Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Adrian Daub. The Cancel Culture Panic: How an American Obsession Went Global. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. 212 pp.

Review by Marianna Torgovnick

3 March 2025      

The Cancel Culture Panic: How an American Obsession Went Global was published in September 2024, not so long ago in calendar time. It revises and to some extent rewrites an earlier book Daub published in Germany in 2022, bringing it and its global contexts up to date for the American version. And yet the term woke Right, which now seems commonplace, does not appear in the book, though phenomena that are woke Right decidedly do. In fact, since January 2025, the time gap since September 2024 feels like an eternity.  

Much of the book looks back rather than forward, providing a thoroughly researched history of the phenomenon that goes back into the twentieth century to William F. Buckley’s 1951 For God and Man at Yale, a very elegant conservative tome that criticized secular humanism in universities. Daub identifies cancel culture’s closest antecedent as the political correctness debates of the 1980s and 1990s, when universities explored canon revision and expansion, including Black Studies and Queer Theory, and came under attack by well-known pundits like Allen Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind [1987]) and Dinesh D’Souza (Illiberal Education [1991]). I played a cameo role in the p.c. debates, commissioned by my university to say in a television interview, as often as I could, that we do teach Shakespeare at Duke. For years, a shadow mafia patrolled reviews of my books on Amazon, posting negative reviews—often mentioning Duke where I teach—to offset positive ones.

While similarly associated with universities and the imagination of flamingly radical campuses, cancel culture added to the mix the speed and circulation of the wireless internet and social media. Conservative pushback against the politically correct (a term not used to identify oneself) performed the same basic three-step that Daub identifies in reactions against cancel culture: anecdotal evidence circulated widely, disproportionate to any actual event; moral panic among those who felt left out or disrespected; cancellation in the form of job loss or banishment from the public sphere. Some examples of cancel culture from the Left are trivial; others, more consequential. A main point for Daub is that everyone takes cancel culture seriously, until they don’t. It is the intellectual and political equivalent of fast fashion.

Move forward to 2025 and Daub’s findings seem curiously tame, in part because his voice is so steady, so urbane, so devoted to seeing both sides of a question. He notes, for example, on both the Left and the Right, the “oscillation” of liberalism and illiberalism that “demands certain freedoms [such as free speech for its side] but can only think to achieve them by doing away with other freedoms” (p. 175). In fact, for him, cancel culture “discourse constitutes one long attempt to convince the audience that this contradiction is no contradiction,” and is ultimately “a confusing but also a confused discourse” (pp. 176, 185).

Daub teaches Feminism and Gender Studies at Stanford, so his underlying sympathies are never in doubt. But his even-handed approach tends to flatten out the difference between cancel culture on the Left and on the Right. Both have the same form or structure: anecdotal evidence repeated; moral panic; cancellation. But the content and the force exerted from each side differ substantially. And the differences matter—a lot.

One can easily adapt, for example, Daub’s three stages of cancel culture to what he calls “government censorship” (p. 173). Having seen anecdotal evidence of, say, drag queen story hours, and experienced (or played into) moral panic, governors in states like Florida have banned Critical Race Theory, LBGTQ issues, and “wokeness” in schools. Brute force in action.

In the same way, a great deal follows from executive actions like the one declaring that there are only two sexes, male and female as assigned at birth, cancelling transgender identity after substantial moral panic. Such cancellations (“government censorship” if you wish) far exceed the normal effects of cancel culture. The consequences will live on, at least for the next four years, every time someone in the United States who would choose a different gender identity applies for a passport, a driver’s license, seeks admission at a public university, or even needs a flu shot. Will that executive action be revoked? Will it be overturned in court? Stay tuned—which is the desired effect, with other things no doubt happening behind the scenes, a diversionary effect that Daub identifies with cancel culture as a whole.

In fact, I’d argue that some of the “genius” of the second Trump administration thus far has been perceiving the deep structure of cancel culture and using it relentlessly not just on DEI issues but also foreign relations. Anecdotal evidence? Because it works, why not completely fabricated evidence or no evidence at all? Challenged on a wildcard statement that exists online and in videos? Well, you can always take down the post or say something like, “did I say that? I don’t recall.” When Elon Musk purchased Twitter and made it X, when social media moguls like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos got front-row seats at the 2025 inauguration, the immense importance of social media in our attention-hungry culture was recognized writ large. We have and will see it deployed to strong effect.

In The Cancel Culture Panic, moral panic seems so manipulated, so uncool, so inurbane that it’s tempting to resist it and tune out the news, as some people have. The book seems to open space for more reasoned and reasonable discourse. But the changing contexts in which The Cancel Culture Panic will be read raises different questions. The last words in the book allude to something beyond liberalism and illiberalism, “something completely different, something far darker” (p. 185). Are we there yet?