QAnon, Child Abuse, and the New Moral Panic

Lots of people are wondering why Trump's supporters, about whom he once said that they would stay loyal even if he committed murder in broad daylight, are rebelling over the Epstein files. In the NY Times, Jia Lynn Yang relates this to the long history of similar moral panics in America:

Historians have noticed a pattern across centuries of American life: When the role of women in society changes, a moral panic about children soon follows. Concern about children tends to surge not with evidence of increasing harm, but with broader cultural currents. Children become repositories for our anxieties about changes we cannot control and an uncertain future.

I'm sure most of my readers know about the Satanic daycare panic of the 1980s, which pretty much everyone agrees was a response to fears about more women working outside the home and the resulting growth of commercial daycare. Yang reminds us that there were earlier panics.

Nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization came at a time when we were shaping a new model of the family, and laws against child labor were enacted at around the same time many people began to see children as innocent beings in need of protection from adult wickedness. There was a lot of angst around this, associated with the beginnings of the Progressive movement and the various crusades to clean up slum neighborhoods. Abolitionists generated a lot fury about slave girls being trafficked (as we would say) into prostitution. Yang:

An indisputable moral cause was born. Now that children were synonymous with innocence, their protection would also become a crusade, to be used for pure as well as cynical ends.

But that was just a prequel to the big panic that erupted in the years around 1900:

As feminist activists uncovered child prostitution rings in American cities, they successfully fought to raise the age of consent in much of the country, which hovered at 12, with some states going even lower, including Delaware, where it was 7. Feminists fought to raise the age closer to 16.

But social reformers and newspapers also stoked a frenzy with false and lurid stories of sex trafficking of children by immigrants, claiming that girls were being kidnapped off streets and sold into prostitution by powerful syndicates. The mania over “white slavery,” as it was called, led to the passage of the country’s first federal anti-trafficking law, the Mann Act, which banned the transport of women across state lines “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” 

Which brings us to today. I find it interesting that, unlike in 1890-1925, we are not focusing on immigrants as abusers of children. Our angst about immigration and our fear of pedophiles seem to be quite separate.

So what do we fear instead?

The "global elite."

The characeristic fear of our time seems to be that events are entirely outside of our own control. And there is something to this; the economy is more global than ever before, and local businesses that serve local needs are an ever smaller part of the picture. Most people used to bank with small local or regional banks headquartered in their own cities, or at least their own states. Now banking is dominated by nationwide conglomerates. Rather than local newspapers, most people rely on nationwide or internet news sources. More and more of our consumer goods are made overseas. I used to work for a medium-sized regional firm, but it has been swallowed by a global behemoth, and many Americans have had the same experience. The national government seems nearly as distant and foreign to many Americans as the EU or China. 

Many Americans channel their anxiety about this situation into fear of a sinister global elite. And there is a global elite, although not in the sense that many people fear. But for many people it is not enough to accuse the elite of stock profiteering, political manipulation, and contempt for the rest of us. That is too vague and not evil enough. So, falling back on our long tradition of moral panics, we accuse them of pedophilia. Yang:

Experts on conspiracy theories often point out that people break with reality when reality breaks with them. The country has witnessed an undeniable drumbeat of sex abuse scandals at the highest levels of American society, from the Roman Catholic Church to Bill Clinton to Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein to Mr. Combs and Mr. Epstein. Besides, some of the most disillusioned people in America are mothers charged with protecting their children, but who see all around them examples of elite misconduct that the government has not constrained.

Mothers especially have been open to conspiracy theories because of how much they feel pressure to keep their children safe, argue Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko in “Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon.” These mothers quickly learn that it’s impossible. Dangerous levels of lead and arsenic have been discovered in baby formula, all of it missed by regulators. Microplastics are found in the air and water, and even run-of-the-mill vegetables are grown with toxic fertilizer from sewers. For plenty of mothers, this means confronting threats to their children in the most mundane of places, the aisles of a grocery store. What else might be hidden?

Which explains why Trump's Epstein diversions are not working. He sold himself as the man who would fight for ordinary Americans against the sinister global elite. But to millions of Americans, fear of that global elite has been crystalized into fears of pedophile conspiracies, and Epstein might be the first member of that elite that many Trumpers would name if pressed. It is hard to sweep this under the rug when it has become, for many, not just everything but the only thing. I predict that if Trump does manage to quash all of this, the fire will die down in many of his supporters' hearts.