Left: The Capitol bombing in the Netflix hit series Designated Survivor (Kinberg, Sutherland, Bymel, Sood and Pepper, 2016) Right: The January 6 Insurrection (Reuters, 2021).
A year on, the United States continues to reel over the Capitol Insurrection. Yet the conspiratorial campaigns of QAnon, which spurred the Insurrection, is not a new phenomenon. Decades prior, the “Satanic Panic”, gripped the United States. It was characterised by heightened mass panic of a Satanic syndicate which preyed on children, inviting a surge of unproven allegations both from the public and law enforcement officials, especially in crafting contradictory accounts from children (Romano, 2021). According to sociologist Mary de Young (1996), Christian fundamentalism in the United States emphasised on the Devil as the progenitor of social ills, and declared that Christian spirituality was the panacea to social ills, a belief which continues to persist in the rural and conservative regions of America today. While the Satanic Panic tended to brand teachers as Satanist practitioners, QAnon brands a segment of political elites as Satanists who ran a “deep state” in the United States – a dubious association of elites who operate the powers of the state – and believes that the former President Donald Trump is fighting a battle against this group. Yet both groups of followers securitise child safety in political and religious discourse. According to political scientist Mia Bloom and psychologist Sophia Moskalenko (2021), QAnon has increasingly been adopted in feminine spaces under the guise of protecting the children through harnessing the #SaveTheChildren hashtag, a digital equivalent of the allegations made during the Satanic Panic.
As such, how do moral panics facilitate political polarisation? The answer might lie in the formation and operationalisation of moral panics by QAnon followers as well as sharper political polarisation surfaced before the 2016 Presidential Election and the years after.
Moral Panic
What are moral panics? Sociologists Eric Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda (2009) conceptualised moral panics as ideas harboured within a sizeable section of the society that the actions of some members within their society have done something “evil”. These moral panics also engender beliefs that because the “evil” is so damaging to society, steps, sometimes drastic ones, must be taken to subdue and punish this “evil”, and rectify the damages they have caused. Moral panic comprises five elements. First, there is elevated concern within the society that is observable and measurable. Such concerns can be generated through the existence of folk devils – actors seen as responsible for the ills of society – evolving into hostility against the accused members of society where the stigma of responsibility is branded on these actors (Cohen, 2011). There must be widespread consensus that the potential threat is real and damaging. Since moral panics can exist in any size, it can be shared by either a majority or sizeable groups in society (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 2009). The “evil” in question should be exaggerated too; that it can potentially inflict severe damage in society, proven or otherwise. Lastly, moral panics are volatile. They can erupt and subside quickly, or be institutionalised in the form of laws, news-making, and particularistic interest group conspiracy theories (Cohen, 2011).
Causal links between political polarisation and moral panics
The construction and operationalisation of deviance by QAnon through moral panics facilitates further political ripples, such as political polarisation and the rootedness of identity politics in partisanship. Political scientists David Darmofal and Ryan Strickler (2019) identify path-dependent reasons for identity-driven partisanship where racialised and conservative forces undergird the consolidation of white partisanship in rural America and the imagination of the American community as “white-only” only. Furthermore, Republican supporters generally believed that they were unheard and had limited decision-making powers (Cramer, 2016). Though journalistic accounts may explain individual voting behaviours, broader voting behaviours could still be causally linked to racialised party identification; white Republicans are likely to oppose a Democratic campaign even before forming strong opinions (Darmofal and Strickler, 2019). The confluence of life circumstances and racialised partisanship likely inspire moral panics ignited in the conservative-Republican camp, believing that being neglected by the state might somehow be caused by a Satanic oligarchy controlling state machinery (Bloom and Moskalenko, 2021), and that only a strongman authoritarian like Trump, ironically, could secure their “democracy”.
However, existing social scientific research tended to make conservative-Republican Americans the subject of inquiry. No conclusive studies on moral panics within the liberal left-Democratic camp have been conducted, calling for a deeper understanding of the perception – potentially heightened fear – of a second Trump-esque term. Though mobilisations against political issues continue to occur, they cannot possibly be branded as “moral panics” because these issues do exert undue lethality on minority lives. Yet memes about a possible Trump presidency soon turned into a short yet observable wave of panic as America then inched closer to the 2016 election, with search terms like “moving to Canada” spiking during that period as more Americans expressed their desire to leave the United States (Beauchamp, 2016; Ray and Esipova, 2020). Clearly then, would Trump and his followers have become “folk devils”?
Beauchamp (2016) included a Google Trends graph of the search term “move to Canada”. We ran the same query in Google Trends in January 2022. The blue dot represents when the query peaked during the election season in 2016. (Google Trends, 2022).
Conclusion
Studying polarisation thus becomes a meta-theoretical step in the study of political deviance through the formation and organisation of moral panics. As targeted disinformation campaigns become more politically salient, QAnon becomes a variable which influences political polarisation and the way both sides of the Democratic-Republican divide frame deviance. Ultimately then, scholars will have to observe how moral panics serve as mechanisms to facilitate political polarisation and its relationship with authoritarian foothold in democratic states.
Food for thought:
With QAnon stalling progress in electoral reforms and leading political discourse according to their conspiracy theories, how will American society fall into near-irreversible democratic backsliding, undoing decades of democratic reforms?
Does the exercise of unfiltered and uncontrolled freedom of speech and assembly in QAnon necessarily sustain broad democratic rights?
Written by Winston Wee Chin Hin, Year 3, Political Science Major & Sociology Minor
References
Bloom, M. & Moskalenko, S. (2021). Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon. Stanford: Redwood Press.
Beauchamp, Z. (2016, March 2). After Super Tuesday, Americans are frantically Googling “move to Canada”. Vox. https://www.vox.com/2016/3/2/11146024/move-to-canada-super-tuesday.
Cohen, S. (2011). Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The creation of the Mods and Rockers. New York; London: Routledge.
Cramer, K. J. (2016, November 16). For years, I've been watching anti-elite fury build in Wisconsin. Then came Trump. Vox. https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/11/16/13645116/rural-resentment-elites-trump.
Darmofal, D, & Strickler, R. (2019). Demography, Politics, and Partisan Polarization in the United States, 1828-2019. Cham: Springer Nature.
de Young, M. (1996). Speak of the Devil: Rhetoric in Claims-Making About the Satanic Ritual Abuse Problem. The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, 23(2): 55-74. https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/jssw/vol23/iss2/4.
Goode, E. & Ben-Yehuda, N. (2009). Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance. (2nd ed.). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Ray, J & Esipova, N. (2020, January 4). Record Numbers of Americans Want to Leave the U.S. Gallup. https://news.gallup.com/poll/245789/record-numbers-americans-leave.aspx.
Romano, A. (2021, May 31). Why Satanic Panic never really ended. Vox. https://www.vox.com/culture/22358153/satanic-panic-ritual-abuse-history-conspiracy-theories-explained.
Pictures
Google Trends. (2022). Accessed 2022, January 20. Retrieved from: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=move%20to%20canada.
Kinberg, S., Sutherland, K., Bymel, S., Sood, A., & Pepper, N. (Executive Producers). (2016). Designated Survivor [Television Broadcast]. Burbank, CA: ABC Studios.
Reuters. (2021, January 7). Crisis at the Capitor: How a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol as lawmakers debated the final certification of the presidential election. https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-ELECTION/PROTESTS/qmyvmqewmvr/.