While cancel culture may not be new it certainly seems amplified by new conditions of media and the digital era, which seem specially able to manufacture larger

While cancel culture may not be new it certainly seems amplified by new conditions of media and the digital era, which seem specially able to manufacture larger polarized mobs and hermetic ideological bubbles. He points a ginger finger at the left and its tendency of late toward puritanism, but I think this is too polite. (The modern right has its own tendency and gets no pass, by the way.) One thing I find interesting amid the modern polarization of ideologies is how clearly the essence of "conservatism" and "liberalism" can be seen in their extreme lights. You get a much clearer picture of "where" each ideology goes when taken to its extreme. Embarrassingly I grew up tacitly seeing "conservatism" as the "bad guys"; I reject that simplistic thinking these days. People are people: the right and the left are cut from the same cloth, and both are subject to fundamentalist thinking. I'm speaking not just from media but how certain ideas falling from it have been trickling directly into my friend circles over the years without any kind of thoughtful skepticism or individualization.