reason why The Scarlet Letter was published back in 1850 and is still inflicted on high-school English students to this day. Our political culture has likewise grown ever more obsessed since Watergate with the “kill shot,” the one scandal or one story that will instantly collapse the career of a political figure and destroy their credibility forever. The proper approach to taboos is not to abolish them or enforce them remorselessly, but to recognize that they are such powerful medicine that they must be leavened by heavy doses of judgment, perspective, and mercy. Not everything that is bad is indefensible or inexcusable, and not everything that is indefensible or inexcusable is a capital offense. The trouble with cancel culture is not simply that it engages the shunning impulse to enforce taboos, but that it weaponizes that tactic — often against political enemies or professional rivals — in a spirit of blind Jacobin fury in which it doesn’t matter whether the target’s sin was malicious or accidental, whether it was offhand or sustained, whether it was long ago or ongoing, or even whether it was a thing done or said at a time when the taboo in question didn’t exist yet.
My longstanding view of Kanye West was that he was a highly talented guy who was mentally unstable in ways that were not really separable from his musical gifts or from the simple cussedness that led him to break with Hollywood groupthink. You could appreciate aspects of his presence in the public square, but it was unwise to get too close to a man with no real mental or emotional guardrails. Thus, when he came out with a weird late-night antisemitic outburst on Twitter in October, I did not defend him, but I argued that this was more characteristic of Kanye’s erratic and often irrational behavior than with any public track record of antisemitic bigotry. Thus, it shouldn’t greatly change our assessment of the man’s character: He is what he is, just keep your distance. The fools on the right were people such as Tucker Carlson and whoever runs the House Judiciary Committee Republicans’ Twitter account, who were trying to embrace Kanye as a legitimate spokesman rather than just letting him keep doing his thing in the world like any other half-cocked celebrity, only more so:
https://twitter.com/judiciarygop/status/1578174670854975491?lang=en
In this case, however, Kanye has kept on digging for the past month rather than offer any sort of acknowledgment that he had said anything wrong. I can’t blame his corporate sponsors for deciding, once he continued down this path, that he had made himself too hot to handle. At a certain point, it became the only proper course for them to take. We should, after all, have taboos against antisemitism, and while those taboos should not be enforced with a spirit of brainless “zero tolerance” stripped of all human capacity for judgment and perspective, we have seen all too often throughout history what happens when those taboos are simply permitted to collapse.
That brings us to this week’s outrage: On Tuesday, Kanye dined with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and brought along as his guest the notorious Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, who showered Trump with flattery. Trump now says that he didn’t know who Fuentes was, which is entirely plausible but (if true) suggests the complete breakdown of competent staffing around the former president as he ramps up a 2024 campaign. In fact, during his presidency and prior campaigns, Trump often seemed to prefer not to know who his supporters were, so long as they supported him. Fuentes is not exactly a household name and mostly known only to people who are Too Online, but it would not take a very long Google search to figure out what he is. Even Breitbart News published an appalled item by Jerome Hudson and Matthew Boyle on the dinner under the headline “Trump Dined at Mar-a-Lago with White Nationalist, Holocaust Denier Nick Fuentes Alongside Kanye West,” in which Hudson and Boyle observed that Trump “seems to have met with an open white nationalist, antisemite, and Holocaust denier in Fuentes. Fuentes’ now-shut-down YouTube page is shot-through with racist and antisemitic rants that date as far back as 2014.”
Trump aside, however, Kanye clearly knew who he was there with; indeed, it is entirely possible that listening to Fuentes has fed a lot of West’s current enthusiasm for antisemitism. This is a dark place, from which there is no returning.