May 16, 2023

24. “Cancel Culture”: How a Moral Panic Is Capturing America and the World – with Adrian Daub

1 hour 47 minutes

Let’s dive deep into the “cancel culture” 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 Adrian Daub. He is a Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Stanford University, where he specializes in culture and politics of the nineteenth century, as well as questions of gender and sexuality. In the fall of 2022, Adrian published “Cancel Culture Transfer: How a Moral Panic is Gripping the World” – which is currently available in German only, but will be out in English soon; it is by far the most in-depth, most incisive dissection of the “cancel culture” moral panic and its transnational dimensions that anyone has offered to date.

In this conversation, we do not spend much time on debunking the idea that there is widespread “cancel culture” – because it’s been debunked so convincingly, so many times. The “cancel culture” narrative diagnoses a national emergency: an acutely dangerous situation in which radical “woke” leftists are succeeding at undermining free speech by imposing an ever-more restrictive culture of censoriousness on the country, with dramatic consequences for anyone who dares to speak up. 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.

What, then, can we learn from such a rampant moral panic: 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?

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. 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.

Then we turn our attention Germany as a case study of how the moral panic has spread internationally. German conservatives are obsessed with the idea of “woke cancel culture” spilling over from the U.S., and they have found willing allies among self-proclaimed moderates and liberals who have propagated the idea that “cancel culture” constitutes an acute threat to liberty and freedom. Across the “West,” the moral panic is, to a significant degree, a creation of the “respectable” center. What can we learn from 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?

Finally, we manage to end on a somewhat hopeful note: Across the “West,” the self-proclaimed defenders of freedom get into trouble as soon as they have to present concrete suggestions of how to fight back against “cancel culture”: Those always turn out to be blatantly illiberal, authoritarian measures, and they uniformly fail to attract majority support.

Adrian Daub, Cancel Culture Transfer: How a Moral Panic is Gripping the World

Dreams in the Witch House – Adrian’s newsletter

On "Cancel Culture" by Thomas Zimmer

Keep up with Adrian’s work via his personal website

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By Lilliana Mason and Thomas Zimmer

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