POLITICS
Five Ways Democrats Can Respond to Right-Wing Moral Panics
The Right Wing is launching a deluge of moral panics at Democrats on varying social issues. From false claims regarding curriculum dangers posed by critical race theory to the transphobic debate arguing that transgender high school athletes are undermining women’s sport.
Indeed, the Virginia state election was won, in part, around parents concerns about school education and curriculum. Yet, there has been little united and coherent defense of critical race theory and an unclear response to the political weaponization of social issues as moral panics across the country.
The idea of moral values warfare in the political arena dates back to the 1980s, but there is perhaps no better example than the moral panic toward gays in the military in the 1990s. On the offense are Right-Wing Republicans who have built a mobilization operation of grassroots activists and interest group organizations around an agenda centered on issues that can generate anger and fear.
Most recently, this enterprise has been targeting transgender children in Texas. The literature on moral panics tells us that the principle political goal of this moral panic is to send a message of unworthiness to a target population as well as to rally the Right Wing base. This political self-interest is not benign, however. The result of politically attacking trans youth can be deadly. Data indicate that “82% of transgender individuals have considered killing themselves and 40% have attempted suicide.” Importantly, this suicidality is not the result of being transgender, it is the result of oppression and discrimination which is fomented through these moral panics.
In a recent paper that I wrote with Aaron Cohen, we examine Trump’s moral panic on the issue of transgender military service. We note:
“Trump’s use of tweets as a vehicle to deliver a moral panic from the bully pulpit of the presidency is not simply an agenda-setting device, but rather a policy tool to spread exclusion, fear, untrue stereotypes, and second-class citizenship in ways that boost transphobia and mobilize transphobic extremism.”
The trans hate agenda is similar to other attacks on groups with little political power. Whether centered on Big Bird or Drag Queen Story Hours, the point is to stir moral panics for political gain.
Moral panic politics is often successful because little has been theorized around how to respond to it.
In this article, I put forward 5 ways to fight back against a Right-Wing Moral Panic:
- Affect: Fight back with emotions: Taking the emotion out of a moral panic cannot be done. Moral panics are fueled by emotions. Jock Young notes in the British Journal of Criminology, “there is a great deal of emotional energy involved on both sides: the police pursue the deviant with zeal, the media thrive on the controversy, the public avidly follow the outrage and the deviants are galvanized and sometimes reconstituted by the response.”
What must be done is that a new strongly-held emotion must be introduced to counter the existing frame and a narrative embedded onto the political issue. The Big Bird debate was a good example of making an outcry look silly. Here the issue was made small. Constance Duncombe notes in the journal of International Political Sociology that, “if we see others display an emotion, this experience can engender an emotional response within ourselves that shares at least ”threads” of that initial, witnessed emotional display.”
2. Discourse: Fight back with language: The Right Wing have learned to use language that sounds scary to the general public. This is designed to get their attention and alert them to a societal problem and highlight the conflict between an issue and treasured social values. “Death panels” it was argued would kill people under Obamacare. And the “death tax” was argued to be an extension of Democratic fiscal philosophy. In response, Democrats faced barriers in those debates by trying to come off as reasonable, which does not have the same psychological purchase power as more extreme language. Indeed, there is a cadence to moral panic language. I have to confess that Howard Stern was correct last week when he said the Left should start calling the Republicans the “Wacko Party.”
Stanley Cohen suggests that the way in which issues arrive on the scene and disappear reveals that moral panics are really about the qualities related to the social reaction, such as the targeting of groups that undermine or disturb community values, more than the attributes of the acts or events being responded to themselves. Put another way, moral panics are about what the folk devil or deviant group is perceived to represent in society.
So the response should assail the values of the Right. For instance, the Reagan Administration’s history of abandoning men, women, people of color, and gays around AIDS is familiar.
3. Salience: Fight back with advertisers. The nature of the news cycle on an issue that is familiar to the public can be tapped into. The media often reports and gives-in in an unaccountable manner. This reproduction of Right Wing talking points extends the length of a moral panic. Advertisers should be written down and targeted to pull their ads from programs that repeat hate speech.
4. Scope: Fight to expand the scope of the issue: Go big, or go bigger. Here, Republicans are brilliant. They make the smallest issue about childhood, God, Hell, and communism — even better if all are combined. I used to say the problem with LGBTQ politics is that the Right says your going to Hell and the Left says I want my partner’s dental coverage. Proportionality matters.
The reason to increase the scope of an issue is to increase the salience — the degree of importance the public feels relative to what else is going on — and to introduce new actors such as interest groups, political figures, protest groups, celebrities, and others. This shines a brighter light and provides an opportunity for more people to weigh in and burn an issue out. As Anthony Downs notes in Public Interest, “American public attention rarely remains sharply focused upon one issue for very long — even if it involves a continuing problem of crucial importance to society.”
5. Penalties: Fight back with political penalties: The modern, “Wacko” Republican party is playing from a new playbook. Political penalties are discussed by me in my 2019 book “Flaws” as “internal pressures for individual actors because a sensitive issue can also be also temporally acute, representing a problem that matters, to the people that matter, during a time that matters.” Connecting the emotion-salience (a problem that matters at a time that matters) to the people that matter (advertisers, voters, etc) is a complex matrix.
Moral panics are effective when they are emotionally charged. The response should be to charge them up more and redirect emotional resources. Keeping the emotion high, changing the language, pushing back on advertisers, expanding the scope of the issue, and inflicting penalties all tell a narrative of assertiveness in response to a moral panic attack. Or as Sean Connery might say, “don’t bring a knife to a gun fight.”
Christopher L. Pepin-Neff, PhD is a senior lecturer in public policy at the University of Sydney.
