“Cancel culture” is a phantasm. Yes, as any true believer will insist, there have been cases where a person saw consequences — such as being suspended for a year from a plum teaching gig — for “political incorrectness. A deeper look, however, often shows that what is being sold as “free speech” is instead repeated abuse of colleagues or students. More often, it’s outrage at being yelled at online, as we see with self-described cancellation victims like J.K. Rowling or Elon Musk. In many cases, the “cancellation” is pure myth, such as when a few students complained about bad food at the Oberlin cafeteria, and the press decided it was “wokeness” and not good taste driving anger that limp pork sandwiches were being passed off as “bánh mì.”
In his new book “The Cancel Culture Panic: How an American Obsession Went Global,” Stanford professor Adrian Daub argues that the hysterics over this alleged trend amount to a moral panic. Worse, fretting about the mythical excesses of youthful leftists has created a pretext for the right to engage in real assaults on free speech, such as banning books for being “woke” or shutting down student protests. But conservatives get away with it because so much of the press — not just in the U.S., but in Europe as well — would rather feed centrist audiences a steady diet of “cancel culture” panic.
“This problem with disproportionality is what I think characterizes stories about cancel culture.”
Daub spoke with Salon about his book and whether it’s “politically correct” to want your bánh mì to taste like a real bánh mì.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You describe cancel culture as a moral panic, similar to the Satanic panic of the 1980s. Why do you think this is an effective framework for understanding it?
Maybe the Satanic panic isn’t even the best kind of antecedent, but rather the child abduction panic or the gang crime panic, where there is a real problem, but blown out of proportion. This problem with disproportionality is what I think characterizes stories about cancel culture. There’s just a few anecdotes that this discourse is centered around, but the use of the term gets inflationary.
The people I know who are most panicked about cancel culture always do exactly that. They’ll find an incident where somebody got yelled at or even fired and they’ll say, “See, it’s real!” But one incident is not a trend.
Yeah, exactly. You also get feedback effects, where people start paying attention to things more because they have a ready-made frame they can insert an anecdote into. With most cancel culture stories, if you dig right down to it, it’s basically unpleasant disagreements. There are a few other cases where people did lose their jobs. But a lot of the stories are “this person got yelled at online or by their colleagues” or “this person didn’t get a prize that they were nominated for.” Without the cancel culture frame, people would say, “Well, what’s the big deal?” Well, cancel culture is the reason it is a big deal.
You cover a wide range of these stories in the book: A handful of cases where somebody really did get fired for expressing an unpopular opinion. Lots of ugly disagreements. Then there is a multitude of straight-up urban legends or even fictional novels cited as if they are fact.
When you look more closely, especially at universities, you see that there are sexual harassment cases where the accused has chosen to recast it as a fight over “free speech.” Then there are stories turn out to be about nothing. Stanford did not ban the word “American.” Or the kerfuffle over “banh mi” at Oberlin. A lot of the cancel culture stories that come out of universities, there is nothing there.
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There are some cases where people really did lose their jobs, but the cancel culture framing suggests more than those few cases exist. It also places blame on “woke” kids, as opposed to the trustees of the university. The framing also suggests things are getting worse, but I haven’t seen any data that convincingly argues this. The frame also suggests these incidents are somehow expressive of our larger culture. But ultimately it says more about specific environments, such as the university campus or the Twitter bubble.
The Twitter bubble matters, because, as you point out in the book, the concept of “canceling” started as an internet joke. It initially described social media behavior, but then “cancel culture” made a conceptual leap to the campus, mostly in the press imagination. Initially, it was a way to describe online mobs yelling at people, but now most cancel culture legends are about “woke” university students allegedly silencing older, more powerful people. Why did the university become the focal point of the panic?
There are a couple of reasons. Worrying about the young is standard for any moral panic. It allows people not to reflect on their own practices. The people who freak out about people freaking out online online, are doing the same thing they’re accusing other people of. But somehow it’s supposed to be different. Creating an artificial gulf between your own behavior and those you criticize is essential. That’s why a lot of moral panics tend to attach to the young.
“Worrying about the young is standard for any moral panic. It allows people not to reflect on their own practices.”
The second reason is there has been, for almost 70 years now, an infrastructure set up in the United States to drum up moral panics about the leftist youth. It started with conservative foundations and think tanks, but now includes institutions such as the New York Times. They dedicate enormous time and resources to sending a reporter to Brown University to stick a microphone in a 19-year-old’s face, so they’ll say a slightly ill-considered thing. The anecdotes are very easy to get, because they have built an anecdote factory around our colleges. These stories do quite well. Certain outlets, like the Atlantic, specialize in these stories.
Your book focuses on how these cancel culture stories leap from the U.S. press into the foreign press, especially the French and German press. Why are media outlets in other countries so interested in these often-apocryphal stories of overreaching leftists on American campuses?
It’s astonishing, right? I started with the book because I was noticing that, as I was giving talks in Europe, people seemed to have a finely honed sense of what they thought was happening on American college campuses. I’m a lifelong denizen of several campuses, and I never felt comfortable hearing how ready these folks seemed with a diagnosis of life at American universities. The French and German press and, to some extent, the Spanish press already participated in the political correctness panic in the 90s and early 2000s. They have this fear that anything that comes from the U.S. must inevitably reach their universities, their society, etc.
If you’ve ever been to a French university, it’s a very different place from an American university. You wouldn’t be in any danger of confusing one for the other. On the other hand, of course, these people have something to fall back on, which is the sense that certain things from the U.S. do come to them: pop culture and internet culture. But it’s not real when it comes to cancel culture.
A lot of the time the people that are accusing the left of “cancel culture” are conservatives who are often the first to censor and silence, but for real.
Some people engaged in this “cancel culture” discourse think of themselves as liberals, or at least libertarians. But the problem they describe seems to call for an intervention, right? Then you get people like Gov. Ron Desantis obliging by saying we have to “stop woke.” That’s how the contradiction gets shuffled under the table. It’s like a three-card Monte. If you get people scared enough of cancel culture, they want the state to do something about the universities. It becomes an excuse to declare that campus is a “problem” that needs to be brought under control. This is a reassertion of dominance and control. In the case of the universities, it usually goes through either state power or donor power.
With the panic over cancel culture, the power people are afraid of is amorphous, like shaming power. People can yell at you on Twitter. Students can heckle you during a speech. A book’s mere existence can make you feel guilty. But the response to this is actual censorship: banning books, banning student protests. How do people not see the hypocrisy here?
My argument is that the whole discourse is there so that you don’t see the hypocrisy. If “cancel culture,” as a discourse, attracts you, you do not see the contradiction. You claim the only way to correct course is to censor people. The whole language game exists to conceal that contradiction. Concepts like “identity politics,” “wokeness,” etc. are necessary to justify this behavior. It allows people to say they’re censoring to protect the liberal values of the Enlightenment. That is the magic of this term.
One apocryphal story from the political correctness panic that has resurfaced for the cancel culture panic is that they don’t teach Shakespeare in college anymore. I was an English major back then and read so much Shakespeare, and you can look at syllabi now and see students still do. Why does this silly myth persist?
There’s so much wrapped up in that. They pin the worry on campus identity politics, but aren’t worried that people barely read Shakespeare because they take so few English classes. Instead of talking about why so few people take English classes, they just say there’s no more Shakespeare being taught. Who they say it is instead is still Alice Walker, though I don’t know when I last saw Alice Walker on a syllabus. I guess they just don’t update their material all that often. This really comes out of a white identity politics. This comes out of an anxiety that started in the 1980s, about the university slightly starting to look a little different from the university people remembered from their youth. There are other people and other cultures around. It’s like the “great replacement” theory, but for the canon.
“If you get people scared enough of cancel culture, they want the state to do something about the universities.”
How many of the people making that complaint have read a Shakespeare play in the last 5 to 6 years? Not very many! But it creates an alliance between fire-breathing white identity politics people and nice centrist liberals who think Shakespeare is good. They see Shakespeare in the park and are bummed to think that the kids don’t seem to read it anymore. It creates a meeting space for the reactionaries and the centrists. It’s an Andy Rooney-style conservative gesture, to complain about kids these days.
If you’re worried about the humanities on campus, the real threat right now is an ongoing movement to restructure academia to marginalize the humanities. They’re cutting funding and chasing out professors, especially in the humanities. Freaking out over cancel culture is such a distraction from the real issues.
You should not take away from my book that everything is fine at American campuses. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are many things amiss. Tenure is going away,. The amount of contingent labor, especially in a field like English, is going through the roof. But it’s easier to focus on this myth now that Shakespeare is no longer taught. It makes this a cultural complaint rather than asking why universities are changing.
Why do our students all want to be engineers? It could be the half-million dollar price tag that college can now carry. Those are the questions we really have to ask ourselves. But that’s not what the cancel culture war is about. It’s just a culture war. It’s just saying, “The kids are too woke.” What’s the solution? The kids need to stop being so damn woke? They’re not asking what the work environment looks like. Or what do we want out of a civic education. Or what is the job of a university. Those are good questions. The problem is conservatives want to see the state getting out of the education business. They want people to pay so much for their education. They don’t seem to think that it’s that big a problem that our state students take on massive debts.
It’s ironic that the people behind the “cancel culture” discourse call themselves heterodox. Ultimately, theirs is a full-throated defense of the status quo, right down to our canons and our established cultural values, etc. But the cancel culture discourse allows them to feel rebellious. They can claim to be courageous and the lone voice in the desert and say everyone else has gone crazy with the the “woke mind virus.” But what does this rebellion actually look like? Well, you’d like the things to be taught that were taught when you were in college. You like to use words that you used when you were in college. You don’t like want to learn about the kids and their new ideas about gender. You persist in doing what you’ve always done, but you get to reframe yourself as a defender of Western values. You can say you’re a bold truth-teller, even though your bold truth-telling is nothing more than wanting things to stay how they’ve always been.
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