What the Left gets wrong about moral panics

Does fear and rage suffuse your body whenever you read the news or look at social media? Have you considered you might be in the grip of a moral panic? For there is, if you believe the headlines, a lot of it around: people panicking about delivery drivers; social media use; DEI; drag queens; immigrants; antisemitism; puberty blockers; the New York subway. Feeling irrationally adrenalised by the news cycle is now apparently so widespread, it’s a wonder moral panics aren’t up there with ultra-processed food and waterborne fluoride as things RFK wants to see banned.

Luckily, though, such reactions almost always concern matters about which your typical progressive is perfectly relaxed, and so a simple solution is at hand. To avoid the stress, why not simply shift your political stance to be more forward-thinking and chill out? Or, better yet, only freak out about real things: like Donald Trump being a fascist, or how white supremacy is being covertly propped up in British universities; or the rise of this dangerous new antifeminist influencer called a “femcel”. Granted, the sensations of anxiety and fury may be indistinguishable from earlier versions, but at least you will have the consolation of knowing that they spring from encounters with fearlessly honest, trustworthy reporting.

It is now more than 50 years since the academic Stanley Cohen popularised the phrase “moral panic” to describe scandalised media and public reactions to Mods and Rockers fighting on South Coast beaches, and the concept is as popular as ever. A branch of sociology — “moral panic studies” — is devoted to it. And there are disciplines where the mere mention of one in the title of your paper would seem to guarantee publication: moral panics about pornography, trans-identified males in sport, immigration rates, predatory academic publishing outfits, knife crime or whatever it is that great minds currently want you to think is Completely Fine, Actually.

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The classic features of a moral panic, according to those professionally invested in their existence, would include the exhibition of widespread hostility towards a particular kind of person: someone who counts as an outsider in relation to the status quo. There must also be “volatility”, in that public sentiment against such people must seem to have arisen relatively suddenly, probably as a result of Right-wing media exaggerations. And it is important that the hostility displayed be “disproportionate” relative to the threat posed; a feature with the pleasing side effect of allowing dorky lecturers to feel like urbane sophisticates as they sneer at Outraged-of-Tunbridge-Wells or Belligerent-of-Blackpool, assuming them to be in the grip of narrow-minded bigotry and quite possibly Victorian levels of sexual repression too.

But some things have changed in the moral panic discourse over the years. Cohen’s original formulation of an accompanying “folk devil” for every moral panic — a scapegoat for hidebound reactionaries and emotionally labile plebs to fixate upon — seems to have since been loosened, so that moral panics are now detected in reactions to impersonal things such as smartphone use and vaping, as well as in responses to particular kinds of people. And some of the traditional subjects of panics of yesteryear, once smirked at by hippies who considered themselves too cool for such uptight judgements, are now badged by progressives as genuinely problematic after all: the risks posed by alcohol, for instance, or the dangers posed by white working-class men.

There have been other changes too. In the Seventies and Eighties, a moral panic tended to be construed by its principal theorists as inevitably a bad thing, demonising the underdog in order to consolidate hegemonic Establishment power. Or, as one set of scholars puts it, introducing a journal issue on the topic: “Moral panic theorists have long recognised … moral panics as attempts to hold together a collective order that is permanently proclaiming its own demise in the face of the ‘barbarians at the gates’.” But equally, over the years, eagle-eyed theorists began noticing that progressive and Left-wing interest groups could be prone to the odd bit of volatile, widespread, and disproportionate fear-mongering too.

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True to self-interested form, though, this observation didn’t lead to scepticism about the whole idea, but to a new stream of journal articles, ponderously discussing whether there could be “good” panics as well as bad. Cohen thought that the ends sometimes justified the means, writing in the introduction to the Third Edition of his book that his own “cultural politics” meant positively “encouraging something like moral panics about mass atrocities and political suffering” in order to raise awareness. He went on: “Perhaps we could purposely recreate the conditions that made the Mods and Rockers panic so successful… and thereby overcome the barriers of denial, passivity and indifference that prevent a full acknowledgement of human cruelty and suffering.” It is almost as if he were setting out a truth-indifferent, histrionic template for progressive media, that many outlets have followed to the letter ever since.

A more accurate conclusion would have been that, whether or not it started out that way, the theoretical apparatus surrounding the concept of a moral panic soon became skewed towards protecting an aggressively individualistic variety of Left-liberalism, typically beloved of university academics but hated by those who have to live with its material effects on the ground. In practice, the concept has often been used to attack entities and social structures that stand in the way of these vested interests: close-knit communities (cue sneering at “moral panics” about unchecked immigration or crime rates); stable family relationships (see the casual dismissal of concerns about pornography; surrogacy; prostitution; absent fathers; divorce rates); and a conception of childhood and adolescence as desirably free from market-friendly adultification (marvel as they ridicule fears about the premature sexualisation of minors; medical procedures on trans-identified teenagers; child safety online). Supposedly detached observers may well characterise public resentment of these things as “volatile”, arising suddenly out of “nowhere” as a result of being whipped up by conservative media sources, but this only further underlines their relative cluelessness about how the other half is living.

In truth, whenever some newspaper or journal article contains the dreaded two words in its title, there is a strong chance that some fairly obvious and credible concern is being brushed aside; and that anyone who might have that particular concern is being atrociously caricatured pour encourager les autres. And another condescending aspect of the moral panic discourse is that the adjective “moral” is effectively treated as an intensifier of the pejorative “panic”: you might think panics are bad, but wait till you see a moral one! Once again, we make contact with an essentially adolescent attitude to taking a moral stand, as if the cool people wouldn’t be caught dead doing so.

“Whenever some newspaper or journal article contains the dreaded two words in its title, there is a strong chance that some fairly obvious and credible concern is being brushed aside.”

But actually, identifying something as a moral panic inevitably involves getting into the weeds of moral judgement yourself, however you might pretend otherwise; for what else could you be saying than that some perceived problem is not in fact as important as it seems to others, and that their negative emotional responses to it are disproportionate and harmful? Every step of this involves ethical deliberation, evaluation, and ranking.

Of course, the detector of so-called moral panics might well be wrong in his assessments about significance and proportionately; maybe, in fact, he is not panicking enough about some state of affairs, letting major harms slide, to which he ought to be attending. Yet the thought doesn’t seem to enter the heads of those who like to wield the concept very often. One sign of this is that theorists of moral panics rarely offer extended arguments for their implicit judgements on the supposedly benign nature of whatever-it-is they are dismissing, relying instead on the assumption that their readers, similarly steeped in all the biases of a university education, will share them.

No one group, be it populist or technocratic, should be treated as infallible or impartial  in their assessments of social harms; and both Left- and Right-wing media platforms can distort, exaggerate, and monetise partisan outrage to awful effect. But contrary to their reputation, moral panics are not the exclusive domain of the Right; nor are they always — or even often — thoroughly misdirected. And nor do they especially bolster elite and Establishment interests; though the contemptuous progressive discourse about them just might.
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