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There was something about your response that rubbed me the wrong way the last time, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but with my response to the article, I think I managed to crystallize it: Yes, it's wrong when we do it, but for us to become unburdened by what has been (sorry, couldn't resist), you have to offer people some form of catharsis. It can be material, or it can be symbollic, but you've got to give them something, otherwise you're asking for saintly levels of forgiveness, and I'm not even a Christian.
I think that's fair? There's still a reasonable discussion to be had about what kind of catharsis is appropriate, but I'll grant that demanding unconditional forgiveness and generosity towards one's ideological foes can be difficult. In particular, while I hope we can all agree that an emotional, id-driven impulse towards vengeance ("they made us suffer so we must make them suffer!") is wrong, considerations of justice or even just making it psychologically possible to move on might require... a kind of penance, or amends?
If it were a war between two clear opposing parties, you could imagine conditions for that. We don't just take all your cancellations and then forgive them full stop - we may, while not cancelling in return, nonetheless ask for recompense. Reinstate or compensate unjustly-cancelled people. Offer them some kind of sincere apology. Remove previous cancellers from power and don't trust them again. All the kinds of things that you would expect from an aggressor who is defeated in a war - not just to stop, but to apologise and attempt to make it right.
That's why, for instance, the sacrament of penance and reconciliation (most often in the Catholic Church, but also more broadly) requires four things - sorrow for the fault, a firm resolution to repair its effects, sincere confession of wrongdoing, and then the sacramental penance itself. While vengeance remains wrong, there's a case for asking the wrongdoer to repair the harm as much as possible, and to demonstrate sorrow and a reformed conscience.
This is much more foggy, however, when dealing with large and vague camps like 'the left' and 'the right'. As Scott's post points out, most people who identify on the left are opposed to cancellation! Moreover, many enthusiastic cancellers as individuals seem very unlikely to recognise their wrongdoing (likewise for right-aligned cancellers) or repent. In fact, often they double-down and blame the other side even more. So there isn't a central organisation to ask for repentance, and it would be wrong to take it out on individuals who weren't involved. Perhaps the best we can hope for is for left-wing organisations to disavow cancellation as a strategy?
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