Trump has won and it is time, once again, for Beltway pundits to earn their millions by telling us all that his appeal is fundamentally unknowable and that trying to understand the motivations of voters is folly.
As longtime Washington Post hack Jennifer Rubin put it, “The idea we have to understand how or why Trump won to prepare to fight him is a category error.”
In my humble opinion, the two foundational texts for understanding contemporary politics — especially American politics — are The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations by Christopher Lasch and Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair by Sarah Schulman.
In combination, they outline how therapeutic culture and shallow identity politics have coalesced around the gnawing hollowness of modernity to produce a Politics of Victimology.
Political discourse now centres on identifying the ultimate victim, overstating harm, and punishing the perceived perpetrator. Victim status alone confers moral superiority. Only the subaltern speaks.
While this is usually portrayed in popular media as being the stuff of leftwing university critical theorists and Tumblr activists, victimology is, in reality, the dominant political mode. It pervades the liberal media, which now generates most of its income through fomenting outrage. Its simple message: you have been wronged, you are never wrong.
What Trump has provided is a template for inverting the formula, so that those on the receiving end of this politics — usually straight, white men — can access the role of the victim.
In the Trumpian account, men are the victims of DEI and woke, women and children are the victims of LGBTQ+ people, and white people are the victims of a convoluted plan to replace them demographically.
It also has the appeal of flattening complex phenomena into simple competition between various demographic groups. Trump’s acolytes in the man-o-sphere have spent years now selling young men on the idea that the root of their isolation, alienation, and poor socialisation is women.
But Trump is now in the ascendency and the latest group to take up the victim mantle are American liberals. Fortunately, it is a role they feel fully at home in. During the last Trump term, the most daring act of resistance most liberals could muster was cosplaying as the titular handmaids of Margaret Atwood’s Christian theocratic dystopia.
Trump, American liberals, and the Politics of Victimology
This time around, liberals are grappling with a defeat to Trump without the psychological release valve of a Russiagate scandal.
Before they could even dust off their bonnets and cloaks, the remnants of the collapsing Obama coalition began pointing fingers, looking for a Girardian scapegoat to sacrifice. Many possibilities were floated: Progressives? Trans people in sports? Elon Musk? But ultimately consensus seemed to form that Arabs and Latinos were to blame.
MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid took to the airwaves to denounce Latino men, who voted 55% in favour of Trump. “You own everything that happens to your mixed-status families and to your wives, sisters, and abuelas from here on in,” she said on her nightly programme, The Reidout.
Elsewhere, liberals were more explicit in how they hoped Latinos and Arabs would be punished for their votes. Democratic Pennsylvania Senator and AIPAC success story John Fetterman made time to take a swing at Arab voters. Speaking about residents of Dearborn, Michigan, Fetterman sneered, “Well, congratulations, you’re going to love the upcoming Muslim ban.” Numerous X users shared reaction GIFs demonstrating how little they would care when these groups “started getting deported.” Some hoped those who voted for a third party would be “curb stomped” by the fascist Proud Boys.
Others took matters into their own hands. TikTok user @minipapix posted a video urging people to call US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to report any undocumented family members of Trump voters. An X post with over 31k likes read, “Do Ice [sic] still give out rewards for reporting undocumented Latinos?”
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Another much-discussed X post called for a boycott of businesses owned by Arab Americans. It read, “If you’re in Michigan, don’t continue to patronise those corner stores, shops, bakeries and gas stations owner [sic] by Arab Americans. They showed you who they are.”
Still, other Democratic voters found a different group to blame, conveniently silent, largely invisible, and already under bombardment by US weapons.
Incensed that a group outside the imperial core had managed to pull focus from their victim status, many liberals took to going after Palestinians themselves. A trend emerged of TikTokers filming themselves devouring Starbucks or McDonalds with relish, announcing they were no longer boycotting or supporting Palestinian rights.
Social media was flooded with vindictive, sadistic fantasies from disappointed liberals hoping Gaza would be, “flattened,” or, “turned into a parking lot,” as though that has not already happened under a Democratic administration. One TikTok user, @msmenopause — who had already gone viral for claiming she was “out” of the Palestinian cause after receiving too many requests to make videos for the GoFundMe accounts of Palestinians in Gaza — posted a video saying she was, “trying to figure out how much them condos are gonna run over there in Gaza.”
The problem with a Politics of Victimology is that very quickly any conflict, any distress, any discomfort becomes justification for punishing the perceived aggressor through any means.
The third section of Schulman’s book is entitled, Watching Genocide Unfold in Real Time: Gaza through Facebook and Twitter, June 2-July 23, 2014 and examines how Israel uses overstatement of harm and false accusations to justify violence against Palestinians.
The lens is the 2014 war on Gaza, but the playbook is the same as the current genocidal violence. Schulman uses social media posts to demonstrate how an over-identification with victimhood underpins Israel’s actions.
Think of the way Palestinian children’s artwork or simply Arabic songs become evidence of Israeli victimisation.
In Schulman’s words: “Like all creations of the other as monster, Jewish Supremacy is a pure manifestation of ‘loyalty’ without opposition; a creation rooted in the mirror of Supremacy and Trauma. One of the most glaring and lethal applications of this false accusation of harm as justification for cruelty in turn is the way Palestinian resistance to occupation has been pathologised instead of supported.”
Israelis take on the role of the victim on the global stage and utilise legal apparatuses ostensibly designed to protect victims all in furtherance of the subjugation and dispossession of Palestinians.
Later in the week, a group of Israeli football hooligans were filmed tearing down Palestinian flags, attacking houses, and chanting racist, violent songs.
In response, they were chased and beaten up by locals, primarily a group of Moroccan taxi drivers. Almost every Western outlet mostly ignored or minimised the cause of the violence, instead choosing to describe the event as an “antisemitic pogrom.”
While scrolling X, one particularly nauseating reply to the coverage caught my attention. I clicked through to the user’s profile to find their description contained a quote from the first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion: “Suffering makes a people greater, and we have suffered much.”
Alex Foley is an educator and painter living in Brighton, UK. They have a research background in molecular biology of health and disease. They currently work on preserving fragile digital materials related to mass death atrocities in the MENA region.
Follow them on X: @foleywoley
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.
