The Devil You Know

Why do some moral panics become central to our culture, while others are forgotten?

Goya’s “The Witches’ Sabbath”

Why are there so many movies about McCarthyism, and so few about the Satanic Panic? Why is one so ever-present in our culture as a moral lesson, and the other is invisible?

A couple of days ago I wrote about the inability of the Progressive end of Liberalism to recognise other ways of seeing the world as legitimate, its difficulty in coping with cultural defeat, and why that matters.

I suggested that one of the reasons for that is Narrative Privilege; that the most Progressive people are never asked to think of themselves as bad in the way that every other political tribe is, as every story we tell positions that way of seeing the world as objectively good and correct. It affects not just them but also their opponents, as people lack the narrative resources to critique Progressive ideas.

I thought it might be helpful to provide a specific example of the problem, to consider - if things were different, if our culture was based around different kinds of moral emergencies, how would that look?

One such emergency that is ever-present in our culture is the McCarthyism era of the Red Scare. As the Cold War began, fears of global communist infiltration of governments - which had been dormant during WW2 - once again became widespread in the West. This was encouraged by paranoia, and for cynical political reasons on one hand, but also by a number of cases that are generally not considered hysteria such as those of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs.

One person who rode this wave was Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who gained prominence by alleging that communists had infiltrated high levels of the U.S. government, including the State Department. McCarthy chaired the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which acted as a platform from which he could inquire into public figures’ links with Communism. Lots of people’s careers were curtailed or ended, and reputations were destroyed, due to the ensuing blacklists (especially in Hollywood).

He was only a committee chairman for two years, but this era of the Red Scare is ever-present in our culture as a reference point and moral lesson, including outside America. Whenever we feel that someone is building a career by using the political system to persecute their enemies in public we compare it to McCarthyism. McCarthyism is kept in the public eye by movies telling the stories of the people who were blacklisted during the period and emphasising the cruelty of the hearings.

These will underline the basic innocence of the accused. Where they were Communists it will emphasise their good intentions, their dedication to the oppressed, to kindness, egalitarianism and social justice. The evils of the regimes they supported are generally not emphasised; nor is the fact that people existed who really did want to subvert western governments and steal their secrets.

There probably hasn’t been an eighteen month period in the last 25 years without a critically or commercially significant movie, book or TV show being released that at least touched on the subject. Just to take the last few years it was a central theme of Oppenheimer, which is the most successful cinematic adult drama of the decade. It was also touched on recently by The Apprentice, the movie about Donald Trump and his relationship with his mentor Roy Cohn; Cohn was Chief Counsel to McCarthy.

As a counterfactual, let us consider a different moral emergency very similar to McCarthyism - but which is strangely forgotten rather than obsessively commemorated, despite being at least as sensational and considerably more lurid.

There was a brief period in America in the 1980s and early 1990s when a large number of schoolteachers, reporters, psychologists, and social workers became convinced that children were being drawn into occultism and that devil worshippers were making human sacrifices of kindergarteners not merely regularly but on an epidemic basis.

This was encouraged by the fad for recovered memories and fueled by books like Michelle Smith's 1980 memoir “Michelle Remembers” and sensationalist media reports. This is what people call the Satanic Panic, and even though it sounds absurd—and despite the complete absence of any verifiable physical evidence of these widespread atrocities—it really happened.

Careers were ruined, children were traumatised (often through highly suggestive and leading interview techniques), false confessions were extracted, and families were torn apart. The most famous case was the McMartin Preschool trial. In this and other caes, individuals faced years of legal battles to exonerate themselves, and free themselves from wrongful imprisonment.

Some details of the accusations in the McMartin Preschool trial

McCarthyism and the Satanic Panic are similar in a number of ways. Both initially told stories about subversive forces undermining the goodness of everyday life and threatening the safety of normal, healthy, happy people. To their critics they are both characterised by preposterous conspiracies, false accusations, ruined lives, and people using the hysteria for their own ends - boosting careers, basking in attention, increasing social status. If you want your movies to convey a moral lesson one is as good as the other, and neither is inherently less interesting. Everytime I read about the Satanic Panic I think “this would make a great movie - why aren’t there more about it?”

To be politically useful - to become a generalisable moral lesson - a story about a great crime needs the right kind of villain. Conservative Congressmen and Senators, populist rabble-rousers, people who fear change and difference, people who are un-egalitarian in some way - who reject the notions of kindness and empathy embedded in the best ideals of Socialism and Communism - these are perfect bad guys for our culture.

Who would you identify as the villain if you made the Satanic Panic into a general moral lesson? Excessively empathetic social workers, psychologists employing what they believe to be the latest scientific methods, people presenting themselves as abuse victims, and any number of other people whose worldview seems to revolve around kindness, sympathy and vulnerability. For a society that privileges Progressive ideals, and especially for the kinds of people who write movies and help identify particular ones as worthy, these are the wrong kinds of villian.

Certainly in 2025, a story that warned society about the danger of people who project their neuroses and dark fantasies onto children; who coach children to lie about important things and encourage them to misrepresent their feelings in order to please adults; and who take what a child says as true even if it’s unbelievable and grotesque on it’s face - I think this would have some troubling political implications.

They would be even more troubling if the story warned that sometimes this can be erroneously encouraged by activists, teachers, members of the psychiatric and medical professions. In this case the message is a problem not because it has no political utility but because it has too much of the wrong kind.

The comparison between these two events and how they’ve made their way into popular culture is arbitrary; and of course there are other reasons why McCarthyism maintains its level of prominence in the culture. For one, it has a personal resonance for movie-makers and storytellers, since they were key targets of it.

As well as that, we live in a political world so it makes sense that political events from the past would resonate with us as reference points; it’s not like there’s always satanic conspiracies in the headlines, whereas there are always hearings, ideological tensions between left-wing and right-wing parties and so on. And finally, the injustice of people being falsely accused of membership of a political party is less upsetting to read or hear and think about than children being molested or cannibalised.

But the lesson here is that the stories we choose to tell, and the lessons those stories enforce, are ones that go with the grain of cultural power, with the preferences of the institutions that produce culture, and the people who work in them. The stories that we are encouraged to relate to our own time aren’t randomly selected or neutral. There are all kinds of tales, with all kinds of moral lessons, that could be positioned as relevant to your political life but that are forgotten about - to their point that even remembering them seems like the act of a wilful troublemaker.

This leads to the worst version of “media literacy”, which we see constantly on social media: the belief that the creative outpourings of the human mind and the most salient events of history are just a continuous stream of people confirming Progressive beliefs as objectively correct, that there is no possibility that any other way of looking at things could be legitimate - that it is in fact kind of scandalous and unseemly to hear another side.

But there is something basically healthy about being confronted with an unflattering version of yourself and your worldview from time to time; to be asked to think of yourself or people like you as the bad guy. It’s a kind of weakness to never have to search for reassuring lessons from the media you consume, to instead have them deferentially popped directly into your mouth as though you’re a screeching baby bird and not someone with a complex aesthetic sensibility. Quite aside from anything else it means you are unprepared for what happens when the moral ground shifts under your feet; or when the people around you who are tired of hearing you pontificate decide to turn your volume down.