Notes on revolutionary panic

The importance of mass media and cultural stakeholders in promoting so-called "moral panics" has long been recognized by theorists, from the pioneering work of Stanley Cohen onward. Cohen noted the role of politicians, media organizations, and activists in fomenting a sense of cultural anxiety. As this Oxford entry on moral panics outlines, the process of generating a panic relies on a three-step process: "The first is exaggeration and distortion of who did or said what; the second is prediction, the dire consequences of failure to act; and the third is symbolization," which means identifying some figure as a threat.

We might extend this idea of a moral panic to consider the aims of a revolutionary panic. In a revolutionary panic, revolutionaries and their allies whip up a sense of (catastrophic) anxiety in order to provoke a broader frenzy. This frenzy aims to polarize and raise the stakes of politics. Those who do not participate in acts of revolutionary purgation confess their guilt by this refusal to participate--silence is, as it were, violence. Because they could be adapted by various deplorables, facts that counter revolutionary narratives are inherently suspect, as are those who dare to mention them. (There might be real shortcomings that revolutionary panics invoke, but they will approach these challenges in a mode of venom and catastrophe.)

The workings of revolutionary panic also tend to degrade the individual. Because the stakes are so urgent, toleration cannot be allowed.  Those "allies" of the revolution should cut off all contact with those on the "wrong side of History," including family members. The revolution demands total commitment. Those who violate the precepts of the revolution should, of course, be banned from employment.

If normal politics is about the calibration of disappointment and hopefulness, revolutionary panics instead invoke the most radical despair in order to conjure a utopian urgency.  Because the present is so wretched--because the normal discourse of politics cannot work--revolutionary disruption and even violence are the only ways forward. If the aim of revolutionary politics is regime change, then proponents of a revolutionary panic have every incentive to show that politics under the existing regime cannot work.

As revolutionaries of various stripes have understood, part of undermining this existing regime also means disrupting the symbols of the regime as well as of the accumulated images that represent the past settlements within this regime's history. The Americans who pulled down the statue of George III in New York after the Declaration of Independence did so to indicate not the hopes of a more perfect union with the mother country but instead a radical break.

Whatever its purportedly moral claims, revolutionary panic is in many ways about power-politics. Members of an elite that want to extend their power might seek to feed this panic in order to strengthen their own positions. In contemporary societies, a revolutionary panic can be a vehicle for bureaucratic power struggles--who will get patronage, funding, or prominence. Many revolutionary panics might invoke the name of the oppressed but do so in the interests of the powerful (or at least those who are close to being among the powerful).

False Justice

I've written on this before, but I thought I'd flag this passage from Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self, a philosophical survey of evolving notions of selfhood in the modern age.  At the end of Sources of the Self, Taylor reflects on the way certain efforts for radical social reform can become corrupted, shifting from moral improvement to the denigration of the "deplorable."

High standards need strong sources. This is because there is something morally corrupting, even dangerous, in sustaining the demand simply on the feeling of undischarged obligation, on guilt, or its obverse, self-satisfaction. Hypocrisy is not the only negative consequence....

There are other consequences of benevolence on demand which Nietzsche didn't explore. The threatened sense of unworthiness can also lead to the projection of evil outward; the bad, the failure is now identified with some other person or group. My conscience is clear because I oppose them, but what can I do? They stand in the way of universal beneficence; they must be liquidated. This becomes particularly virulent on the extremes of the political spectrum, in a way which Dostoyevsky has explored to unparalleled depths.

Many young people are driven to political extremism, sometimes by truly terrible conditions, but also by a need to give meaning to their lives. And since meaninglessness is frequently accompanied by a sense of guilt, they sometimes respond to a strong ideology of polarization, in which one recovers a sense of direction as well as a sense of purity by lining up with implacable opposition to the forces of darkness. The more implacable, even violent the opposition, the more the polarity is represented as absolute, and the greater the sense of separation from evil and hence purity. Dostoyevsky’s Devils is one of the great documents of modern times, because it lays bare the way in which an ideology of universal love and freedom can mask a burning hatred, directed outward onto an unregenerate world and generating destruction and despotism.

Taylor here offers a warning: efforts for sweeping social reform--even while marching as an "ideology of universal love and freedom"--can degenerate into a program of despotism when they lose an affirmative sense of the good and instead focus simply on attacking those they characterize as fallen.

Those movements that rely on mass denigration, humiliation, and vituperation might not strengthen human bonds but undermine them. Atavistic impulses toward domination and cruelty can wear the mask of "justice," too.