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When it comes to our moral panics, it sometimes feels like the 1980s and 1990s never ended. We find ourselves at the tail end of a panic about “cancel culture” and “wokeness” in the U.S., which has—minus a mention of social media here and of #MeToo there—the longer it has gone on simply recycled the earlier panic about “political correctness.” But part of the feeling that we’re stuck in the forever ’80s is that, recycled or not, the panic clearly worked. (Barely) reheated “PC” discourse though it may have been, the freakout over “wokeness” likely helped Donald Trump retake the White House. It’s not just the purveyors of this kind of rhetoric who are stuck in time—we’re all there with them.

What many Americans likely don’t know: Countries the world over enthusiastically adopted the panic over “PC” in the 1990s and adapted it to their own local needs. Stories of censorious undergraduates and ridiculous newspeak in the U.S. found grateful consumers in French, German, and U.K. media. And since 2018, these other countries have begun importing stories about cancel culture.

I trace that process in my new book, The Cancel Culture Panic. Fears of “PC” and “cancel culture” took varied paths in the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, South America, Turkey, or Russia. But at least in most democratic countries, they wind up in a remarkably similar place.

The Cancel Culture Panic

By Adrian Daub. Stanford University Press.

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By far the most bizarre bits of detritus from this panic I encountered in my research were the “dictionaries” of political correctness that proliferated across various countries and languages. Even though they were far more prevalent outside of the U.S. than domestically, these fascinating documents sum up the “PC” panic rather well. This goes beyond the snarky entries about “dreadlocks” and “gender,” or “homophobia,” even beyond the tired anecdotes (here’s a thing a foundation wrote on its website, or a thing a college professor was yelled at over). It’s about the particular kind of broad brush with which this discourse painted, about its pretense at playfulness and irony, when it was actually pretty indignant about old hierarchies eroding, and about its unwillingness to admit just how right wing it really was.

As part of my research, I read my way through more than a dozen of these in four languages: English, French, German, and Spanish. There was a veritable wave of these in the mid-’90s, including in Germany, France, the U.K., and Spain, with only a drip of new releases in the years since. Still, Carlos Rodríguez Braun’s Diccionario Políticamente Incorrecto has gone through three editions since 2005, and two German dictionaries that came out in 1994 and 2007 published (slim) second volumes in 2001 and 2022 respectively.

There are a handful of “cancel culture” dictionaries today—similar projects that use updated culture-war language. Australian political commentator Kevin Donnelly had the misfortune of publishing A Politically Correct Dictionary and Guide in 2019, just as a new, shinier vocabulary was becoming available. Undaunted, he published The Dictionary of Woke three years later. But in a way, these books do belong to the “PC” era, when bookstores were still plentiful and national newspapers relatively robust. You could imagine one of them placed in a decorative basket on the back of a toilet, ready for a pre-smartphone visitor to browse, or given as more or less welcome gifts to a graduate, or a younger family member, by elders out to torment.

These strange relics allow us to understand a lot about what the contemporary fear of “cancel culture” among right-wingers and reactionary centrists is really about. For one thing, they suggest why the U.S. was due for a new version of “PC” worries after #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, and why this new version both warned about and fundamentally relied on social media. These books register nothing so much as the writer’s outrage that there is an evolving social consensus the writer doesn’t share. The authors of these books regarded the fact that other people had become sensitized in their language use as at best a personal affront and at worst a conspiracy. And even well before the social media age, they were horrified to have to watch other people speaking differently. No wonder the PC dictionary was a global export that went viral before we had virality.

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