The Daily Beast Podcast - Cancel Culture and the Eroding of America’s Institutions

Episode Date: January 5, 2025

Adrian Daub, professor at Stanford University and author of The Cancel Culture Panic: How an American Obsession Went Global, joins The New Abnormal to discuss moral panic, its echo chambers, and its celebrity origins. “Canceling” began with celebrity disinvestment in online spaces and moved into politics, Daub explained. “But there's a wholesale kind of reorientation of this term once it leaves those online only spaces,” said Daub. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. Welcome back to another bonus episode of The New

Abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here. Today we're joined by Adrian Dobb, a Stanford professor and author of the Cancel Culture Panic, how an American obsession went global, and he joins us to impact the moral panic around cancel culture, its global spread, and the societal power dynamics driving the phenomenon. Adrian Daube is the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, where he serves as the the faculty director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. He's the co-host of the Inbed with the Right and the feminist present podcasts and also the author of the new book, The Cancel Culture Panic, How an American Obsession Went Global. He joins me now to talk about it. Adrian, thanks so much for being here.

Thank you for having me. So I want to start with a definitional question. What exactly is a moral panic? Because something you say in the book is that a moral panic is not mere mass hysteria. So what is the difference between the two? So a normal moral panic starts from a real basis. A lot of people, I think, think of the satanic panic of the 80s, and I think sociologists would tell you that that's kind of an outlier. A normal moral panic has a set of real events as its basis, and the problem of the panic sort of sets in when we extrapolate from a fairly limited base of events towards these kind of apocalyptic predictions. This could either be, it's happening way more frequently than you think, Or it could mean it's on a rapid increase.

Right now it's not happening that much, but it'll happen a lot in the future. Or it's meaning, right? Like it really shows something deeply wrong with our society. So it's a way of metabolizing real events that in the process sort of starts to detaching itself from the actual frequency of a phenomenon and sort of suggests that it's way more common, way more problematic, and often shaped very, very differently from the way it actually presents itself to people on the ground. Gotcha. And one more definitional question. What exactly in your mind constitutes cancel culture? I know. You write that talk of cancel culture has become a lingua franca of a self-styled,

embattled liberalism, but the object itself is fuzzy and what it means is elusive. So what are we talking about when we talk about cancel culture? And are we even all talking about the same thing? Yeah. I think my book. makes the argument that we're not, right? That even the word cancel culture has been sort of in print since about 2018. It existed on the internet before that. And in those five years, it's really had quite the career. It's undergone several transformations, which makes it a little hard.

It's laughing when you asked me to define it. It's a little hard. It depends on when you're asking and whom you're asking. But it's definitely not wrong to say it's about a form of social ostracism, a form of holding people accountable, that arises at least semi-spontaneously via social networks, especially via Twitter or Facebook or what have you, and that targets everyday folks with the same kind of ferocity with which disappointed fans might respond to something a celebrity that they really like did.

So that would be sort of my working definition with which I try to sort of bridge a lot of the internal distinctions and differentiations that the term has undergone in the last six years. Yeah, that's interesting because it kind of did start, as you say in the book, as something aimed at celebrities, and it really did start in large part on black Twitter. Yeah, it comes out of fan communities, right? The idea of canceling, as Professor Meredith Clark has pointed out, is really about a disinvestment. I've invested a lot of attention, time and money into this person, and now they're canceled, meaning I'm no longer supplying that time, that money, that attention. And that is something that we tend to do to people who are

traditionally owed all those things, namely celebrities, right? That's sort of the traditional, or this is the place where people first started talking about cancellation, about someone being canceled, and when people defending the celebrities that were canceled in that way, said, this is cancel the culture, this is a problem, right? But of course, as the term has evolved, we've tended to move away from the celebrity angle. right? This is kind of why I get interested in it as a professor because one of the things that you never see in early online discourses, whether it's on black Twitter or on Tumblr, about cancer culture is the university. The people who were debating about cancer culture there and then

thought it had everything to do with fan communities, with what we call toxic stand culture. It had nothing to do whatsoever with academics, right? And today, when you ask people about famous cancel culture cases, I would say that at least half of the ones that are you people will mention have to do with colleges, with censorious students getting speakers disinvited, with a professor who was no longer allowed to teach something, whatever you want to think of. But there's a wholesale kind of reorientation of this term once it leaves those online-only spaces. Yeah, it is wild how much of it now seems to revolve around universities, particularly, quote-unquote, elite universities. And if I recall correctly, something you say in the book,

a lot of the time it's elite eastern United States universities. And so much of that involves anecdotes that may or may not give the full picture of the particular incident or may be half true or maybe not true at all. And this is all kind of by design, isn't it? It is. Right. So first, Americans, I think, traditionally did not use to pay attention to their university campuses. The attention page sort of starts in the 1950s. Now, that's not a huge surprise because, because that's the moment when the U.S. government started heavily investing in university. So it sort of makes sense. It's also when the number of universities just skyrocketed.

But it's essentially, there are people alive who can remember a time before this, right? It very quickly became a place where you could sort of debate, you know, leftism, liberalism, et cetera, et cetera, right? Where you can sort of have campus leftists stand in for broader trends in society that you didn't like. And as you point out, this usually meant that the campus meant a very, very, very, tiny subset of the actual campuses that we have in this country. It is, yeah, what we call Ivy Plus, right? Stanford's in there. Berkeley's in there, but largely it's a bunch of Ivy covered East Coast institutions. What it isn't is your local state school. It is not your community college. It's not

the small liberal arts college that's in your town, right? No, the campus is supposed to be Brown, Harvard, Columbia, Swarthmore, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, and then, you know, Berkeley and Stanford, just because, you know, we don't want to be totally parochial, so we're going to throw a couple of West Coasters in there. But it's a very, very small group of schools that account for a minute fraction of today's college students, and they become the stand-in for, quote-unquote, the campus as a whole. And then within those universities, it's very frequently,

very specific fields and very specific faculties, right? You very rarely hear about students at a business school or, you know, in the pre-law program or whatever. it's going to be something about the English curriculum at the University of Texas and Austin. It's going to be something about gender studies at the University of Santa Cruz. It's going to be about a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, what have you, right? It's going to be, even within those schools, not the whole school, but very specific cherry-picked portions of them. And those over the last, you know, 70 years have become just very, very easy stand-ins for broader social problems that,

certain writers and certain activists wanted to diagnose. One of the things that, you know, I mentioned earlier about about cancel culture as a moral panic, right, the fact that it can't, it has a trouble, it has trouble with representativeness, right? Like this thing happened, this thing seems bad. How representative is it? That's the question that we tend not to ask when it comes to moral panics. And I would argue that's exactly how we look at the campus. We never say, okay, that seems like this, you know, this instructor at this small school,

I just heard of for the first time said something kind of dumb. How representative is this for the university, for our society, for the left, what have you, right? The magic by which that is made representative, right, for, I don't know, Joe Biden or something like that, that was a long process that sort of allowed for that association to work and to take hold. And that's something that trace in the book. Absolutely. And there's a question, and you address this in depth in the book, because a lot of the book explains how this particular moral panic spread from the U.S. elsewhere, particularly Europe. So why did that happen more so than, say, the political correctness craze did back in the 80s and 90s?

Is it completely explained just by the fact that, well, we have the internet and social media now? Because as you repeatedly point out, it's a little bizarre that the dietary practices of a sophomore at Oberlin matters the slightest bit to someone. in Dusseldorf, but Castle culture has to become a thing in places like Germany, France, the UK, Russia, Turkey, Switzerland, etc. Yeah, it is really remarkable, isn't it? I mean, I was just, I mean, it's the topic of the book. So obviously, I kind of knew going in that this was going to be the case, but still, I was gobsmacked just by how far these stories travel.

So I think that there's two things going on. One is it is the spread of the Internet sort of twice over. On the one hand, it is the fact that, like, a small, number of editors at shrinking national newspapers in these various countries, spend a lot of their time on Twitter and sort of like to do their research via Twitter. And this is just a place where these kinds of stories are pretty easily accessible. The other thing, though, is that, of course, the idea that first political correctness, then cancel culture, is sort of an U.S. export that is now coming to what have you, Germany, Switzerland, the UK, Argentina, Russia, right? It's seductive

for two reasons. One, it's an old story. And these were stories that were told about political correctness to some extent, right? They were often stories about U.S. institutions and about American pathologies. But then they often also sort of had that tone of like, oh, just watch out. This might easily make it to Zurich or to, you know, to London or whatever. But of course, it's probably not an accident that a lot of this is happening on Twitter, a platform that indeed is furnished, right? I'm sitting here and talking to you in San Francisco. go right down the street from where I sit, right? This is a U.S. object, a U.S. service that does influence how German, Swiss, French,

UK people live their lives and get their information, right? So it is a way of metabolizing a certain kind of U.S. cultural dominance as well that I don't want to say is totally made up, right? It's kind of taking a part of U.S. culture that I feel like is not actually very mobile, right? Like small liberal arts colleges are a pretty uniquely. American thing, I would say. I don't see those in France or in Germany very often. But of course, it's not an accident that this is all happening on Twitter. I think that social media is a place where, yes, decision makers in the U.S. do shape in a pretty remarkable way how news consumers

get information in pretty far away places. And so I do think it's both responding on a kind of fantastical level. It's kind of imagining a kind of dependence on the U.S. that isn't actually there, right? We're just like the US, and so therefore we must also get this. It's like, well, no, you're not actually that much like the US, except the one place where you're having these discussions, namely on social media. That is a place where, you know, Germans don't go on their own specific social network. Russians do, I guess, but they, but in Germany, they do go on on X or Twitter, right?

They go on TikTok, they go on Instagram, right? There's also grappling with a very real dependence on the Internet Aeatheaval. and the role that the U.S. play in the Internet age. Yeah, it really is wild. And everything you just said also goes back to something you said earlier about one of the aspects of a moral panic is the idea that, well, even if this is small now, it could get bigger or even if this is an American thing right now, it could easily come here. And it does feel like everything is sort of playing off of that.

Like even in Europe, if people are saying, well, it's not like that here yet. Ah, but it could be. And we need to nip it in the bottom. Now. Just to give your listeners to a couple of examples of this, right, when Jordan Peterson in 2016 at the University of Toronto gave his big YouTube lecture about political correctness having run amok and basically became kind of an international superstar doing it, you know, he sort of warned against the new left-wing orthodoxy. And then he said several times, like, oh, it hasn't yet come to Canada, thankfully, but I'm already starting to notice that it's sort of dripping in. This is

how it always works with both political correctness and with cancer culture. It's always poised to come to wherever you are in the next, I don't know, one to two years or whatever. There's a book by a French journalist that came out two years ago. This is not about cancer culture. The author does mention cancel culture. The title is about lewokism, so wokeness, right? And the title is wokeism, will France be contaminated? That kind of says the quiet part out loud. These are fears of contamination, right? If the U.S. catches a cold, we're going to start sneezing soon, right? Like the idea this is coming to us, whether we'd like it or not. They often talk about a wuk wave in France, right? The idea that

there's this tsunami coming, the social justice tsunami coming, that has begun to already corrode the U.S. institutions and now it's taking aim at us. That is absolutely there. And it is absolutely where these texts sort of take their emotional charge from. Because everyone, basically, it generates both an interest in things that are far away and the sense that this is actually getting closer. And what's really interesting is so much of this seems to depend on, I don't know if you want to call them power dynamics, or I think you in the book call them existing social relationships, basically in the sense of who has power and who doesn't. It's this idea that the people who are yelling the most about cancel culture seem to think that transgender

people have all the power. And as you say, the Russian Federation is a power. And as you say, the Russian Federation is a powerless victim. The members of Congress are powerless victims. Donald Trump is a victim. You know, white people are the truly oppressed people who are suffering from racism in America. It feels like every aspect of this ties into a sort of an absolute fear that people who are used to being on top of the food chain, for a better way of putting it, are maybe becoming, things are maybe becoming a little more equal. That's right. I think that it's two things, right? It's on the one hand, this idea that what we would assume, right, would be the distribution of power in an institution has been inverted, right? And I think universities are a pretty good example of this. Most

cancel culture stories suggest that it's students, really, who now control universities, right? And administrators are powerless to stop them. Now, if I wanted to get fired from Stanford tomorrow, I could probably do it. I wouldn't likely, I wouldn't likely try to piss off my students. I try to piss off a trustee. That's the number. want a way to get fired, right? People who are cutting the checks tend to be, in a capitalist society, tend to be pretty powerful, right?

But the cancel culture story kind of inverts, the common sense picture of how power is distributed in an organization. And then the other thing that's maybe a little bit more hidden, you know, we mentioned in the beginning that like cancer culture stories often tell us, oh, this could happen to anyone.

And yet, most famous cancel victims are not actually anyone. They tend to have a certain stature in the institution where they get cancelled, right? It's a professor, a tenured professor at a major university. It is someone who edited a newspaper and now no longer gets to. It is someone who, you know, was a famous actor and now is no longer famous, right? Part of why that is, is that not so covertly, these fables of cancellations are stories about our hierarchies being actually good, right? The person who has power right now is owed that power. They deserve that power. They worked hard for that power. The person who gets

our attention deserves that attention, right? Under all the, you know, fire and brimstone, all the apocalyptic talk about, you know, struggle sessions and the cultural revolution and McCarthyism from the left, et cetera, et cetera, ultimately these stories are a very reassuring set of stories about how the people who are at the top of certain institutions deserve to be there, right? And so it's both. It's both kind of asking us to invert our common sense picture. of how its powers distributed in universities, in journalism, in Hollywood, in politics, etc, et cetera. But it's also asking us to kind of buy into the fact that the hierarchies we have are fine,

right? That there's a reason to them that they deserve defense to some extent. So it's a doubly conservative discourse. You know, so many of the people railing about cancel culture and so many of these people who, the self-styled heterodox thinkers, in the end, it's this existing power structure that they want to prop up. And they sort of, they see themselves as these brave cultural heroes. But in reality, they're basically, they're not speaking truth to power. They're trying to keep the powerful in power, it feels like. Yeah, it's one of those funny things.

One aspect of this course in the United States clearly is that it's often carried by libertarians. It has a great deal of libertarian impulses. But like a lot of U.S. libertarianism, it seems to operate with an unacknowledged hierarchy of power, right? If nature were left to its own devices, if the state, if society, if those do-gooders, if the takers didn't meddle in affairs, like white men would miraculously rise back to the top, right? Like, there is an element here where there's also kind of certain lies that libertarianism tells about itself or certain kinds of libertarianism tell about themselves kind of rises to the surface where we realize, oh, wow, as you say, this isn't, you pretend to be this insurgent.

anti-institutionalists. You pretend to be this individualist. But in the end, you're very, very upset about individuals who have risen past your station who you think don't deserve it. Yeah, it's absolutely wild. And as a former libertarian, I can vouch for everything that you just said. The book is The Cancel Culture Panic, How an American Obsession went global. Adrian Dow, thank you so much for being here. I wish we had more time because the book covers a whole bunch of things we didn't have a chance to get into. So I encourage people to go out and buy it. It's a really insightful read. Thanks, Adrian.

Thank you so much. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at thedailybeast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a daily

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