Just What is Cancel Culture Anyway?

I'm having trouble understanding the uproar over "cancel culture," whatever that is.

I do understand the scourge of intolerance. It's bad. I've read Huxley and Orwell so I have a working grasp of group think.

The letter published in Harper's warns of "a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.

...

The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.

Unfortunately Ms. Atwood et al don't offer specifics about how they and their fellow writers are being reined in. What are they forbidden to express? What dire fate awaits them for crossing lines? From whom?

History shows that we have freely and unrepentantly resorted to what seem to me as similar cancel culture measures in the past. One example that comes to my mind was de-nazification in postwar Germany. So odious was nazism that it was driven from the German culture, its adherents purged of office (if they weren't required for American aerospace and weapons programme purposes). Did it work? Not on its own, it didn't. There were a lot of carrots that went along with that stick and, nazism being an idea, is a stain that never will be completely erased.

Slavery and the post-emancipation repression of blacks in America was about as odious as nazism but it persisted not for a few decades but over a span of centuries.  Tearing down statues of Confederate leaders, traitors to the United States of America, that have been symbolically oppressing black Americans every day since they were installed, is not cancel culture.

No one is going to forget Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson. No one can erase the memory of butchers such as Nathan Bedford Forrest. Their names and their vile crimes are preserved for eternity in books in every library in the English-speaking world. No one is trying to cancel that miserable culture. Destroying symbols that venerate them, however, is not cancel culture.

I'm glad that Margaret and Salman and Noam were able to get their concerns off their collective chests even if they fell far short of making a persuasive case for the peril they suggest looms above us all. It is good to be reminded of the need for free speech and tolerance and we should embrace those freedoms daily.  That said I think there are many bigger fish to fry.