The end of 2019 saw several conflicting reports about the severity — and even legitimacy — of cancel culture. It’s bad. It’s not that bad. It’s real. It isn’t that real. Imposed largely by social-media-based arbiters of up-to-the-minute standards of justice, cancellation in this context refers to social and cultural excommunication imposed on people who’ve committed anything from actual criminal acts (like Harvey Weinstein committing sexual assault) to offenses so minor as to be imperceptible to any but the hungriest scavengers of online shame (like the Iowa man whose efforts to raise money for charity resulted in brief viral fame that led to the surfacing of offensive tweets dating back to his adolescence).

For all the unpleasantness of such predicaments, some argue the threat is overblown. After all, Louis C.K., disgraced in 2017, is currently on a world tour. Kevin Hart, who stepped down from hosting the Oscars last year amid an uproar over years-old homophobic tweets, has a new Netflix series. J.K. Rowling, who in recent weeks has been labeled a TERF (that stands for “trans exclusive radical feminist”) for tweeting in support of yet another person deemed to be a TERF (it’s a long story) has become something of a free-speech hero for refusing to apologize.

The great irony of cancellation: You can really only be canceled by your own side.

Still, it’s worth pointing out that whether or not the canceled person manages to make a comeback, there can be consequences that go far beyond punishing the original sinner. When ABC axed Roseanne Barr’s television show over a racist tweet, countless people, from fellow actors and writers to makeup artists and lighting grips and catering staff, lost their jobs. When Al Franken was booted from the Senate over a tasteless photo and a (dubious in my opinion) harassment complaint, the Democrats lost a powerful voice in Congress.

The fact that it was the Democrats themselves who called for Franken’s dismissal illustrates the great irony of cancellation: You can really only be canceled by your own side.

Granted, there have been cases of ideological opponents laying the trap for someone’s downfall, such when right-wing troll-cum-“political commentator” Mike Cernovich unearthed old tweets by Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn and got Gunn fired by Disney in 2017. (Franken’s accuser, for what it’s worth, is a conservative radio host.) But true punishment can only be meted out by members of one’s own tribe. Maybe that’s why liberals are so much more likely to cancel and be canceled than conservatives. On the right, cancellation is often enacted as a last resort. It’s the nuclear option, the lever to be pulled only when the entire empire is threatened, for instance when Milo Yiannapolous is caught talking about pederasty or some mystical calculus finally determines that Roger Ailes’s history of sexual predation is more trouble for Fox News than it’s worth. The left, on the other hand, issues citations — and frequently makes full-on arrests — to anyone who shows any signs of disrupting a narrowly defined peace.

You might even say the left takes a “broken windows” approach to patrolling itself.

Broken windows is the criminology theory that seeks to reduce major crime by cracking down hard on minor infractions like vandalism and loitering. It has been a guiding principle of urban policing since the 1980s and is often cited in the 2014 death of Eric Garner, who was choked to death while being arrested for selling loose cigarettes on the sidewalk. As Bench Ansfield, author of a forthcoming book about broken windows policing, explained in a December 27 Washington Post article, the researchers who first presented the theory distilled it into this core concept: “If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.”

If that doesn’t sum up the driving force of cancel culture in all of its paranoid, myopic, misguided logic — “if someone says something mildly offensive and is not swiftly punished, the whole world will be offensive” — I don’t know what does.

Here’s something we do know. Broken windows policing never really worked. As New York City mayor in the 1990s, Rudy Guiliani implemented the broken windows approach with a “zero tolerance” policy for things like subway fare evasion and public drunkenness and was credited with drastically bringing down the crime rate. But later research has suggested that the decrease in crime during that time correlated with a nationwide reduction, including in cities where broken windows policing was not in place. There’s even evidence that the approach might have done more harm than good. “By focusing on low-level offenses,” Ansfield wrote, this theory of policing works to criminalize communities of color and expand mass incarceration without making people safer.”

I realize that comparing mass incarceration to social media cancellation is asking to be canceled. But (not that Twitter cares) that’s not the connection I’m making. What I’m talking about is how easy it is to fall into the assumption that a few bad things mean everything is terrible. It’s especially easy nowadays because social media rewards language that is not just hyperbolic but apocalyptic. Climate change is not just a threat that demands serious attention but an imminent catastrophe that will end the world as we know it in little more than a decade. The violent death of a trans person is not merely tragic but proof of an epidemic of murder in that community. (The Human Rights Council says there were 26 such deaths reported in 2018. That’s 26 too many, but the frequent use of “epidemic” around the issue might warrant some examination — not to mention contextualization within the broader conversation about violence against women, 1,600 of whom were killed that year.)

The logic that animates both cancel culture and broken windows is fundamentally shallow and also fundamentally fear-based. It acts on the assumption that something that’s not necessarily harmful in and of itself but that somehow has the flavor of harmfulness — be it an edgy tweet or some tipsy neighbors hanging out on the stoop — must be rooted out for the good of society, unintended consequences be damned. Just as one unrepaired window will lead to nothing but broken windows, one problematic remark that goes unpunished will lead to an irreparably problematic world. As sad as it is to lose J.K. Rowling, taking her down is taking one for the team. It is on this twisted premise that left-wing purity police enact their own special form of brutality.

The logic that animates both cancel culture and broken windows is fundamentally shallow and also fundamentally fear-based.

Up until fairly recently, I wondered if our best hope for stamping out cancel culture would be getting canceled to actually become cool. With so many noteworthy people getting caught in the net of social media shaming — often for reasons you’d need a microscope to detect — it stands to reason that the general public would want to get in on it. From there, the act of canceling would become boring and banal. It would become basic, the pumpkin spice latte of ruining someone’s life. It would be the late 2010s version of dancing the Electric Slide at a wedding. One minute, you’re thinking you’ll never escape it. The next minute, you realize you haven’t thought about it in years.

After all, pendulums are made to swing. In the last four years, under Mayor Bill DeBlasio, New York City rolled back not only broken windows policing but also a related anti-crime strategy, “stop and frisk.” With that has come waves of advocacy around decriminalization of everything from pot smoking to prostitution. So despite Guiliani being installed in Washington as Trump’s chief whisperer, New York City is about as far from the Guiliani days as you can imagine — and no more dangerous for it by most measures.

Nonetheless, cancel culture might prove a far more formidable battleground than urban crime. If the by-now entirely thinkable happens and Trump seizes another four years in power, there will be that much more anger out there for people to misplace and misuse — through cancellation or worse. The left will have to contend with the fact that no amount of individual window repair can fix what feels like a broken world. The right, meanwhile, will insist that there’s nothing to fix.

And if we cancel J.K. Rowling, it really may be the apocalypse.