I think it’s a grotesque mistake to call them Democratic. These mobs (physical or virtual) are rarely more than 1% of the population, and are rarely supported by even 10% of a population (10% is about the ballpark for supporters of cancel culture as well, by my crude estimation). And yet they are able to push their agenda because they are (for the moment) uniquely willing to wield fear and intimidation. What about this is democratic?

To answer your questions about concerning similarities between physical and virtual mobs, they both use fear and intimidation to get their way. Neither are concerned about due process and they are happy to persecute innocent people (“scapegoats”)—of course legal courts are imperfect, but there imperfection is a big whereas with mobs (of any kind) it’s a feature. Both kinds of mobs are as happy to persecute the powerless and the powerful alike (or in the case of cancellers culture, they’ll pretend that the high schooler they’re targeting is “powerful” because of his race and that the mob speaks for minorities who the mob regarded as uniformly powerless—astute readers will note the racism here). Further, mobs have no sense of proportionality—the current cancel culture mob is notorious for its utter inability to distinguish between actual Nazis and progressives who fail to adequately toe the line (or anyone in between) and they are all punished as severely as the mob can muster. Since mobs are happy to target anyone who they decide they don’t like on a given day with the severest treatment they feel they can get away with, fear is imposed on everyone, not just those who have actually been targeted.

Note also that there are groups like antifa who openly profess a belief that violence is justified in order to “suppress fascists” (wherein their definition of “fascist” is so broad and arbitrary that it’s indistinguishable from “anyone they don’t like”) and they occasionally do perpetrate violence on these grounds. Note also that many (probably most) of the people who engage in cancellation also applaud Antifa’s violence or else they rationalize and justify it and very rarely condemn it (certainly they would never dream of cancelling people who engage in political violence which is apparently much less abhorrent than wrongthink). There is also a tiny minority of cancellers who are right-wing, and they also have their antifa-like physical violence groups who they applaud. So “cancel culture” and “physical mob” seem to be adjacent points on a continuum, and the only thing that keeps the majority of cancellers on the “cancellation-but-not-violence” side of the line is that as a society we have strong (but rapidly eroding) values of law-and-order and nonviolence and cancellers are usually rightly (though decreasingly) afraid of running afoul of those values. I take little consolation in the idea that our eroding social values are keeping most of the cancellers from using physical violence in their fear campaigns, and there’s nothing noble about cancelling someone because you’re afraid of the consequences of physical violence.

Lastly, if these mobs are allowed to continue, people will lose faith in the criminal justice system’s ability or will to keep their injustice in check, and counter-mobs will form (and to a degree already have formed). The mobs and the counter-mobs will go back and forth, continually escalating.

Cancel culture has no redeeming qualities.