The war on terror as political moral panic

Abstract

Stanley Cohen coined the concept of moral panic in order to account for the animosity toward the hooliganism of the “Mods” and “Rockers” in British resort towns in the 1960s and the immoderation of English working-class youth culture in general. His focus was on the social construction of deviance in public and media discourse which, at times, creates analogous panics around threats posed by school bullies, illicit drug abusers, child molesters, welfare mothers and immigrants (Cohen 1992: viii-xxi). In conceptualizing such a situation as a “moral panic,” Cohen sought to highlight processes by which a threat to random innocent individuals assumes a moral dimension by becoming widely interpreted as a threat to the social order itself. Since the majority of threats, regardless of their severity, do not lead to panics and most panics, regardless of the extent of their spread, develop a moral dimension, it is clear that moral panics, as Cohen asserts, are socially constructed. For example, the threat of predictably recurrent massacres of students, coworkers, and other bystanders with firearms widely available in the United States has led neither to panic nor to forceful legislative strategies of gun control and ownership regulation. Conversely, during runs on bank deposits or stock markets, coincidental attempts by individuals to safeguard their own assets by getting ajump on other fearful depositors or investors create the very financial crisis all wish to avoid. In such cases, however, it is not the panic that assumes a moral coloring; on the contrary, a moral dimension enters such panics only when efforts to bring them to an end generate potential “moral hazards.” The focus in studies of specific moral panics, therefore, should be on the moral entrepreneurs who transform threats into moral panics and the interests that benefit from such panics. Cohen’s theory is compelling, but we find it necessary to revise it in two ways to address an internal ambiguity (which we do in this section) and to flesh out its potential as a framework for analyzing the GWOT (the subject of Section B). Though Cohen clearly suggests that moral panics are socially, that is normatively, constructed, he also insists that most claims associated with moral panics can be evaluated objectively with respect to other threats or to basic demographic information. Both older and newer constructivist approaches gladly consent that once a situation is defined as objective or real, that definition will take on a life of its own and have real consequences (Thomas and Znaniecki 1984). We equally recognize that some threats pose greater risks than others – and therefore there is room for the combination of moral panic theory and risk analysis (as we shall see below). Cohen’s aspiration to use an objective scale of threats conceals his recognition that since responses to threats are socially constructed they will both reflect and shape social and political interests. We suggest that conceptualizing a moral panic has to include an allusion to the process of how it is constructed. In fact, Cohen himself does so from time to time. Cohen’s original book does not offer a systematic theory as much as a number of insightful observations on the characteristics of moral panics. In a continuing debate with several waves of supporters and critics, Cohen has since identified several features of moral panics, though only suggestively or with excruciating terseness (see Unger 2001: 272). Of these features, we consider four to be the most significant. Reading Cohen’s original formulation, his revisions, and the criticisms of his approach, we offer a conceptualization that highlights the social and political process by which moral panics are created.