The Scott Matheson Courthouse in Salt Lake City is pictured on Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2024. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)
What we are watching in Utah is not new. It’s the state-level expression of a national political theology decades in the making — one that claims to fear authoritarianism while steadily normalizing it. Fear is politically useful. It can magnify perceived threats and recast the exercise of power as morally necessary.
We can laugh now at the moral panics of the past. In the 1980s, people warned that “Stairway to Heaven” contained satanic messages, that Smurfs were demonic, and unicorns were gateways to evil. Those claims seem absurd in hindsight. But the structure of the panic followed a familiar pattern: identify a perceived threat, amplify fear, and demand urgent action before it’s too late.
Moral panics weaponize a community’s best instincts. The desire to protect children, defend families, and safeguard what feels sacred is real and sincere. But panic hijacks those instincts. It redirects concern toward imagined or exaggerated threats, inflates urgency, and narrows moral vision. What begins as “we care about doing right” becomes “we must stop this group or idea before catastrophe strikes.” The intentions may be good. The outcomes often are not.
Figures like Jerry Falwell and Phyllis Schlafly rose to prominence in the 20th century by insisting the United States was in existential moral danger. The threats were framed as communism, secularism, feminism, civil rights enforcement, and cultural pluralism. This was not treated as ordinary political disagreement, but as civilizational collapse. When fear hardens into moral panic, the pursuit of power is recast as moral necessity, and undermining the rules that limit power becomes easier to rationalize. Over time, elections became suspect when the “wrong people” win. Expertise becomes suspect when it contradicts ideology. Courts become suspect when they protect minorities. This reveals the underlying irony: the fear is not government overreach itself, but government power that fails to advance their interests.
The Moral Majority perfected mobilizing voters through moral threat narratives. Once embedded, this logic produces a politics in which courts must be aligned, election rules must be managed, and voter initiatives must be constrained. Not because democracy is rejected in theory, but because it fails to deliver the preferred outcomes.
Utah’s recent actions fit seamlessly into this lineage. Court expansion following unfavorable rulings signals that judicial independence is valued only so long as it does not frustrate legislative goals. Ongoing legislative resistance to voter-approved redistricting reforms shows that even when voters approve clear limits on gerrymandering, such as Prop 4, lawmakers will work to override them when the results are politically inconvenient. None of this requires bad intentions. In fact, it works precisely because leaders are convinced they are right.
That same logic now governs voting access itself. At the national level, Trump has urged Republicans to “nationalize” voting, invoking unproven claims of fraud. Utah is moving to dismantle vote-by-mail, despite audits finding no evidence that non-citizens voted or that voting by mail compromised election integrity. The absence of fraud does not resolve the concern, because the concern is not fraud. It is a loss of control. Voting by mail broadens participation in ways that are harder to predict, narrow, or selectively influence, reducing the ability of those in power to shape who votes. Measures framed as “election security,” such as stricter voter identification requirements, function in the same way. They add procedural hurdles that disproportionately burden women, low-income voters, elderly citizens, and other populations whose participation is easier to suppress and whose votes are less reliably aligned with those in power.
Across decades and movements, the pattern of moral panic is consistent. Declare moral emergency. Identify an enemy and a threat that must be stopped. The consolidation and exertion of power then presents itself as the reasonable response. Democratic erosion advances through incremental moves carried out by people who believe constitutional and democratic constraints are limits they can no longer abide by.
What is happening in Utah and the nation is not moral leadership. Real moral courage accepts limits even when they are frustrating. It honors voter intent even when doing so requires accepting loss. It defends independent courts precisely when they rule against us. It values restraint not as weakness, but as the price of freedom and democracy.
