Who is in charge of cancel culture?

Each of these incidents, up close, turned not on the intervention of activists, or the mechanisms of mass protest, but on the anxieties and misjudgments of élites. That held true in cases in which the activist was outspoken (as at Smith) or perhaps hypothetical (as with Seuss). The college president, the city-council subcommittee, the panel of experts: these figures are often described by their political opponents as if they were as coherent and determined as a closed fist—that there is something cohesive that could be called cancel culture. My own sense is that something close to the opposite is true. The claims of racial justice have upended liberal élites in interesting and profound ways, and left them deeply uncertain: about how much history should be revised, about what kinds of retributive steps should be taken, and, above all, about how many people, really, want radical change.