The worst thing about so-called 'cancel culture' is its hubris. It imagines itself so powerful it can ignore competing epistemologies, and that aversive arguments can be extinguished by preventing their official discussion. It's wrong.

This might look superficially like it's working, in the short term, but the failure of the Soviet Union to exterminate Christianity - and the whole infrastructure of samizdat publishing and intellectual exchange - shows how ideas can't ever really be stifled in this way.

The fact that 'cancel culture' is in many respects trying to stifle not very nice ideas, such as ethno-nationalism, in no way changes the fact that these ideas will carry on bubbling away. They'll just be doing so insulated from mainstream discourse.

This has two effects: first, forbidden ideas grow more virulent and their advocates more passionate. Second, the mainstream grows fat and complacent, and loses the ability to counter them.

For example hardly anyone who cares about feminism reads the misogynistic stuff that often emanates from the Weird Right, beyond noting that it's quite misogynistic. The belief seems to be we don't have to, we can just cancel it. This is hopelessly complacent.

You don't need a naive belief in some 'free market' of ideas to think it's prudent to engage with thinkers who are profoundly hostile to your way of viewing the world. But the cancellers seem to believe they're now powerful enough that this is no longer necessary.

Time will tell but my hunch is that in time this hubris will prove disastrous for the liberal-left.