Judge Dredd And The Art Of Moral Panic

Reading 'I Am The Law: How Judge Dredd Predicted Our Future' by Michael Molcher

Effective violence always resembles authoritarianism because authoritarianism fetishizes effective violence. From Karl Popper to the present, leftist academia has consistently inverted this relationship. Postmodernism has perfected this framing

Of all the comics I read as a child of the 1980s, the one that stands out today as the most prescient is Judge Dredd. In his pop culture history of the Dredd character and Mega City One, Michael Molcher writes that the creators intended “a satire that would both cut to the heart of the historical moment and track the slow, steady march toward authoritarianism that had already begun.” These stories were meant to be “a warning, not a manual,” Molcher writes, lamenting that the “fine line between satire and mockery” has sometimes been crossed, hurting the marginalized communities of the present-day through cartoonish representation in the future.

In a word, this book is woke. Molcher has written a postmodernist history of British policing as a form of racist “colonialism” heavy on anti-Thatcherism and contempt for Ronald Reagan’s America. In this way, Molcher resembles the young John Wagner of 1977 who intended Dredd to be a warning against fascism. Dismayed to see readers buzzing with delight instead of reeling in newly-radicalized horror, Wagner and his creative team “started making stories to make Dredd and judges look bad” decades before Disney Star Wars did the same with Luke Skywalker. But they were too good at telling stories. “‘Obviously it didn’t work,’ Wagner added, wryly. So, a year later, they tried again.” And it still did not work, for by that point, Joe Dredd had taken the hero’s journey too many times, while his creators were still far too talented to produce the mirthless lectures of a streaming Marvel series. Dredd still appeals to a much wider audience than the political left.

I Am The Law: How Judge Dredd Predicted Our Future is a fine history of how John Wagner, Carlos Ezquerra, Mike McMahon, Pat Mills, Colin MacNeil, and Brian Bolland all came to create the iconic future lawman and his city. Where the book fails is where it becomes the thing it decries most: a moral panic. For while “this book examines how a comic strip originally intended for children reflected and predicted the ways in which policing and punitive politics would remake the world,” as Molcher sets out to do, it does not examine how soft-on-crime policies feed populist backlashes against liberalism. This outcome is instead dismissed as ‘moral panic’.

The present state of American politics is a reaction against the moral panics of progressive orthodoxy and covid lockdowns that made crime rates surge. In Britain, the Labour government faces stark electoral prospects because of a two-tier policing policy that punishes catcalling in the street while immigrant rape gangs enjoy free reign over Rotheram because it would be racist and Islamophobic for the police to investigate them. These are the moral panics of the left, which Molcher expects the reader to respect, because to do otherwise is literal fascism. It never occurs to writers like Molcher that they are making fascism sound really good to an awful lot of people. They never think their simpering for criminals can backfire, that their agenda to stop Judge Dredd might create him, instead.

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