It's here: THE CANCEL CULTURE PANIC is out!
A brief note on the genesis of this book
I’m so excited that The Cancel Culture Panic is finally here! It officially came out today — I already had a first event, people seem to like it, and first notices are positive!
It’s a funny feeling, because I’ve been here before. About 2 years ago I published the German book (Cancel Culture Transfer). The Cancel Culture Panic is based on that book — but in the event I rewrote large parts of it. This is not because I really changed my mind, but because I think the assumptions the book wants to unsettle are different ones in Germany than in the US. Which is, ironically enough, the topic of both books.
Because both The Cancel Culture Panic and Cancel Culture Transfer are about the extreme mobility of this concept, buzzword, meme, or whatever you want to call it. Many reviews of the first book (and now the first one of the second one) say that I argue that “cancel culture doesn’t really exist”. I say that it is far more identifiable as a signifier than as a phenomenon supposedly designated by that signifier. And it travels as a signifier that can attach itself to various cultural and political anxieties. Those anxieties are not arbitrary — a US reader wouldn’t be shocked by a cancel-story from France or Chile. But they also are never quite the same from place to place. Part of the mystery is just why people care: how do stories about a “coddled” American mind inform complaints on the German right? Why do French journalists care about what happens in US cafeterias? Why would an Argentinian newspaper cite The Human Stain (published in the year 2000) as an example of cancel culture in 2021?
Cancel Culture Transfer worked pretty hard to explain to German-language readers that the very vigorous their print media were having about cancel culture was not an immediate extension of the US discourse using the same word. That they were not passive consumers of a prefabricated US debate, but rather active adapters and reinventors of it.
This is perhaps not as fascinating to US readers, so I left a lot of that out of The Cancel Culture Panic, and instead tried to show the full breadth of what becomes of complaints about “cancel culture”, “wokeness” and “identity politics” when they make their way to Germany, the UK, South America, Italy, Turkey or Russia. “Cancel culture” became a bridge term that connected what others have called “reactionary centrists” to the Far Right. So what did the center-right press in France or Germany, what did Le Figaro or the Times mean by the term vis-a-vis US outlets? And as the term migrates from center to the right wing, how does that transition work? What does Putin mean by these terms, what does Javier Milei (and especially his vice president), what does Georgia Meloni?
Why should American readers care? Well, for one thing because the international dimension is what distinguishes the cancel culture freakout from the earlier one about political correctness. That is not to say that journalists, writers and readers outside the US took no notice of anti-“PC" freakouts in the US back in the 1990s. But the internet age has changed the mode of reception. Thanks to Twitter/X the US discourse always had an international dimension that was just as vibrant, if not more so, than the US one (there are German-language newspapers in particular that far outpublished any US outlet short of Bari Weiss’s Substack in terms of the sheer quantity of cancel-articles).
The other reason: because there are feedback loops here. For this newsletter, I’ve been doing a review of PC-“dictionaries” from various countries. These were never of any danger of being translated into English and showing up in the US. The same is true for the most recent crop of anti-woke books, whether in France, Spain or the German-speaking world. But some aspects of these discourses do then get exported to the United States. I’ve been thinking a lot about one word that often shows up in cancel culture texts in France — “islamogauchisme”, or “Islamo-leftism”, meant to designate some kind of unholy alliance between soft campus liberals and Islamist terrorists.
The French word has always been far more prevalent than any English analogues, but over the last years — as media outlets in the US have fixated on college students and their supposed love for Hamas — the nexus the word designates has suddenly made the leap back across the Atlantic. So a term that’s seen as designating an American export (“cancel culture”) enables a French rightwing trope to establish itself in the United States. In an age of global connectivity, and in terms of a populist right that operates increasingly cross-borders, these terms are always already internationalized. This is why I never contemplated lopping off the non-US parts of the book and just write about Ron DeSantis, Bari Weiss and Chris Rufo. We are not all having the same conversation, and it’s important to be alive to the local differences and nuances. But in the end these conversations have a way of mutually reinforcing each other, of lending each other plausibility and force. This seems to me one of the scariest dimensions of our moment and of today’s reactionary international. It’s why I wrote the book I wrote. And it’s why I wrote it twice. I hope you end up reading either version, and I hope you let me know what you think!