How Cancel Culture Panics Ate the World

In the fall of 2015, some Oberlin College students complained in their campus newspaper that Campus Dining Services had been passing off a pulled pork sandwich as a Vietnamese banh mi. This was a reasonable criticism, expressed through established channels at a pitch far from hysterical. But if you’ve heard of this particular sandwich, this is almost certainly not what you heard about it, at least six weeks later, from The New York Times—or perhaps it was The Washington Post. Or Newsweek. Or Seventeen.

According to the version you probably heard, this most (in)famously liberal of liberal arts colleges was engulfed in an uproar over the dining hall’s “racist” and “culturally appropriative” practices. Only three days after the New York Post first “broke” the college paper’s story in the national media—“Students At Lena Dunham’s College Offended By Lack Of Fried Chicken” (December 18, 2015), published with an unrelated photo of the Girls star—the news had already gone trans-Atlantic: The Independent relayed the story to its British audience with the subheading, “Critics say complaining college students had ‘no idea’ about the real world.” Before long, the unfitness of these American undergraduates for life in “the real world” had become the object of German, Brazilian, and French journalists’ derision. Almost five years after the sandwich was actually served, Caroline Fourest sneered that the Oberlin students had made the not-banh mi “their 1968” in her 2020 book Génération offensée: De la police de la culture à la police de la pensée. Quite an impressive escalation in political stakes and geographic scope for one sandwich in rural Ohio.

This should all be remarkable: that the tale of the banh mi circulated so widely and enjoyed such a tenacious afterlife in political polemic; that it was subjected to such wild distortions; and that its stakes proved so mutable. Yet when readers today recall this episode, they likely do so with a sense of tedium. And it is just as likely that they do not quite remember it, the bad taste of this particular sandwich having been washed away by a deluge of formally identical, indeed interchangeable “cancel culture” narratives. These stories are calibrated to elicit terror and rage, yet their sheer quantity and regularity manages to render these emotions dull, even comfortable. It is perhaps for this reason that the phenomenon of “cancel culture” has never really been submitted to rigorous analysis: We all already know about it, or at least we think we do, and we’re sick of hearing about it even though we cannot stop talking about it.

The gambit of Stanford literature professor Adrian Daub’s clarifying new book, The Cancel Culture Panic: How an American Obsession Went Global, is the contention that, in fact, we don’t really know what “cancel culture” is. Moreover, the very fact that we think we do sustains it. Like every moral panic, cancel culture skirmishes thrive on contradictory impulses: incuriosity regarding accuracy coupled with intense, even prurient interest in perceived violations of norms; presumptive familiarity cut with historical amnesia. Before we have even read the latest cancel culture narrative, we already know the roles, the sides, and where we stand. Yet still we find ourselves consuming each one as the baleful harbinger of something new, strange, and profoundly threatening to the integrity of the polity.

What is cancel culture? Daub offers a working definition with three main elements: (1) the actual existence of new social practices, especially online, that some commentators find scary or confusing; (2) the claim that these practices are “part of a broad cultural shift”; (3) the notion that a “culture of left-wing censoriousness actively drives social fracture.”

Only (1) designates a “culture” in the sense of a set of signifying social practices, whereas (2) and (3) do not designate things people say and do not constitute “cancellation” so much as the way other people talk about those things. Daub’s critical intervention is to shift our attention from (1), the substance of the anecdotes, to (2) and (3), the ways these anecdotes are narrated, circulated, and put to political work. From cancel culture, to cancel culture discourse, to cancel culture panic. Or: from a complaint about a sandwich, to the mass media that amplifies it, to the political projects that make use of it.

Daub’s book, then, is not another entry in a series of sober critiques of cancel culture such as Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap, Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s The Canceling of the American Mind, or Susan Neiman’s Left Is Not Woke. Rather, these books are themselves artifacts of the discourse Daub examines. The Cancel Culture Panic trawls a vast archive of such artifacts, dating back as far as William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale (1951) and spanning a range of media, genres, and forms: from polemics like Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education (1991) to campus fictions like Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000), and from the feuilleton sections of German newspapers to individual tweets. “The first thing one has to acknowledge in analyzing this discourse,” Daub cautions upfront, “is the simple but fundamental fact of how much of it there is.” A fleet and often entertaining narrator, Daub has an eye for the most fitting illustrations and manages to keep one or two examples at the center of his arguments while gesturing at many similar ones.

Nearly all of those examples are “anecdotes,” which Daub identifies as the default literary genre of cancel culture discourse. The genius of the cancel culture anecdote—say, “the one about the sandwich at Oberlin”—is its peculiar capacity for inverting an “economy of attention”: Stripped of context, with its stakes inflated and its complexities sanded down through repetition, compression, and sometimes outright distortion, the anecdote makes the minor seem major and the individual seem general. It “turn[s] the common-sense picture of existing social relationships—who has power and who doesn’t, who is vulnerable and who isn’t, what can and can’t be said—on its head.” For instance, in many cancel culture panics, “transgender students who are rarely interviewed in the media suddenly appear as a dominant group, while members of Congress, presidents, eccentric billionaires, and the entire Russian Federation are seen as their powerless victims.” Cancel culture panic depends on the production and dissemination of these attention-sucking anecdotes, sometimes years or even decades later and all but unrecognizable to those with firsthand knowledge of the events they narrate.

The cancel culture anecdote is not an especially new phenomenon, though some things about cancel culture and its discourse are genuine innovations. Daub is insistent throughout the book that “cancel culture,” properly speaking, is indeed a product of the internet. Not only is social media where much of the discourse unfolds—280 characters is a perfect length for an anecdote—but we have it to thank for the distinctive usage of “cancel” (from Suey Park’s 2014 Twitter hashtag campaign against The Colbert Report) as well as the formulation and practices of activist “callout culture” (Tumblr). However, The Cancel Culture Panic is primarily concerned with doing what cancel culture discourse never does: trying to understand something by tracing its history. Reaching back into the twentieth century, Daub unearths cancel culture discourse’s distinctively American roots.

The first crucial precedent is the media’s elevation of the “campus,” and the students and faculty imagined as populating it, to figures of national political concern. The elevation arguably began in earnest with Buckley. In God and Man at Yale, Buckley complained that the faculty of his alma mater was, as Daub puts it, falling morally “out of step with the rest of the country in a fundamental way: They were deeply anti-Christian and anti-individualist,” if not outright communist. In so doing, Buckley made Yale University—an unrepresentatively wealthy and selective institution—stand in for “the university” as such, and focused his critique disproportionately on professors in the humanities—two de rigueur tactics of conservative complaints right on through to 2024. But the elevation of the campus reached a new high point, Daub argues, with Ronald Reagan’s 1966 “Morality Gap” speech at the Cow Palace, in which Reagan stoked moral panic by offering a litany of anecdotes about “radical” student behavior at the University of California at Berkeley, punctuated with that trinity of archetypal ’60s culture-war bugbears: sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Reagan made collegiate goings-on the business of American voters, even if these voters had no direct stake in any educational institution: Reagan’s pitch to voters was that “they were allowed to be concerned about what young people were doing on campus,” Daub writes, “because it was patriotic and a sign of their own seriousness.”

While plenty of cancel culture anecdotes are drawn from the media, the entertainment industry, and from the publishing world, most are set “on campus.” The “Morality Gap” speech helps us understand why: Reagan demonstrated canny insight into the peculiar capacity of the imagined campus to organize collective political anxieties. For one thing, youth alone makes college students effective avatars for the imminent future of the polity. For another, higher education is an important organ for class reproduction and class mobility. When told in a way that taps both of these connotations, an anecdote about the ostensibly degraded social mores at a flagship state school like Berkeley can be transformed into a foreboding glimpse at not just a university in turmoil, but an America careening toward disaster. At a moment of greatly expanded access to higher education by women, minorities, and the working class, Reagan projected anxieties about generational transfer and demographic changes onto campus life, casting college students as available objects of concern and condescension from adults whose very seniority guaranteed their relative maturity, sobriety, rationality, and pragmatism.

The second major turn is the neoconservatives’ fashioning of this new concern about the campus into a moral panic over “political correctness” in the 1990s. By examining that older discourse alongside the new cancel culture discourse, Daub makes a persuasive case that cancel culture panic is political correctness (“P.C.”) panic, updated for the media technologies of the 2010s and ’20s. As Daub shrewdly observes, the two discourses even share certain canonical anecdotes—formulaic tales, similar both in their content and in their strategic narrative elisions, which get framed repeatedly over the decades as evidence of a new, troubling cultural tendency.

For instance, foundational documents of “P.C.” panic like Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals (1990) and Jonathan Rauch’s Kindly Inquisitors (1993) warn their readers about politically correct “speech codes” ostensibly being enforced on American campuses. Analyzing one of Kimball’s examples, from Smith College, Daub finds that the anecdote’s kernel of truth concerns a document circulated by the Smith Office of Student Affairs, with suggestions for how students could avoid speaking and behaving in ways that might be interpreted as perpetuating “lookism” (in Kimball’s gloss, “the prejudice of believing that some people are more attractive than others”). This office “isn’t ‘the’ university,” Daub points out—its staff has a limited purview and doesn’t represent even the unified views of the Smith administration, much less of all institutions of higher education in the country. Yet Kimball presents its (nonbinding) suggestion as if it were “a commandment handed down by the [Smith] administration.” In 2022, more than three decades later, “media worldwide ran with the story that Stanford University would punish students or faculty for using the word ‘American.’” This panicked anecdote distorted the reality of the situation in an identical manner: The Stanford IT department, an office with no disciplinary prerogatives, “had drawn up a list of possible terms to avoid or to replace on official Stanford websites.” And between these instances, there have been other “speech code” controversies, many relying on likewise distorted suggestions and recommendations from unrepresentative individuals and offices. In each case, the supposed speech code is imagined as already in force and affecting students by at once censoring and brainwashing them. No matter what days “these days” refers to, the kids are never all right—and they are often not all right in very predictable ways.

The last step on the cancel culture anecdote’s itinerary from real event to media spectacle is the anecdote’s global export and redeployment in new political settings by non-Americans who imbue it with significances foreign to its original contexts. (The connotations of Fourest’s jab about the Oberlin students, “their 1968,” will be lost on those unfamiliar with the history the French student movement, for example.) There is, it turns out, a worldwide appetite for cancel culture discourse—which is always a discourse about (and against) the United States, even in the discourse’s British, German, French, Brazilian, Russian, Italian, Turkish, and Spanish iterations.

In France, the rising population of immigrants from former French colonies in the Middle East and North Africa since at least 1989 has been framed in the media as a direct threat to the social cohesion and cultural integrity of the secularist republic. Those who criticize this reaction to postcolonial demographic change as racist or Islamophobic are, according to many French commentators, speaking a distinctively American language of “le wokisme.” Thus, cancel culture discourse serves a distinctively French political project by yoking one French majoritarian panic (about Muslims) to a separate claim that French debate is being distorted by socially “fractious” ideas about race and colonialism from without. These ideas originate, supposedly, not from Francophone intellectuals like Frantz Fanon or Aimé Césaire, but rather from American campuses.

Caring overmuch about what American college students are supposedly doing and saying—and even more importantly, what they are allegedly not allowing to be done or said—is, Daub finds, a global pastime.

Daub illustrates the political incoherence and mutability that define the various exported versions of cancel culture panic. Daub’s ultimate contribution in The Cancel Culture Panic, though, is to show that that incoherence was embedded in the discourse at its American point of origin. There is no version of cancel culture panic—not Buckley’s, not Reagan’s, not the neocons’, and not the internet’s—that is not structured from the start by a fundamental contradiction. This contradiction is internal to liberalism: Cancel culture panic, as Daub describes it, frames a world in which the supposed adults in the room must take illiberal measures (e.g., cracking down on protest) in order to protect the values and institutions (e.g., free speech) conventionally associated with liberalism.

The university is at once attacked as a bastion of decadent values and totalitarian practices, and celebrated, in the melancholic mode of lament for bygone glory days that are always whiter, more rigidly and inequitably gendered, less socioeconomically diverse. Panic discourse helps to legitimate the repressive exercise of state power against these institutions’ workers and students as well as further state disinvestment. In Ron DeSantis’s Florida, to take one example, entire fields of academic study are being banned ostensibly in the name of “freedom.” In cancel culture discourse, Daub comments, “You get to fancy yourself an institutionalist conservative and a populist firebrand at the same time. This is the central feeling of the … discourse: It scornfully celebrates the hollowing out of the very institutions whose aura and established hierarchies it wants to protect.”

If cancel culture panic is only the P.C. panic rebooted for the Twitter era, and if both consistently obsess over “the campus,” then this makes good sense: Both moral panics are downriver of the neoliberal hollowing-out of American higher education. Indeed, all of the industries from which cancel culture anecdotes are extracted (education, publishing, journalism, entertainment) have undergone increasing financialization and casualization since Reagan spoke at the Cow Palace. As a result of these economic changes, the positions of people who work in these fields—like today’s college students—grow ever more precarious, ever more exposed to fiscal discipline. In the case of the university, “financial disinvestment and moral overinvestment” are connected: “Politicians … use tales of political correctness to justify budget cuts” to morally invested constituents, observes Daub, and those budget cuts produce workers and students who are increasingly, let’s say, cancelable.

Yet it is precisely those who suffer the costs of neoliberal discipline who are then cast in the role of a powerful illiberal force in cancel culture discourse’s “little morality plays.” This inversion rewrites problems of political economy as dramas of an embattled liberalism, while also furnishing an “all-encompassing” justification for dismissing out of hand critics of the status quo as “Twitter mobs” or “woke” college students. All the while, the ongoing production of ever more anecdotes means more opportunities for panicked moralizing and prepares the way for yet more disinvestment.

This is the grand political mystification effected by cancel culture panic as Daub has described it. It persuades us to feel angry at or fearful of or smugly superior to the student, inevitably blue of hair, who wants to “cancel” the dining hall at her college for misrepresenting a sandwich. In our fervor, we forget to ask not only whether that is really what happened, or whether we should really care, but also why she had to take on tens of thousands of dollars in debt just to be there in the first place.