When a single accusation can erase a lifetime of work, Dershowitz argues that cancel culture short-circuits both free speech and due process, replacing evidence with outrage.
Cancel culture is “the new McCarthyism,” a fast, largely anonymous social sanction that chills debate by punishing without process—even when the speech itself is constitutionally protected.
Dershowitz grounds his case by (a) recalling McCarthy-era blacklists, (b) contrasting governmental repression with today’s amorphous online “judge and jury,” and (c) tracing how definitions of “cancel culture” entered mainstream lexicons (Merriam-Webster, Macquarie). For broader context, publisher records confirm the book’s publication and scope (Hot Books/Skyhorse, Nov. 17, 2020).
FIRE’s campus deplatforming data shows continuing attempts to disinvite or disrupt speakers, illustrating the book’s concern about chilled discourse.
Best for readers who care about civil liberties, campus culture, and the mechanics of public shaming; not for readers seeking a neutral ethnography of online activism or a left/right survey absent the author’s strong, personal stance.
Table of Contents
A brief introduction
Cancel culture, free speech, due process—these three keywords dominate public debate but often slip into slogan and counter-slogan. Dershowitz’s Cancel Culture: The Latest Attack on Free Speech and Due Process tries to pin them down, historically and legally, and to show how social punishment without procedure corrodes the “marketplace of ideas.”
He opens by linking his childhood brush with McCarthy-era fears to today’s climate, arguing that the old blacklist was obvious—names on paper, careers ended by the state—while the new list is crowdsourced and opaque. He places cancel culture within First Amendment values, treating free speech and due process as “twins” that together restrain tyranny and cultivate truth-seeking.
To show the term’s spread beyond punditry, he quotes lexicographic notes: Merriam-Webster’s “Words We’re Watching” entry describes canceling as withdrawing support from public figures over objectionable conduct or opinions, a social severing similar to a “cancelled contract.” This aligns with the dictionary’s formal definition today.
The aim is plain: to warn that cancel culture undermines both free speech and due process—even when expression remains legally protected, the social consequences can function like penalties without trial.
1. Introduction
This is a short polemical-legal essay from a Harvard Law professor emeritus known for civil-liberties advocacy. It belongs to the genre of public-intellectual argument: descriptive history of censorship blended with constitutional analysis and first-person testimony. His argument leans libertarian on speech and proceduralist on justice, with a recurring comparison to McCarthyism.
The thesis is that cancel culture poses “a frontal attack on freedom of speech and due process”—and that while canceling is itself speech protected by the First Amendment, its moral and civic consequences warrant criticism and resistance.
In crisp, autobiographical pages, he describes how today’s networked accusations—“The social media is judge and jury”—bypass presumption of innocence, creating “an irrebuttable presumption of guilt.”
2. Background
Dershowitz’s baseline is historical memory: the Rosenberg era, Hollywood blacklists, and state-driven punishment provide the old template.
He then surfaces a crucial difference: in the past, the government censored; now, platformed publics—amplified by social media—coordinate sanctions with few checks, little transparency, and diffuse accountability.
The conceptual twist is that today’s cancel culture is, paradoxically, speech about speech. For Dershowitz, that doesn’t absolve it of scrutiny; rather, it makes the case for stronger norms of due process (fact-checking, proportion, opportunity to respond) before we digitally erase someone from the public square.
Lexicographic milestones—Macquarie’s “Word of the Year” and Merriam-Webster’s tracking—mark the phenomenon’s mainstreaming.
Public debate also widened in 2020 with the Harper’s “Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” which criticized “illiberalism” and asked for a renewed tolerance of disagreement; the letter itself then became a target, illustrating the very dynamics it named.
3. Summary
Cancel culture, in this book, is not a single movement but a pattern: rapid condemnation, status and livelihood penalties (from deplatforming to firing), and little procedural fairness for the accused. The author distinguishes between holding the powerful accountable and punishing without process, pressing readers to notice when we pass from one to the other.
He sketches the mechanisms. First is mass naming and shaming: networked publics mobilize speed and scale to strip support from individuals and institutions.
As Merriam-Webster’s emerging-use note described, canceling now means “withdrawing support” from a person’s work because of opinions or behavior—an act that resembles severing a contract. Second is platform opacity: algorithms reward outrage, while the identities and incentives of the “cancellers” are often unknowable; “The social media is judge and jury.” Third is a temporal reach that extends cancellation backward; even the dead and their descendants become targets for renamings and removals, without a forum to weigh context or reform.
Throughout, he places free speech and due process together. “These fundamental rights are twins,” he writes, “roadblocks against tyranny” and instruments of truth-seeking through evidence and argument; without them, democracies become vulnerable to panics and certitudes. He quotes Judge Learned Hand: “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.”
Moreover, Dershowitz insists that constitutional protection of speech does not settle the ethics of cancelling. “At its core, cancel culture is itself an expression of free speech,” he concedes—then calls it “wrong,” “dangerous,” and often partisan or identity-driven. He traces intellectual roots in movements for “moral clarity,” quoting journalists who argue against objectivity when one side is presumed obviously right; he warns that elevating a single, official “Truth” invites repression.
The book also uses comparative history. Stalinist erasures (literally airbrushing figures from photographs) demonstrate a maximal form of cancellation; the author recounts seeing doctored images at a museum visit with Nuremberg prosecutor Telford Taylor, where empty spaces stood “where so-and-so stood in the picture.” The analogy is not identity—Stalin killed; today’s cancelers do not—but the point is to show how social erasure functions across regimes.
His normative proposal is modest but crucial: preserve robust criticism and boycotts (speech with consequences) while rebuilding procedural fairness in our institutions of adjudication—universities, media, HR departments. He laments university “processes” that are “so result-oriented and peremptory as to be no real process, and certainly not due process,” particularly around sexual-misconduct cases; he cites open faculty letters calling for fairer standards.
Finally, he acknowledges that the law can’t do everything. Even in polities rich with speech protections, liberty requires civic virtues and intellectual humility—“the spirit…not too sure that it is right,” as Hand put it.
3. Critical analysis
The evidence in this short book is a blend of memoir, legal doctrine, intellectual history, and carefully chosen definitional sources (Merriam-Webster; Macquarie). That mosaic fits the scope: he aims to name a problem, not to run a randomized field trial. Still, the book’s most compelling passages are where doctrine meets daily life—say, his account of an accusation that made “the accusation [into] the conviction,” with “no presumption of innocence.”
Does the argument generalize? On campuses, third-party data suggest yes: FIRE’s deplatforming database logs hundreds of attempts and disruptions over two decades, with 2024 continuing at pace; that doesn’t prove “cancel culture” explains all incidents, but it corroborates the chilling-effect pattern.
Meanwhile, the Harper’s Letter shows elite signatories sensing narrowing discourse—an impression disputed in rejoinders, which is itself evidence of profound cultural disagreement about whether sanctioning speakers is accountability or suppression.
In terms of logical reasoning, Dershowitz is at his strongest where he separates constitutional protection (what government may forbid) from moral-political evaluation (what citizens should do). He concedes canceling is speech—but insists that norms of due process should guide institutions before imposing punishments like firings or disinvitations. He’s weakest where the analogy to McCarthyism is stretched; significant differences remain (state power, prisons, formal blacklist systems).
To his credit, he states those differences explicitly (Stalin “had the power not only to cancel, but to kill”), keeping the analogy as a warning rather than an equivalence.
The book contributes by reframing culture-war skirmishes as problems of procedure rather than ideology: you can hate a viewpoint and still insist that any penalty be evidence-based, proportionate, and appealable. In an era of fast reputational ruin, that’s a civic technology we need.
4. Strengths and weaknesses
What worked for me.
The pairing of free speech and due process as “twins” is clarifying—and, yes, oddly calming. It reorients readers away from “who’s right” toward “how we know.”
The historical vignettes are sticky: the airbrushed Nuremberg photographs; the boyhood story during the Rosenberg furor; the definition arc from dictionaries to campus policies.
The concession that canceling is itself speech gives the argument integrity; he’s not calling for bans, but for better norms.
What snagged me.
At times the book reads more as a legalist’s intervention than a sociologist’s. Readers wanting systematic data on rates, demographics, or outcomes will need to pair it with independent research (FIRE; social-science studies on reputational sanctions).
And because the author is a high-profile participant in these debates, some passages feel polemical—useful for understanding the stakes, less so for adjudicating granular controversies. That said, the frankness about personal cost invites empathy rather than cynicism.
5. Reception, criticism, influence
The book reached readers already animated by the free-speech debate and sits alongside 2020’s high-profile public letters urging “open debate.” Critics of the broader cancel-culture narrative argue that concerns are overstated or misframed—that legal threats (like libel abuse) pose at least as serious a danger to speech. Supporters point to ongoing disinvitations, firings, and reputational storms as evidence that informal sanctions can approximate formal censorship in effect.
Beyond policy circles, probinism.com has treated cancel culture as a live civic question, outlining its “impacts” and tensions—evidence that the debate has diffused well beyond law reviews into generalist public-education venues.
6. Quotations
“The new McCarthyism—cancel culture—threatens these rights as well.”
“The social media is judge and jury.”
“These fundamental rights are twins… roadblocks against tyranny.”
“At its core, cancel culture is itself an expression of free speech… I will defend it as a constitutional right, while condemning it as a matter of morality and principle.”
“Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.” (Learned Hand, quoted by Dershowitz).
7. Comparison with similar works
Compared with campus-focused reports (e.g., FIRE’s rankings and deplatforming database), Dershowitz offers less data and more constitutional-moral architecture.
Against sociological takes that treat “cancel culture” as accountability movements, this book is a liberal-proceduralist counterweight: he affirms accountability yet insists on due process before penalties. In the broader intellectual conversation—Harper’s letter; New Yorker interviews with signatories—the book stands as a pointed, personal brief for liberal norms under stress.
8. Conclusion
In my judgment, Cancel Culture succeeds at its self-appointed task: it’s a warning flare about the erosion of due process norms in our cultural institutions and an intellectually honest reminder that free speech protections don’t answer the ethical question of how we punish.
Its strengths are clarity, brevity, and moral seriousness about procedures. Its weaknesses are the limited empirical base and a sometimes heavy reliance on analogy. Still, if you’re a student, editor, HR lead, activist, or simply a citizen who wants to keep the marketplace of ideas open without abandoning accountability, this is an essential primer.
Recommendation.
Highly suitable for general audiences who want a brisk, principled tour of the issues; also useful for campus leaders and journalists. Specialists will want to supplement with social-science datasets and institutional case studies—but they’ll find the free speech + due process framework indispensable.
