Cancel culture crisis: Adrian Daub describes old fear in a new era
A clear-eyed and essential dissection of the cancel culture phenomenon has hit shelves with Adrian Daub’s The Cancel Culture Panic: How an American Obsession Went Global (Stanford University Press, 2024). In a talk given at The Clayman Institute for Gender Research on October 16th, Daub argued that cancel culture isn’t the free speech crisis we’ve been told it is, but rather a reflection of deeper struggles over social power and cultural narratives. His central argument: the moral panic of cancel culture is, at the core, a reactionary machine that defends the political agendas and status of those who fear losing what is often unearned social dominance.
Cancel culture can often feel distinctly emblematic of the last several years—its rise to popular usage fueled by the convergence of COVID, heightened political polarization, and social media’s tendency to amplify antagonistic ways of engaging online. Daub, who cites copious examples of public intellectuals bemoaning not “being able to say anything anymore” throughout history, he renders cancel culture “an old fear in a new get up.”
Though today, when cancel culture’s crisis narrative is mobilized in full force, it has a few hallmark giveaways. Daub says that archetypal instances of cancellation must be publicly visible, often playing out in the public arena, and usually involve referendum on a powerful person’s status by those with less power: “the young, the racially excluded, the gender non-conforming, etc.,” said Daub. The cancellers—those with less status—are typically cast as overly sensitive, overreaching figures who act in a merciless and totalizing fashion, while the cancelled are typically portrayed as righteous victims unfairly punished or silenced without due process. These stories, according to Daub, make up the merry-go-round of cancel culture clickbait often circulated by The Atlantic, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.
Such essays –and their accompanying viral moments—become most powerful and harmful when creating moral equivalencies, according to Daub. He pointed to examples like Woody Allen and Joshua Katz, noting how their alleged “cancelation” has been framed in a way that draws attention away from the broader systemic issues in which both cases are embedded. “The strategy is to degrade accusations of real harm,” Daub said, noting that these stories are weaponized into their own form of grievance culture, ultimately distracting from the systems that allow certain people with power to attain and abuse it in the first place.
Daub reserves his harshest critique for those he and others describe as “reactionary centrists,” people who identify as liberal or neutral but have drifted toward conservative viewpoints under the guise of defending free speech. “There’s a strong dynamic at play where people convince themselves they’re on the side of reason and fairness, but they’re actually reinforcing a reactionary agenda,” Daub explains. He suggests that this is where the real danger lies—not in cancel culture itself, but in how it allows masses of people to adopt reactionary views under a veneer of reasonableness. While many high-profile cancel culture cases are overblown or distorted in ways that benefit conservative agendas, the sense of moral panic they evoke is in fact very real.
The Cancel Culture Panic unmasks cancel culture’s essence not as public shaming or the imagined “loss” of free speech, but as the symbolic battleground where political factions fight over who gets to control the narrative. In this lucid critique, Daub reveals how the so-called cancelled, who lament their silencing through the loudest and most visible public forums, often do just that. Daub is Barbara D. Finberg Director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. He also is the J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor of the Humanities and a professor of comparative literature and German studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences.
