Thursday, June 11, 2020

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).