There’s a lot of schadenfreude on the right, and even more lamentation on the left, about the cancellation of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

Donald Trump leads the schadenfreude caucus. “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings,” Trump crowed on social media. “I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert!” (It is remarkable that a president who campaigned with a vow to end “cancel culture” is so uninhibited in his celebration of cancel culture when it’s on his terms.)

The lamentations from the left are just as exuberant, from the other direction.

They hail Colbert as a heroic martyr for free expression and speaking truth to power. “Not really an overstatement to say that the test of a free society is whether or not comedians can make fun of the country’s leader on TV without repercussions,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes declared.

In a sense, both sides essentially agree that Colbert was cancelled because of his politics. The argument from the left is that this was unfair and even illegitimate. The illegitimate claim rests on the fact that CBS’s parent company, Paramount, has been trying to curry favour with the administration to........

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