Let’s dive deep into the #CancelCulture moral panic, what it can tell us about U.S. society, culture, and politics, and how it has spread across the “West.” There is no one better equipped to help us do that than @adriandaub. 2/
The “cancel culture” narrative diagnoses a national emergency: an acutely dangerous situation in which radical “woke” leftists are undermining free speech by imposing an ever-more restrictive culture of censoriousness on the country, threatening anyone who dares to speak up. 3/
But there is no actual cancel culture. Our argument is *not* that no one has ever had to face unfair consequences for what they said publicly – but that the evidence for such a worsening national emergency caused by “wokeism” running amok is simply not there. 4/
If we don’t accept the pervasive “cancel culture” discourse as a mere representation of an objectively existing free speech crisis, then how do we explain and interpret its omnipresence and the fact that so many people are fully committed to it at this exact moment? 5/
We talk about why the college campus is playing such a crucial role in the “cancel culture” discourse, and in the elite imagination more broadly, and discuss how our own experience as college professors relates to these debates. 6/
We grapple with why all this is happening now, with the genealogy of the moral panic, how to situate it in the long tradition of reactionary moral panics, and how it began to crystallize as a distinct phenomenon in the mid-2010s. 7/
Then we turn to Germany as a case study of how the moral panic has spread internationally. German reactionaries are obsessed with the idea of “woke cancel culture” spilling over from the U.S. - and leading conservatives are advocating for a GOP-style culture wars politics. 8/
Reactionaries have found willing allies among self-proclaimed moderates and liberals who have propagated the idea that “cancel culture” constitutes an acute threat. Across the “West,” the moral panic is, to a significant degree, a creation of the “respectable” center. 9/
What can we learn from the German “cancel culture” fixation about the role of the U.S. in the imaginary of Germany’s political and cultural elite? How does the transfer of “cancel culture” anecdotes and anxieties across the Atlantic work in practice? 10/
Across the “West,” the self-proclaimed defenders of “free speech” get into trouble as soon as they present their plans of how to counter “cancel culture”: Those always turn out to be blatantly illiberal and authoritarian, and they uniformly fail to attract majority support. 11/
This is by far the longest episode we have ever released. And I promise it’s the deepest dive into the “cancel culture” discourse you could possibly hope for.
Addendum: If you want a short introduction into what the “wokeism/cancel culture” moral panic looks like in Germany, and how it’s obsessed with what is supposedly happening in and “spilling over” from the U.S., I wrote about it below:
Sunday reading: Why the Extremists Took Over on the Right
I wrote about the escalating sense of besiegement that has fueled the rise of dangerous people and truly radical ideas that fully define the Right today.
This week’s piece (link below):
We have been talking a lot - and with good reason - about the “crisis of liberal democracy.” But in crucial ways, it is the conception of “real America” as a white Christian patriarchal homeland that has come under enormous pressure. That’s why the Right is freaking out.
Socially, culturally, and – most importantly, perhaps – demographically, the country has moved away from the rightwing ideal since the middle of the twentieth century. As a result, the conservative hold on power has become tenuous.
Fear of a pluralizing America is fueling a radicalization out of a sense of weakness and besiegement.
Some thoughts from my new piece (link below):
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What is America? Who gets to belong? How much democracy, and for whom? Those have always been contested issues. But the fact that this struggle now overlaps so clearly with party lines is the result of a rather recent reconfiguration.
That is the fundamental reality of U.S. politics: National identity and democracy have become partisan issues. This existential dimension of the conflict between Democrats and Republicans overshadows all other considerations, it shapes all areas of U.S. politics.
In the MAGA imagination, America is simultaneously threatened by outsiders – invaders who are “poisoning the blood” of the nation, as Trump has put it – and by the “enemy within.” The core promise of Trumpism is to purge those inherently connected “threats.”
To the Trumpists, the “enemy within” - those radical “leftists” and “globalists” – are as acutely dangerous as the invaders from without.
In order to restore the nation to former glory, to Make America Great Again, it has as to be “purified” – the enemies have to be purged.
According to the Trumpists, only the providential leader can guide the nation to its re-birth and former glory – “Only I,” Trump loves to say. The rightwing base is all in on this, fiercely loyal to Trump personally, bound to him by a cult of personality.
What does the U.S. look like in five or ten years?
I was asked to reflect on this question, alongside other scholars. In a stable democracy, the range of plausible outcomes is narrow. But for America, it now includes complete democratic breakdown.
There should not have been any doubt about the intention of the Trumpists. They desire to erect a form of plebiscitary autocracy, constantly invoking the true “will of the people” while aggressively narrowing the boundaries of who gets to belong and whose rights are recognized.
At every turn, the response to the rise of Trumpism has been hampered by a lack of political imagination – a lingering sense that “It cannot happen here” (or not anymore), fueled by a deep-seated mythology of exceptionalism, progress gospel, and willful historical ignorance.
I wrote about why even critical observers underestimated the speed and scope of the Trumpist assault, why they overestimated democratic resilience – about what America is now, and what comes next?
New piece (link below)
I take stock of where we are after two months of Trumpist rule, explore that space between (no longer) democracy and full-scale autocracy where America exists now, reflect on what competitive authoritarianism means in theory and practice, and recalibrate my expectations.
I revisit “The Path to Authoritarianism,” a crucial essay Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way published in Foreign Affairs in early February. It captured their expectations at the outset of the Trumpist regime – a powerful warning that has nevertheless been overtaken by events already.
People who claim Zelensky was at fault yesterday and should have been more “diplomatic” or “respectful” are either deliberately propagating the Trumpist attack line – or they fundamentally misunderstand what the Trumpist project is and who is now in power in the United States.
There is this pervasive idea that Trump doesn’t really mean it, has no real position, and can therefore be steered and manipulated by tactical and diplomatic finesse; or maybe he’s just a businessman looking for a great deal. But that’s all irrelevant here.
Trump himself has been very consistent about his preference for foreign autocrats, especially Putin, and his (at best) disinterest and siding with Ukraine and (actually) explicit antagonism towards not only Zelensky, but Europe’s democracies more generally.