The threat of cancellation recedes at the other end of the wealth spectrum, too, among the working and lower classes. Again, cancellation is not impossible here, but you are comparatively unlikely to lose a working-class or minimum wage job via cancellation. I don’t expect many McDonald’s managers do social media deep dives on applicants to run the grill. Does anyone really care about their plumber’s politics?

But those in the professional-managerial class can expect their name to be googled in every job application. As Douthat muses, “under the rule of the internet there’s no leaving the village: Everywhere is the same place, and so is every time.” Once PMC members have been canceled, it sticks. Will the woman in the Washington Post Halloween party story, a graphic designer, ever work in her chosen field again? After the video of Amy Cooper, dubbed the “Central Park Karen,” went viral, Forbes published an analysis of “three things [she] did to damage her reputation and career.” Will she ever find another investment job? Or what about this museum curator who resigned after being accused of “toxic white supremacist beliefs” for saying his museum would not categorically exclude white artists? Will another museum take a chance on him? These are truly open questions. Who would risk hiring these people if they can instead select an equally qualified candidate without national or industry infamy?…

This is why cancel culture is so effective. This is why it frightens people in what is self-evidently not a “classless society.” The threat of cancellation isn’t merely intense public shame, though that too is significant. The threat is class expulsion couched within and magnified by our national mythos of self-advancement — that is, the American dream. It is a threat of being stripped, for the choice of a day or moment, of the class status you’ve ordered so much of your life to attain.