The exact same thing can be said about what people refer to as "cancelling". It's not whether they're banned from Twitter, losing their contract or are voted out of office that constitutes the cancelling, but why they were.

Mitt Romney was not attacked for not representing conservative/republican values, but for going against a mob/cult (of personality). That is as "cancelling" as it gets, regardless if it leads to him being voted out in Utah or not.

Criticizing a politician for not representing the values people believe he holds is not canceling. If that is the case 3/4 of congress has been canceled.

Romney is persona non grata in the national GOP now, which is exactly what being cancelled is: to be ostracized. His values haven't moved anywhere from eight years ago when he was good enough to be president, so something else must have changed.

>to be ostracized

He is not ostracized in the way I would consider it. As far as I know Republicans still work with him, are willing to let him sponsor bills, etc. My understanding is he is still invited to Republican lunches as well.

I think we are working with two different understandings of cancellation. He will almost certainly lose his next election though.

>he was good enough to be president

Well not good enough since he lost to Obama. Just because you win a primary doesn't mean the majority actually supports you.

>so something else must have changed.

I think people forgot what his views were. People have nostalgia and remembered they thought he was better than Obama which turned him into a more mainstream conservative in their mind. I think there are other things at play like Romney being a Morman and also having name recognition.

> Criticizing a politician for not representing the values people believe he holds is not canceling.

My point was specifically that this wasn't the case here. Maybe you misread a negative in my comment.

To clarify, I think you're right, and that all the disagreement about cancel culture really boils down to semantic arguments about what the word "cancel" means and whether it is subjectively fair or unfair in a given situation. I would argue that voting someone out of office is a democratic way of literally cancelling them.

I think that the most widely accepted definition of "cancelling culture" is suppressing someone that has opinions different than yours. For example you can cancel a comic that has different political views. Opposing to that, when you have someone representing you, either a voted politician or hired attorney, it is not cancel culture if you disagree and want to be represented by someone else.

What if a comedian loses his audience because views of his come to light that his audience doesn't support? It's no longer profitable for him to go on tour, or for studios to offer him roles on tv, etc.. Is that cancel culture or not? I'd argue that it's cancelling, but not the "bad" kind.

If you say it's not cancel culture when a majority of people change their mind about someone, then you're saying that almost by definition cancelling is when a small minority of people have the power to deplatform someone who missteps. So, it's not accurate to say that "the left is ok with cancel culture" (for instance) since only a small group of people are going it who are not representative of the larger population.

Ask the same question: what if people don't like the local restaurant food (new chef puts too much salt) and they lost the patrons? Is that cancel culture? No. Cancel culture is when you want to close the restaurant for everyone when the owner's daughter refused to date you versus not eating there because you don't like the food, but you don't interfere with others eating there because they like the food. It's "I don't buy" vs "close them down".