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Notes -
Not a call to pick a side particularly, more an attempt to think about cultural dynamics (if possible) before they occur. My model of cultural norms is a sort of "cultural peace" model, where people agree to lay down their metaphorical arms and stop fighting the culture war because it's become troublesome for both sides. (The alternative model of cultural peace seems to be that one side triumphs decisively.)
If the optimal goal is strong cultural free-speech norms, and we take for granted that the prior norm was that "cancellation" was primarily an attack wielded by the left against the right (debatable!) and that the left was not culturally successful at keeping their "own side" from launching cancellation attacks, then it seems like game theory suggests that to achieve the optimal goal one would want
Group #1 is needed to make "the left" realize there is a good pragmatic reason to have a principled pro-free-speech stance (presumably since right-wingers have been canceled by left-wingers, they already have good pragmatic incentives for such a norm).
Group #2 is needed to team up with those on "the left" persuaded by Group #1 to write a new cultural peace treaty and cement the pro-free-speech norms across partisan lines.
The fail mode of this on the one side is that one side is very principled and the other side never has to learn principles because they never have any motivation to do so. However, I think the fail mode on the other side (in the theory that I postulate above) is that there will be a failure to coordinate a new peace and instead of reducing cancellations culturally we double them and the culture war heat ticks up a notch.
(This is all a brutal oversimplification and I sort of hate typing something as broadly sweeping as "right/left wingers.")
It also might be worth pointing out that I suppose one could make a principled difference between speech that calls for political violence and speech that...doesn't. There's definitely a slippery slope here (should Marxists be canceled because of their beliefs? what about libertarians?) but it seems like a culture could agree to draw the line at public calls for violence aimed at specific people.
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