Abstract
This chapter theorises a model of panic-driven scapegoating—the proverbial Oldest Trick in the Book. For the purposes of this exercise, we define scapegoating as a specifically ideological act in which some are blamed for the consequences of the policies or conduct of others with positions of power and privilege to protect. Panic-driven scapegoating is defined as that which occurs in the midst of moral panics, defined for the purposes of this study as periods when society is overcome by fear of external threat. Such external threats understood to be so dire as to imperil its existence—though ultimately illusory (such are to be distinguished from existential threats for which evidence abounds and for which moral panics often tend to enable, like the climate crisis).
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Notes
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- 7.
See Case Study III.
- 8.
Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, London: Routledge, 2002; Goode, Erich, and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance, London: Blackwell, 2009; Ben-Yehuda, Nachman. The Politics and Morality of Deviance: Moral Panics, Drug Abuse, Deviant Science, and Reversed Stigmatization, SUNY Press, 1990; Altheide, David L., Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis, New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2002; Bonn, Scott, Mass Deception: Moral Panic and the U.S. War on Iraq, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010; Critcher, C., Moral Panics and The Media, Buckingham: Open University Press, 2003; Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law & Order, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; Morgan, George, and Scott Poynting, eds., Global Islamophobia: Muslims and Moral Panic in the West, London: Ashgate; Thompson, Kenneth, Moral Panics, London: Routledge, 1998; Critcher, Chas, Moral Panics and the Media, Open University Press, 2003; Hier, Sean, Moral Panic and the Politics of Anxiety, Routledge, 2011; Krinsky, Charles, Ashgate Research Companion to Moral Panics, Ashgate, 2013; Petley, Julian, Moral Panics in the Contemporary World, Bloomsbury, 2013; Béland, Daniel, ‘The Political Construction of Collective Insecurity: From Moral Panic to Blame Avoidance and Organised Irresponsibility,’ Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, 2005; Hawdon, James, ‘The Role of Presidential Rhetoric in the Creation of a Moral Panic: Reagan, Bush and the War on Drugs,’ Deviant Behavior: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 22: 419–445; Victor, Jeffrey S. ‘Moral Panics and the Social construction of Deviant Behaviour: A Theory and Application to the Case of Ritual Child Abuse,’ Sociological Perspectives 41, no. 3, 1998: 541–565. For material on deviance see Becker, Howard, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance, New York: Free Press, 1963.
- 9.
Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, ibid., 1–20.
- 10.
Cohen, ibid., 3.
- 11.
Cohen, ibid., 2.
- 12.
Little, Craig B., ‘The Social Construction of Deviance,’ Deviance & Control: Theory, Research, and Social Policy. FE Peacock Pub, 1989, 381; Cohen, ibid., 5.
- 13.
‘From this point of view, deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an “offender.” The deviant is on to whom the label has successfully been applied; deviant behaviour is behaviour that people so label,’ in Cohen, ibid.
- 14.
‘Among their other functions, the media serve, and propagandise on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy. This is normally not accomplished by crude intervention, but by the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors’ and working journalists’ internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institutions’ policy.’ Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Random House, 2010, xi; See also Carey, Alex, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy, Sydney: UNSW Press, 1995; Ewen, Stuart, PR!: A Social History of Spin, Basic Books, 2008.
- 15.
‘Hetus! Alte omnebus! Virtu e poquebus! Rectus! Hoc honebus!’ The Miley Cyrus prediction seems to have been eerily prescient. An extensive literature on collective narcissism treats this area in much more detail. See: de Zavala, A. G., A. Cichocka, R. Eidelson, and N. Jayawickreme, ‘Collective Narcissism and Its Social Consequences,’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 97, no. 6, 2009: 1074; de Zavala, A. G., Collective Narcissism and Intergroup Hostility: The Dark Side of ‘Ingroup Love,’ Social and Personality Psychology Compass 5, no. 6, 2011: 309–320; de Zavala, A. G., A. Cichocka, and M. Bilewicz, ‘The Paradox of In‐Group Love: Differentiating Collective Narcissism Advances Understanding of the Relationship Between In‐Group and Out‐Group Attitudes,’ Journal of Personality 81, no. 1, 2013: 16–28; collectivenarcissism.com.
- 16.
This is reaffirmed by the observation credited to Nietzsche that ‘all things are subject to interpretation, and whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.’ Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, op. cit., 8. Edward Saïd, Orientalism, London: Penguin, 2003; Khalid, Maryam, ‘Gender, Orientalism and Representations of the “Other” in the War on Terror,’ Global Change, Peace & Security 23, no. 1, 2011: 15–29; de Buitrago, Sybille Reinke, ed., Portraying the Other in International Relations: Cases of Othering, Their Dynamics and the Potential for Transformation, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012.
- 17.
The research cited above pertaining to the role of the corporate mass media and corporate propaganda in the manufacture of consent lends further support to this interpretation. See Chomsky & Herman, Manufacturing Consent, op. cit.; Carey, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy, op. cit. For more on the relationship between corporate power, the manufacture of consent and moral panics see Rohlo, A., and S. Wright, ‘Moral Panic and Social Theory: Beyond the Heuristic,’ Current Sociology 58, no. 3, 2010: 403–419; Young, Jock, ‘Moral Panics and the Transgressive Other,’ Crime, Media, Culture 7, no. 3, 2011: 245–258; Oplinger, Jon, Richard Talbot, and Yasin Aktay, ‘Elite Power and the Manufacture of a Moral Panic: The Case of the Dirty War in Argentina,’ Moral Panics in the Contemporary World, A&C Black, 2013, 263; Shafir, Gershon, and Cynthia E. Schairer, ‘The War on Terror as Political Moral Panic,’ Shafir, Gershon, Everard Meade, and William J. Aceves, eds., Lessons and Legacies of the War on Terror: From Moral Panic to Permanent War, Routledge, 2013, 9.
- 18.
Mead, J., P. Berger, and T. Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality, Penguin, 1991; Schutz, A., The Phenomenology of the Social World, Northwestern University Press, 1967.
- 19.
Mead, Berger, & Luckman, ibid., 92–104.
- 20.
Larner, Christina, Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland, London: Chatto and Windus, 1981.
- 21.
Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, op. cit., 16–17.
- 22.
Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law & Order, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 2.
- 23.
Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, ibid.
- 24.
Hall et al., ibid., 220.
- 25.
Hall et al., ibid., 41.
- 26.
Hall et al., ibid., 220.
- 27.
Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, op. cit., xi.
- 28.
Goode and Ben-Yehuda, ibid., pp. 34–43.
- 29.
Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, op. cit., 76.
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Debney, B.M. (2020). Theorising Panic-Driven Scapegoating. In: The Oldest Trick in the Book. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5569-5_1
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