American Pigeon tweeted out a video of Ari Hasanaj compiling a directory of businesses that are not complying with New York City’s vaccine mandates. Hasanaj is the founder of Project Stand Together, a non-profit  organization with a mission to end the vaccine mandates causing medical segregation across the country. 

Hasanaj says that the directory will be a means for people to recognize and patronize businesses where they do not need to prove their vaccination in order to be served. 

There were many comments criticizing this action as “playing right into the enemies hands” by providing law enforcement a list of non-complying businesses to fine. One comment, in particular, stood out to me. 

It said, “So, we put together a list of those violating our rights on behalf of the government. List of businesses, and individuals of ALL trades, professions and creed. Hold them accountable, to their own standards once the pendulum swings. It’s the only way we can stop this [medical apartheid] reoccurring.” 

The tweet reminded me of when AOC advocated for keeping Trump and those who supported him “accountable.” There was even a website online for some time, Trumpaccountability.net. 

While, from the perspective of this author, this might appear as the perfect avenge for the injustice done to so many, a proposal like this is an imitation of the ideological purpose of political accountability in the form of a “blacklist.” 

It’s what happens when populism is motivated by ideology—and those two things are not obvious accomplices, as conservative populists are motivated by reaction; because conservatism, properly understood, is de facto anti-ideological—an idea to be almost wholly unaccepted by its opponents; but when thinking ideationally, rather than superficially, we aren’t so quick to make empirical justifications for what we want to be true. It is easy to think of politics according to the day-to-day news cycle, where we are moved to feel and act by a drama brought to you courtesy of the outrage machine. That is why the next point is crucial to any individual political thinker. 

(Related: The Dramaturgy of Politics and Journalism: What is Journalism?)

When populism and ideology come together, morality is adapted to align with the latter, expressed symbiotically through mass formation, i.e. populist sentiment, action. Mainstream conservative opinion will not accept this idea of blacklisting or keeping tabs on political opponents, or those who behave in politically undesirable ways; if it did, it would make conservatism as ideological as the left and we would have two forces competing for total authority. 

Making a list of those who agree with you that you may support them, is morally different from making a list of those who do not agree with you that they may be punished immediately or at some later time. At this point in time, conservatism has not culminated the structural or influential power to even suggest such a thing without being globally denounced; such a proposal is the exclusive privilege of the left in the general form of “cancel culture,” discussed further below.  

Populist comes from the latin, populus, meaning “people.” Populism is the belief in that people, the “will of the people”; and that Will usually subsumed into a charismatic leader for the consolidation of political power. The authoritarian pejorative of populism once left a foul odor when it was used to label; however, it’s since been gaining popularity, openly amongst the right-wing and more surreptitiously by the left. 

Amongst conservatives, it’s used to denote a distinction between “the people” and “the establishment,” class antagonists even to the left; which is why it is a cause for vigilance that the left has infiltrated its voice into the establishment, that “the people” and it become mutually reinforcing classes. While conservatives are populists against the powers that be, leftists are populists against the powers that are not, and against what they traditionally stand for. 

Cancel Culture is a case in point of this romance between the “establishment” and the left. The establishment refers to general institutional hegemony: corporate, technological, social, and political. These four institutions are tied by the bureaucratic consolidation of all that is important to, and for, its subjects, and uses those beliefs as means for its own consolidating power. There is an odd contradiction in leftism’s flirtation with centralized power and quasi-public control of information, as resistance to “bourgeois” order refers to the support for the powers that be. 

Perhaps there is no longer a bourgeois of any concern. The long march through the institutions has been a success. Power is relational and must be wielded for its own sake. 

The blacklist becomes a form of “Cancel Culture” when the latter is defined as thus: the popular practice of withdrawing support for (canceling) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive. Cancel culture is generally discussed as being performed on social media in the form of group shaming. 

Populism can be motivated by ideology from either the left- or right-wing. But because conservatism is relative and reactionary, in that it asserts a respect for pre-established conventions against the assertion of the desire to upend them, there is no ideational uniformity, institutional or cultural hegemony that demands conformity to a structural body of authority. Conservatism is instantaneously anachronistic: the moment it utters a vision, it renders itself obsolete, an orphan against the revolutionary, a deer in the headlight of change. 

This political imbalance between the two competing politics is what make the leftist powers that be so tantalizingly authoritarian, to the point of fulfilling the prophetic nightmare of Hamilton’s and Tocqueville’s despotic majority. The left’s insistence on democracy bending to the loudest voices of its constituents have created the conditions for its censoriousness and establishmentarianism—social contradictions to a ‘free and fair’ society often heralded as quintessential to itself by the pure democratists of the left.