In this sense, the woke dialect is a new kind of gnosticism, separating the elite from the great unwashed. This boundary between the initiated and the uninitiated — the woke and the “problematic” — is one that the working-class hockey players ran up against: Their attempted apology was vindictively policed by the other students, punctuated by regular interruptions from the crowd “calling out” this or that choice of words for falling off script. (Apparently, one of the hockey players had lightly put his hand on the shoulder of a black female student to prevent her from entering the party. “I know, I should never put my hands on a woman,” he said, in an effort to say the right line. The crowd exploded: “You should never put your hands on anyone—regardless of their gender identity!”)

What that means, of course, is that the well-educated elite are far less vulnerable to vindictive activists than their less privileged counterparts. “The cancel-culture debate has primarily played out in the public view with famous celebrities or those attached to large institutions,” Phil Klein wrote on Thursday. “The bigger threat from cancel culture is not to famous people with massive audiences. It is to those whose lives can be turned upside down thanks to online mobs, who don’t have the resources or supporters to survive such an assault.”

More fundamentally, the deconstruction of our shared language has made us less capable of seeing one another as fellow citizens. We are no longer capable of talking to one another.