Russiagate Was a Classic Moral Panic – And Jerry Lee Lewis was a “Folk Devil”

Russiagate is the most recent—but certainly not the last—“moral panic” from the political establishment.

What’s the connection between a decades-old rock and roll riot, the recent indictment of a Clinton campaign lawyer, and Russiagate? The rock and roll star was a “folk devil,” the lawyer was a “moral entrepreneur,” and Russiagate was the latest – but certainly not the last – “moral panic” from the political establishment.

Riot at the Palladium

Do you want to start with the politics, or the rock and roll riot? That’s a rhetorical question; I already know the answer. In 1971 I went to hear Jerry Lee Lewis perform at the London Palladium. The audience was pretty evenly divided between young “rockers” who wanted him to play his rock and roll classics, and older working-class Brits who had come to hear songs like “What Made Milwaukee Famous (Made a Loser Out of Me),” recorded after his mid-career conversion to country music. (If you haven’t seen a 60’s-era British “Rocker,” picture a chimeric hybrid between a cast member from “Grease” and the bass player for the Jesus and Mary Chain.)

The Rockers were an unruly lot in their chains, giant pompadours, and leather jackets. One couple kept running down the aisle during every country song screaming things like, “Jerry Lee, play ‘Milkshake Mademoiselle!” Finally, a squat middle-aged man blocked their way down the aisle, said “That’s Mr. Lewis to you!” and knocked the male rocker unconscious.

It was on. The theater was filled with brawling patrons as country fans fought rockers for control of star’s repertoire. They tore up seats and punched the hell out of one another until a contingent of club-swinging bobbies burst through the doors, indiscriminately bashing heads right and left as an unfazed Jerry Lee kept playing the piano with one hand while waving the pinky of his other hand in the air and shouting, “That’s right, honey, ol’ Jerry Lee says wiggle it around just a little bit!”

Needless to say, we got our money’s worth for our tickets. But the event wasn’t just a spectacle to remember. It took place at the intersection of two of the great moral panics of the 1960s: rock and roll and Great Britain’s “Mods vs. Rockers” brawls, which were later immortalized in “Quadrophenia” by The Who, the Mods’ favorite band.

The Mods vs. Rockers panic also formed the basis of early research by sociologist Stanley Cohen, who used it to introduce the concept of “moral panic” as the fear of youth violence gripped England in the early 1960s.

Jerry Lee Lewis’ first visit to England was riven by scandal when he flew into London with Myra Lewis, his first cousin and his new 13-year-old bride. That marriage was indefensible, as the recent conviction of R Kelly confirms. But that marriage also reaffirmed the older public’s fear that rock and roll was undermining morality and the social order. Lewis’ tour was cut short after only three appearances and he returned home in a wave of controversy. That marriage would have been considered scandalous at any time, but Jerry Lee was also caught up in a moral panic.

Panics and Devils

In "Moral Panic and Folk Devils," a book published the same year Jerry Lee Lewis triggered that riot, Cohen popularized the idea that the media and "moral entrepreneurs" routinely created waves of fear and over-reaction around real or imagined events, to promote the belief that the social order was endangered by powerful “devils.” These panics can be useful in reinforcing the social order and building support for the “entrepreneurs” and their causes.

Cohen described a moral panic this way:

“a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions … ”

Famous moral panics include exaggerated fears of violent crime, accusations that music lyrics promote violence, and stories of Satanic cults abusing children. More generalized and long-term moral panics include the Cold War-era “Red scare” and fears that Muslim terrorists posed an existential threat to the United States.

Panic in the Newsroom

The Russiagate phenomenon that gripped Democrats after the 2016 election is a textbook moral panic. Internet memes from the former Soviet countries were at most a minor factor in the 2016 election, and may have had no effect at all, as this research paper confirms. Researchers studied Democratic and Republican voters who interacted with accounts operated by the Internet Research Agency, the most notorious troll farm in the Russiagate narrative, and concluded: “We find no evidence that interacting with these accounts substantially impacted six political attitudes and behaviors.”

But these troll farms were presented as an existential threat to democracy itself despite the absence of evidence for that level of concern. The Washington Post changed its motto to, “Democracy dies in darkness.”

The idea that Russia subverted the 2016 election became an article of faith, despite the absence of evidence. Assertions from the US intelligence community were taken at face value, despite that community’s record of deception and misinformation. The comically inaccurate Steele dossier was treated as holy writ, and millions of Americans chuckled over stories of ‘pee tapes.’(The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple has an excellent series on the misreporting of the Steele dossier.)

The Devils You Know

“Folk devils” were plentiful in the Russiagate narrative. A wide range of forces and actors – including nonstate businesspeople, troll farmers in or near Russia, objective journalists, and the then-president of the United States – were portrayed as acting on the direct orders of Russian president Vladimir Putin, who served as “Folk Devil Number 1.” Other figures, like Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica, were also credited with near-superhuman influence over the political process.

“Moral entrepreneurs” were equally plentiful and included both Democratic leaders and the mainstream media, both of whom could be exculpated by the Russiagate narrative. Democrats escaped blame for losing, while media were exonerated from failing to foresee the political shift that gave rise to Trump. (Overall, however, trust in media has continued to fall.)

The entrepreneurs ranged from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow to the Washington Post and the Hillary Clinton campaign itself, which we now know was spreading wild stories about ‘linked servers’ to an eager stream of mainstream journalists. In that sense, indicted lawyer Michael Sussmann can be seen as either a ‘moral entrepreneur’ or a hired hand on behalf of entrepreneurs in the Clinton campaign.

National Insecurity

Despite no evidence that Russia successfully hijacked critical systems, many reports suggested that our computer infrastructure, as well as our perception of the world, was already under Vladimir Putin’s control. (My favorite quote from that school of commentary is Fareed Zakaria’s: “The problem is not just that Russia has hacked America’s computer systems. It seems to have hacked our minds.”)

Another group of “entrepreneurs” were the people who suddenly became famous as experts in computer security or national security. Adrian Chen, one of the first journalists to report on the topic, recoiled from the label and noted that “the whole issue has been blown out of proportion.” But, as he astutely reports, others quickly took advantage of the situation. He writes of these experts:

“They may derive their authority from perceived neutrality, but in reality they—we—have interests, just like everyone else. And, when it comes to the Trump-Russia story, those interests are often best served by fuelling the fear of Kremlin meddling. Information-security consultants might see a business opportunity  .. Think-tank fellows may seek to burnish their credentials by appearing in news articles—articles written by journalists who, we all know, face many different kinds of pressures to promote sensational claims. (How viral is the headline “Russian Internet Propaganda Not That Big a Deal”?)”

Law enforcement and intelligence services provided more than their share of moral entrepreneurship, too, rehabilitating their tarnished reputations by positioning themselves as the defenders of American democracy.

Liberal Rage

The sociologists Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda (I went to high school with Goode’s younger brother Andrew, not that you care) identified several key characteristics of a moral panic, beginning with fear that the object of the panic will harm society. Another feature of moral panics is hostility, according to Goode and Ben-Yahuda. Then comes consensus, as a substantial group of people fall in line behind the “moral entrepreneurs.”

This is the point at which many elements of liberal/Democratic society turned on anyone who didn’t participate in the panic. Any journalist or, for that matter, anybody on social media who expressed skepticism about the Russiagate narrative became accustomed to being called “Putin’s puppet” and asked, “How much is Putin paying you?”

Even as Russiagate’s entrepreneurs lamented the growing anger in American politics, the hostility directed toward Trump supporters, journalists like Taibbi and Mate, and the non-Democratic left intensified that anger and created deep rifts in American politics. As Chen laments, “every skeptical utterance about Trump-Russia (became) pro-Trump propaganda.”

Russiagate made it permissible to attack political opponents like Lindsay Graham with memes like “licking Red boots,” which in that case seemed homophobic as well as Russia-baiting. The “Red” meme proved especially useful, because it allowed Democrats to attack opponents as both treacherous and implicitly Communist, undermining the Sanders left in the process. (Democratic strategist Donna Brazile even tweeted that “the Communists are now dictating” American policy; when I asked her to clarify that Putin is not a Communist or leftist, she blocked me.)

Prophecies of Doom

Cohen also points out that “prophecies of doom” are typical of moral panics. In the case of Russiagate, this took the form of endless predictions that democracy was about to be overthrown, that fascism was on the doorstep, that Democrats would never win elections again (clearly disproved by last year’s election), and Russia now controlled US foreign policy. (Trump occasionally made friendly comments toward Putin but also stepped up sanctions against Russia.)

Moral entrepreneurs can misstep. Susan Rice initially floated the idea that Russia might be behind the Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd. But the moral entrepreneurs of Russiagate didn’t want to attacked a movement that was supported by a large number of their voters, and Rice stepped back.

The Upside of Fear

But why did Russiagate become a moral panic? Panics can, paradoxically, be reassuring. They often arise in an ambiguous or uncertain situation. As Cohen wrote in 1971: “Ambiguity, which gives rise to anxiety, is eliminated by structuring the situation to make it more predictable.”

The situation after 2016 was complicated and uncertain for mainstream liberals, as well as for Democratic politicians and pundits. Their entire worldview was challenged by an election result that seemed to reject everything they valued and assumed others did, too, including elite educations and professional and managerial expertise.

Their universe was thrown into a state of flux. The Russiagate narrative grounded them and gave them someone to blame beside themselves. It affirmed their endangered values by suggesting that they were on the right track as always but had been betrayed by a nefarious baddie and his minions.

Temptation

I once told a friend not to believe what she heard about Russia on MSNBC. “I know it’s not true,” she replied, “but it’s so much fun.” Or as Jerry Lee Lewis, whose first cousin was evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, said of the Devil to Rolling Stone: “The snake was the most beautiful creature. He walked and talked and he was just like a man.”

You don’t have to buy Jerry Lee’s theology to know that temptation is a dangerous thing, even (especially?) when it comes in the form of smooth-talking moral entrepreneurs. Moral panic are fun, but they’re dangerous.

The Russiagate panic did its job. It boosted support for censorship, weak and biased reporting, and a failed political establishment. But our political system is broken, our economy is increasingly unequal, and there are no meaningful plans to mitigate climate change.

In the world of rock and roll, the King is dead and Jerry Lee Lewis – aka “The Killer” – is still very much alive. In the world where we have to live, the next moral panic may be even more destructive than Russiagate.