This Old Moral Panic

For a large portion of the population of the United States, the last decade has involved a confrontation with how much our ways of thinking about and discussing pretty much everything, on a collective level, isn’t as firmly based in fact as they previously believed.  The concept of fact, the basis of what we consider a verifiable reality, is clearly mutable and permeable in a broad, collective sense. At the foundation of many of our current disagreements about what decisions to make, are questions about the best way to make decisions, depending on the narrative we believe about it is to be “American,” which by implicit extension, relates to what we believe about what it is to be human. Whether we believe in the concept of a verifiable, fact based reality from which humans spring or whether we believe something else, is the real question. Those narratives are the foundation of how we approach information, how we structure our understanding of what the information says, and why we decide whether it is or isn’t important. 

This is the why there’s an obsession with “messaging” in politics. When we’re talking about “messaging,” what we’re talking about is narrative. Questions about messaging in politics are questions about what story is being told, who’s telling it, why they’re telling it, what information they’re conveying. This is a constant hum in politics of “the left,” especially if you consider the Democratic Party as part of or on the left of the American political spectrum. There’s a constant criticism that Democrat’s are “bad at messaging.” What we mean when we’re talking about this is whether the narrative, the way it uses and situates information, how it is characterized, what that information means in the narrative they’re telling is compelling. 

When someone says, “We need to speak to kitchen table issues,” they’re talking about narrative. Kitchen table issues is a phrase with whole list of associations that have been established over time, and those associations are established through narrative. So, when a Democratic Party politician, political operative or one of their many surrogates says, “We need to stop talking about identity politics and start talking about kitchen table issues,” it’s actually saying different things to different people. To one specific population, it’s about economics and quality of life. What they hear is, “We need to speak to issues that impact people in ways they can recognize in their daily lives.” To another, less specific population, what they’re hearing is, “We need to narrow the focus of what we talk about as impacting people’s daily lives.” 

Because of the degree our political and cultural narratives have treated people who are white, heterosexual, cisgender, not disabled and Christian as the center of attention and our political narratives, the people who are the embodiment of what our political narratives treat as “the average American, the assumption in “We need to talk about kitchen table issues and stop focusing so much on identity politics,” is that what they’re saying identity politics aren’t kitchen table issues for the audience they’re addressing. If you are not white, not heterosexual, not cisgender, disabled and not Christian, the daily social experience of those assumptions often are kitchen table issues. If you can be fired for not being heterosexual or cisgender, not disabled, not Christian, these are material facts in your life, the very foundation of what we think of as kitchen table issues. This is the same problem when we talk about culture wars, more broadly. Political professionals will say, “Abortion is a culture war issue,” but for people who can become pregnant, especially those who are of a child bearing age, access to health care related to their reproductive systems, is as much a kitchen table issue as anything else. Access to that health care impacts their ability to procure and maintain employment, what their compensation in that employment is going to be, what the costs are for the care, what the costs are for basic products related to their reproductive systems… these are all kitchen table issues for those people, and are all factually connected to discussions of abortion and how we have those discussions. So, this idea that being “liberal” or “leftist” somehow makes one impervious to the phenomenon of narrative overtaking fact in a decision making capacity, is just plainly false. 

I don’t say this to say, “Both sides are the same.” I’ve dedicated a good portion of my life, and no small amount of effort to trying to demonstrate that’s not true. I say it because it is important to be able to make distinctions about how people with power and influence speak to the public, what narratives they rely on, and that we should be clear about what the narratives they use, how they use them and why they use them tells us a whole lot about how those people will use power. It’s also to say, if those of us who are not inclined to accept Christian white nationalist authoritarianism don’t want to be subjected to it, we should be very aware of what narratives we’re engaging when we’re trying to offer the public another vision of sociopolitical organization, and how we’re engaging them. 

It’s become clear to me recently why growing up in the period of The Satanic Panic was so formative for me. I can trace a number of different interests and obsessions that have been a consistent part of my life back to the way they interact with or are rooted in it’s narratives, how those narratives played out in daily life, and how they effected me specifically. As I outlined in a piece I wrote back in December, the narrative at the center of The Satanic Panic was essentially a horror story. Horror, as a genre of storytelling, is always an exploration of fear, and in this, we can see how political narratives about daycares have been used to manipulate different fears. I have a long piece about John Carpenter’s Halloween and its popularity being a response to many of those same fears, and as a result, presaging The Satanic Panic. It might seem like an odd way into the subject, but that’s more due to false cultural assumptions about a separation between storytelling/narrative (which gets categorized as entertainment when its on screen) and politics. Any film, television show, novel or piece of storytelling that experiences the popularity, level of influence, length of time its been influential and evolution of critical assessment that Halloween has, only does so because it’s resonating as connected to beliefs, fears or experiences lasting as long and intensely felt. 

If the horror released on screen last year, in combination with what was successful and what was impactful enough to generate discussion are any indication (and I think that’s been proven by history), the people of the United States are experiencing a dearth of anxieties and fears related to parenting and children. We also know The Satanic Panic was a manipulation of fears about those exact things by people hungry for wealth and/or power. 

Looking back, it’s clear that The Satanic Panic’s focus on daycares is a narrative that fits neatly with conservative Christianity’s attempts to enforce its definitions of gender, and by extension gender roles, on the culture and nation as a whole. It had suffered setbacks in the form of the Roe vs. Wade decision, in the form of definition of acceptable gender roles with women entering the workforce in larger numbers than before, especially middle class women, all of which are results of previously held beliefs about gender and gender roles being challenged. The patriarchal structure of our social and political institutions both supported by and supporting Christianity’s power within those institutions is plain and clear. Women entering the workforce in the numbers they were in the eighties challenges that power. By extension, it challenges the norms within those institutions too. What is effective within the workplace, and how do we define it? What is efficient in the workplace? Even what appear to be simple questions like these start to meet challenges when women enter the workforce and “business as usual” starts to be examined. If a woman is as effective and efficient as her male coworkers, why isn’t she being paid the same? If women are as effective and efficient, why are they so much more likely to be passed up for promotion, in comparison to their male counterparts? It is both easy and accurate to say, “Patriarchy,” as the answer to those questions if you’re on social media, a talking head on television and so on. It’s far more difficult, and collides with more specific narratives, associations and ideas when you start getting down to, “What do we do about that?” 

The Satanic Panic bypasses all of that. It creates a narrative that overrides those questions. If middle class women have access to a broad based education with specialization of their choosing (as opposed to upper class women having had access to specific education within the bounds of gender norms previously), the belief in meritocracy narratives as a basis of capitalism requires they should have access to the same employment men of similar educational backgrounds do. In order for the nuclear family to still be the economic center of capitalism, as was established in the 1950s, it means child care much be accessible affordable, and safe. In creating fear about the safety of daycare, it removes all of those questions. It doesn’t matter if its accessible or affordable, if its not safe. Because of the patriarchal assumptions our institutions and society have been structured with, the way they are communicated, demonstrated and passed on, creating a fear of daycares as safe and accessible child care means many women then start experiencing an even greater amount of stress in their decision making about going to work, as opposed to staying at home, doing the labor of raising children, “making a home” and so on. It creates more friction at a point that already has a fair amount of friction. The assumption under those gender roles is that if it is possible for a parent to forego a career in order to insure safe child care, it’s going to be women, because the direct, hands on day to day labor of child care has always been the responsibility of women in patriarchal structures. 

Understand, the during the Satanic Panic, there was no evidence produced to support the claim that there were networks of people involved with a systemic abuse of children, essentially using the concept of daycare as a front. There were hundreds of people wrongfully convicted due to the allegations made against them, and the degree to which the narrative of Satanic Panic was given legitimacy, including that lack of evidence. The very fact that both the press and the political institutions, at the time, never even stopped to ask what evidence there was for these claims, and instead participated in the creation of a cottage industry around conservative Christianity’s ability to define and create the imagined reality of Satanic cults legitimized all of it. 

This also created a point of friction people who are ideologically or ambitiously aligned with conservative politics and/or conservative Christianity exploited in limiting access. When the moral panic of the Satanic Panic in full swing, a single accusation would cause devastation to a daycare, and because it had already obfuscated the need for actual evidence, an accusation was all it would take. When we step back and look at how widespread those accusations were, the number of specific daycares they targeted, it shows us the result was also removing access to child care for many families. 

What we’re seeing now, the false accusations against daycare’s that began in Minnesota, with a new conservative grifter making claims specifically about daycare’s run by Somali immigrants, serving the Somali community, are spreading across the nation as an attack on daycares more broadly. The Department of Health and Human Services, aligned with the authoritarian movement to enforce Christian white nationalism as the only acceptable perspective and culture within the United States, has frozen all federal funding to daycares in Minnesota, citing these accusations. Those of us who finds ourselves in opposition to that movement and its aims should assume it extremely likely the Trump administration will, at the very least, start testing messaging on a nationwide freeze on daycare funding. 

Instead of relying on creating a moral panic about a threat to children, this iteration of attack on daycares is relying on other narratives that have been particularly fruitful for the Christian white nationalist movement in the last decade. The first is fraud as an extension of government inefficiency and waste. This is essentially the base of the current claims, though they have already been debunked, it has not stopped every conservative media outlet in the nation from making this central to their coverage, and making the story of this fraud one stories they are repeating most often in their coverage. 

The second is immigrants as the locus for fraud. One of the central claims of the Christian white nationalist movement has been that immigrants are receiving an outsized portion of what we generally consider the “social safety net.” We can see this in the regularity with which the right claims immigrants are simultaneously stealing “American jobs” and are participating in fraud related to every imaginable form of public funding. Racism and xenophobia have been working well for the right in the United States, otherwise we wouldn’t have masked agents kidnapping people off the streets and a press covering it as if it is not an abject example of a racist ideological minority seizing the power of US institutions. 

This also recalls The Satanic Panic in that it used already popular existing narratives. The Satanic Panic was built on a foundation of repressed memories having gained purchase in the collective imagination and stories of “Satanic Ritual Abuse” popularized by the book Michelle Remembers, but that had been seeded in conservative Christian culture before that by Mike Warnke, who had been traveling the country and made himself a celebrity within evangelical circles as a entertainer. 

The narratives the attack on daycares is relying this time are different, but it is frankly stupid to assume the aims are not the same. Like the totality of the conservative worldview, this is a backward looking strategy. All it’s doing is renovating an old moral panic, throwing some modern fixtures and color combinations on it, and saying it’s worth four times more than what it was before. It's the This Old House approach to moral panics and politics. The problem is, it was worthless before, and four times nothing is still nothing. It's also clear the factuality of the allegations being made doesn't matter. What does matter is the narrative about what the allegations say, and who is making them, and if this is going to once again become the landscape of a public battle, those of us who do not prefer a nation run by Christian white nationalists be required to meet all of its the norms and standards it demands take that into consideration.

It is both truthful, and I think compelling, to draw this as an extension to the effort of the Trump administration and Christian white nationalism to both expand their power, and to avail themselves of more funding to loot. The Trump administration, and Christian white nationalism as a movement, have been nothing if not opportunist grifters, manipulating public opinion and narrative to enrich themselves at the expense of their devotees.