Moral panic as an election strategy

In theory, democratic contests are supposed to be about ideas. Candidates engage in debate about principles and beliefs and the electorate decides who most closely reflects their own interests and concerns. But what happens when one party consistently loses the debate?

Here in Victoria, Australia, we are finding out the meaning of this answer, as the state Liberal Party, aided and abetted by their federal colleagues, continue to engage on what academic researchers in sociology have, since the 1970s, referred to as moral panics.

Moral panics are generally regarded as episodes, both historical and contemporary, when society becomes overwhelmed by fears of some exterior threat. Such menaces are typically so great as to be regarded as ‘existential’ threats—which is to say, so dire as to imperil the existence of society per se.

The classic historical example of moral panics was the European Witch Hunts, which ran roughly between the mid-fourteenth and the mid-seventeenth centuries. Related to the fall out from the Black Death, the decline of feudalism and other associated events that undermined the power of the medieval church, the Witch Hunts were essentially an exercise in scapegoating.

Your crops have failed? Your faith is being tested because believers and sinners alike are dying in droves? It’s those evil brides of Satan trying to wreck Christendom and sabotage God’s Plan!

In the aftermath of pandemic, Jews were also accused of poisoning the wells and were subject to pogroms. The antisemitism that informed those weaselled its way into modernity in the form of the National Socialist movement, which substituted Jews for brides of Satan in their own scapegoating campaigns following the economic disasters of the 1920s.

Modernity offers numerous other examples of moral panics, from the Stalinist purges to multiple scares over Communist influence in the United States and Australia, a long period of tension known as the Cold War and after 2001, when a Terror Scare seized much of the world, which knew for sure that it stood on the precipice of anarchy—until the wars started to go badly, anyway.

Sociologists call the process by which witches, communists and terrorists become the focal point of moral panics ‘deviance production,’ or ‘deviance amplification.’ These terms reflect the highly subjective and emotive character of deviance as a concept, depending completely on the power to impose definitions on public discourse rather than of characteristics of anyone so labelled. This is typically achieved with the help of ideologically-charged propaganda, designed to arouse paranoia.

This is not to say that those who have been persecuted historically and in more recent times in the name of fighting witchcraft, communism and terrorism were or are perfect angels. This is not the point. The point is that the best lies are often half-truths, told by those with other agendas. In the case of the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan in response to an attack by mostly Saudi Arabian hijackers, this fact was clear to many.

It is a conspicuous feature of moral panics historically that those who perpetrate scare campaigns over some existential threat or other tend to render themselves cause and cure of the same problem. This is arguably the inevitable outcome of constructing a problem that we can then style ourselves the solution to.

The strategy also has the useful effect of allowing those who scare monger to restyle themselves Saviours of Humanity, using the logic of, for example, ‘if you think for yourself, the terrorists win,’ to shut down opposing voices and dissent. The appeal of this kind of actually-existing political correctness for political figures who are otherwise often extremely unpopular is obvious.

On these grounds we can account then for the continuing popularity of what political scientist Richard Hofstadter famously called the ‘Paranoid Style.’ Hofstadter’s commentary built on that of journalist and satirist H. L. Mencken, who in 1921 very astutely noted that ‘The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.’

And so it remains, more relevant today than when it was written. The particular innovation of the present period, as I argued in a piece for Arena Journal last year, has been the development of moral panicking and deviance production as an electoral strategy.

Criminologist Katherine Beckett studied this phenomenon in US politics, noting its association with the Drug War in particular. Beckett highlighted the deep disconnect between popular concerns and the level of attention the drug trade received from officialdom and the corporate media, citing a mere 2% voicing concern over the issue just after the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. After Reagan launched his drug war, of course, fear of crime blew out exponentially.

This was classic deviance production, blowing the fact that some poor blacks took drugs out of all proportion into a black-on-white crime wave. Middle class whites collectively shrieked and fled to the suburbs, voting en masse for Reagan’s deputy in 1988 in response to scare advertisements about liberal permissiveness towards black convicts.

In this case, the fear-object was embodied in the demonised figure of ‘Willie Horton,’ a black prisoner who committed rape while on a Democrat-established weekend release programme. The Republican scare campaign had nothing to say about rape culture per se, but this fact was lost to moral panic.

Such lessons arrived not a minute too soon for their local Tory counterparts, defeated in the ‘unlosable’ election 1993 after campaigning on the unpopular ‘Fightback!’ austerity platform. This was arguably the last time the Federal Liberal Party made a serious attempt at campaigning on policy, though John Howard later enacted many of Fightback!’s neoliberalisms anyway, grateful no doubt that Pauline Hanson was keeping everyone distracted tilting at the Yellow Peril.

In this sense, Hanson might well be regarded as the true innovator of moral panics as election strategy in Australia, though Howard was better placed to exploit the fear she had stirred—a fact he patently recognised in lurching to the right to steal her thunder. Dethroned, Hanson was forced out until a new moral panic with global reach gave her a new political lease on life, facilitating her return to the centre of national paranoia. On a happier note she seems to like Asians now.

In the meantime, Howard was already settling into his new role as scaremonger-in-chief by hyping the existential threat of the aforesaid fishing boats when he was gifted manna from Heaven during the 2001 election, the Tampa incident saving him from popular discontent over his neoliberalism. In September of the same year, he and his neoliberal counterparts across the west received similar gifts, all very grateful no doubt that they would not have to spend much time talking about economic policy over the course of the next decade.

This historical backdrop to the construction of moral panic over African gangs in Victoria reveals its pedigree in no uncertain terms. In this case, the construction of problems to which one can then cast oneself the solution features just as clearly as it did in the past—and just as defiantly of evidence and facts to the contrary as it did before.

Towards the end of last year, the Police Accountability Project exposed News Limited scare-mongering almost as soon as it began; as far back as January, I exposed its political use by the Victorian Liberal Party with the November state election in the offing.

The fact that this campaign has started so early, a year before the event in question, reveals how deeply embedded the culture of scapegoating and paranoia has become, if not in national political culture writ large, then certainly amongst conservatives. The use of political strategies with a premodern and totalitarian pedigree by those who accuse others of deviance and departure from good form, is a particularly ironic aspect of these developments.

What sadly gets lost as News Limited and the Victorian Liberal Party indulge the politics of scapegoating is the effect on those targeted; while the youth crime levels associated with the alleged threat fall, hate crimes committed against Africans migrants have risen—just like hate crimes against Muslims after 9/11, as uncritical consumers of corporate media-driven panic put their alleged superior values on display.

There are violent thugs on the streets, then, but ones with white skin, driven by bigotry and paranoia and egged on by corporate media and demagogues clinging to failed ideologies whose practical policies appear to amount to looking for scapegoats upon whom to pin the blame.

As history demonstrates time and again, this is what happens when poor losers refuse to admit they have lost. Outside of the scare-mongering over African gangs in Victoria are other stories: low wages and long hours, the high price and shortage of suitable housing, lack of employment opportunities at all, epidemics of domestic violence and spates of deadly violence against women in the community, homelessness and despair, the endemic bigotry of a society with historical accounts outstanding, the ever-worsening problems of wealth inequality and climate change.

The high moral pretences behind scare-mongering over African gangs, which allege interest in the society that suffers these ills, in practise have nothing to say, or to offer. But that is precisely their purpose. We are not to think, but only to react, so that we might permit those responsible to continue with more of the same, indefinitely.