The Unassailable Virtue of Victims

If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency in 2016 she will not only be the nation’s first woman president but our second affirmative-action president. By affirmative-action president I mean that she, like Barack Obama, will have got into office partly for reasons extraneous to her political philosophy or to her merits, which, though fully tested while holding some of the highest offices in the land, have not been notably distinguished. In his election, Obama was aided by the far from enticing Republican candidates who opposed him, but a substantial portion of the electorate voted for him because having a biracial president seemed a way of redressing old injustices. They hoped his election would put the country’s racial problems on a different footing, which sadly, as we now know, it has failed to do. Many people voted for Obama, as many women can be expected to vote for Hillary Clinton, because it made them feel virtuous to do so. The element of self-virtue—of having an elevated feeling about oneself—is perhaps insufficiently appreciated in American politics.

How have we come to the point where we elect presidents of the United States not on their intrinsic qualities but because of the accidents of their birth: because they are black, or women, or, one day doubtless, gay, or disabled—not, in other words, for themselves but for the causes they seem to embody or represent, for their status as members of a victim group? It’s a long but not, I think, a boring story. 

In recent decades, vast numbers of people have clamored to establish themselves or the ethnic group or sexual identity or even gender to which they belong as victims of prejudice, oppression, and injustice generally. E. M. Forster wrote of “the aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky.” Owing to the spread of victimhood, we have today a large aristocracy of the suffering, the put-upon, and the unlucky. Blacks, gays, women, American Indians, Hispanics, the obese, Vietnam veterans, illegal immigrants, the handicapped, single parents, fast-food workers, the homeless, poets, and anyone else able to establish underdog bona fides can now claim to be victims. Many years ago, I watched a show on television that invited us to consider the plight of unwed fathers. We are, it sometimes seems, a nation of victims. 

Victims of an earlier time viewed themselves as supplicants, throwing themselves on the conscience if not mercy of those in power to raise them from their downtrodden condition. The contemporary victim tends to be angry, suspicious, above all progress-denying. He or she is ever on the lookout for that touch of racism, sexism, homophobia, or insensitivity that might show up in a stray opinion, an odd locution, an uninformed misnomer. People who count themselves victims require enemies. Forces high and low block their progress: The economy disfavors them; society is organized against them; the malevolent, who are always in ample supply, conspire to keep them down; the system precludes them. Asked some years ago by an interviewer in Time magazine about violence in schools that are all-black—that is, violence by blacks against blacks—the novelist Toni Morrison, a connoisseur of victimhood whose novels deal with little else, replied, “None of those things can take place, you know, without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.”

Public pronouncements from victims can take on a slightly menacing quality, in which, somehow, the roles of victim and supposed antagonist are reversed. Today it is the victim who is doing the bullying—threatening boycott, riot, career-destroying social media condemnation—and frequently making good on their threats. Victims often seem actively to enjoy their victimhood—enjoy above all the moral advantage it gives them. Fueled by their own high sense of virtue, of feeling themselves absolutely in the right, what they take to be this moral advantage allows them to overstate their case, to absolve themselves from all responsibility for their condition, to ask the impossible and demand it now, and then to demonstrate virulently, sometimes violently, when it isn’t forthcoming.

Evidence of the taste for victimhood is abundant, and one sometimes discovers it in peculiar places, even among the rich, the famous, and those who have access to publishers. One finds it often in the spate of victim memoirs that have been published in recent decades. These memoirs are at bottom declarations of the victim status of their authors, whose stories are about their having been raised with abusive or alcoholic parents, having been sexually abused, having struggled against a debilitating mental illness. If the only standing higher than victimhood in contemporary America is celebrity, the celebrity victim book—starting years ago with Mommie Dearest by Joan Crawford’s daughter—rings both gongs simultaneously to make the greatest public noise.

A relatively new subgenre of the victim memoir are books and essays about that ultimate victim status, those who are about to die, but aren’t ready to depart the planet without first announcing it, often at book length. Christopher Hitchens’s last book was about his encounter with esophageal cancer. The historian Tony Judt was able to compose a book about his dying from ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, while in the grip of that nightmare affliction. The critic and poet Clive James announced his forthcoming death in 2010, and has been publishing several poems and giving interviews about it in the interval between then and now; a few months ago the neurologist Oliver Sacks took to the New York Times op-ed page to announce his own imminent death by melanoma. All this as if death, that most democratic of institutions, didn’t make victims of us all, and wouldn’t continue to do so as long as the mortality rate remains at an even 100 percent. 

The contemporary university, where so many misbegotten ideas find fertile ground and ample watering, has been especially hospitable to the culture of victimhood. Two of the most consequential of these ideas, both catering directly to victims, have been multiculturalism and its twin sister, enforced diversity. Multiculturalism, with its insistence that all cultures are equal, has tended to diminish the centrality of Western culture, with its dominance of white male writers, artists, and philosophers, and push what one might call victim studies, or victimology, to the forefront of university curricula. The result has been the emphasis on race, class, and gender and the concomitant politicization—some would add trivialization—of much that goes on in the humanities and social sciences departments. 

Universities are proud of their diversity; some have deans of diversity. Every college catalogue shows blacks and Asians lounging languorously on their lush green lawns. Today the rarest item at Northwestern University, where I taught for many years, is a photograph of its current president unaccompanied by at least one black, an East Indian, a Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, and any other minority-group student with a few free minutes to kill on a photo op. Affirmative action itself was of course from the outset a victim compensation program. 

Now that so many different minority groups have become part of the contemporary university, the sensibility of their members, it became evident, must at all costs not be offended, their self-esteem in no way deflected, let alone deflated. In their putative defense, political correctness inevitably followed multiculturalism and diversity in universities as what psychologists might term a support system. In classrooms the pronoun police were soon on the prowl, making certain no professor used such proscribed words as “lady” or “Oriental” or failed to use “she” at least as often as “he” when citing examples, even if some seemed more than a bit forced: Every construction worker knows she can readily be laid off. As both a prefix (mankind) and a suffix (chairman), “man” had to go. If a teacher mentioned Shakespeare or Tolstoy in class, he had better find a way to drag in, under an unspoken equal-opportunity pedagogy rule, Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf. If he used the word “Negro” instead of “African American,” or “homosexual” instead of “gay,” he acquired an instant reputation as a racist or a homophobe. Tell a slightly off-color joke, or make an indirectly sexual allusion, he could be hauled in for sexual assault. Victims, even if self-appointed ones, must be protected at all costs, and political correctness was there to do the job.

Meanwhile the already ample glossary of political correctness grows, with many old words proscribed daily. The most recent is “thug” or “thugs.” The reason is that many people, including President Obama, have referred to the violent rioters and looters in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore as thugs. Thugs, it is now understood, means young, riotous black men, and therefore using the word marks its user as racist. The addition of newly politically incorrect language hastens apace; soon a daily bulletin will be required instructing which once commonly used words are now ruled verboten. 

If the rigidities of political correctness were limited to universities, it might not be so bad. The inmates in the bedlam that has become the contemporary university, after all, seem to get on cheerily enough with one another under this tyranny. Alas, these rigidities aren’t so limited. Students graduate and many, if they take little else with them from their years in college, acquire the censorious sensitivities learned under the reign of political correctness experienced during those years. 

I had lunch a few weeks ago with a lawyer in his late seventies who told me that, owing to the retirement of several of his partners, he planned to close his office and move in with a large firm where he would become, in the trade phrase, “of counsel.” The deal was set, but before the actual move, he took 12 of what were to be his new firm’s associates to lunch, to explain to them how he worked with his clients. The day after the lunch, he was called by a senior partner of the firm and informed that the move couldn’t be made after all. When he inquired why, he was told that, at the lunch, he apparently made a joke about a fat man and more than once referred to women who had worked for him as “my girls.” The associates, as a body, found this unacceptable and wanted no part of him. “When I was in college, there were certain words you couldn’t say in front of a girl,” Tom Lehrer remarked. “Now you can say them, but you can’t say ‘girl.’ ”

I happen to know that the lawyer in fact paid these women well, treated them respectfully, and as a result they were as loyal to him as he to them over the decades they worked together. None of which, though, signified, since the associates made their judgment of him on grounds of political correctness, and from the kangaroo courts of political correctness there is no reprieve, no time off for good behavior, and no parole. 

In 1970, some 45 years ago, I wrote an essay in –Harper’s on the subject of homosexuality. The chief points of my essay were that no one had a true understanding of the origins of human homosexuality, that there was much false tolerance on the part of some people toward homosexuals; that for many reasons homosexuality could be a tough card to have drawn in life; and that given a choice, owing to the complications of homosexual life, most people would prefer their children to be heterosexual. Quotations from that essay today occupy the center of my Wikipedia entry. In every history of gay life in America the essay has a prominent place. When I write something controversial, this essay is brought up, usually by the same professional gay liberationists, to be used against me. That I am pleased the tolerance for homosexuality has widened in America and elsewhere, that in some respects my own aesthetic sensibility favors much homosexual artistic production (Cavafy, Proust, Auden), cuts neither ice nor slack. My only hope now is that, on my gravestone, the words Noted Homophobe aren’t carved.  

Political correctness excludes candor, or even complexity, in discussion of public problems, questions, issues. Might one bring up the high crime rates of blacks and black-on-black crime in the recent publicity of police shootings of black criminals without being called racist? Is it possible to mention the matter of potential pregnancy when hiring young married women for high-level jobs without being thought antiwoman? If one says sex-change operation instead of gender reassignment surgery is one hopelessly insensitive? The answer in each case is plain enough: To ask or to say any of these things disqualifies one instanter. 

Thus has political correctness, the vigilantism of the victim, squashed discussion and in many realms of public life replaced ethics. Stefano Gabbana, of the clothing firm Dolce & Gabbana, in an interview with the Italian magazine Panorama, recently made the mistake of criticizing in-vitro births. “Wombs for rent,” he called such arrangements, “sperm selected from a catalog. .  .  . Who would agree to be the daughter of chemistry? Procreation must be an act of love, now not even psychiatrists are prepared to deal with the effects of these experiments.” The singer Elton John, who with his companion is raising two such children, shot back, “How dare you refer to my beautiful children as ‘synthetic’! And shame on you for wagging your judgmental little fingers at IVF—a miracle that has allowed legions of loving people, both straight and gay, to fulfill their dream of having children. Your archaic thinking is out of step with the times, just like your fashions. I shall never wear Dolce and Gabbana ever again.” In an Instagram Sir Elton called for a boycott of Dolce & Gabbana clothes, in which he was presently joined by Ricky Martin, Martina Navratilova, and Ryan Murphy, the producer of Glee.

Stefano Gabbana, who is himself gay, apologized profusely, claimed that his views are those of someone brought up in the traditional Sicilian family, that he wished all gay couples with children well. His partner Domenico Dolce even chimed in that he loved Elton John’s music. “Boycott Dolce & Gabbana for what?” Gabbana asked. “They don’t think like you? This is correct? This is not correct. We are in 2015. This is like medieval. It’s not correct.”

That there is a genuine issue up for serious discussion in IVF births—that it often requires women so hard-pressed for money that they agree to carry other people’s children in what is a form of modern bondage—is ignored in this exchange. Political correctness, though, isn’t about issues, about items in the flux of controversy. It’s about denouncing people who don’t think as you do, and as such it is a key weapon in the arsenal of victims.

Because virtue is at the heart of so many political questions in our day, in victim culture things get to the contempt stage and beyond fairly fast. Elton John does not strongly disagree with Stefano Gabbana; he wants to put him out of business. Nor does one have oneself to be a victim to claim virtue for one’s position. Many bask in the warm virtue of victims by coming out strongly on their side. These are the virtucrats, or those people whose political opinions are propelled by their strong sense of self-virtue. They are people who judge others, mercilessly, by their opinions. Some years ago a journalist with whom I found myself in a political argument closed off the discussion by claiming that the chief difference between us was that I did not care about people anywhere near as much as he, thus positioning himself as a much finer person than I. An old fellow traveler, a Stalinist in his day, once told me that he was of course wrong about Soviet communism, adding that nonetheless in his heart he was right, while I—who may have been correct in never falling for communism owing to having early read George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and Sidney Hook on the subject—in my heart was ultimately wrong for failing to have been moved by the promise of communism.

One of the hallmarks of the virtucrat is his taste for underdogs, or what he takes to be underdogs, no matter how egregious their actions. With the underdogs, after all, is where virtue lies. The true virtucrat lines up with the oppressed (if rocket-launching) Palestinians against Israel, with black and Hispanic criminals apprehended by police, most recently against the French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo for mocking terrorists, who after all have feelings, too. In a presidential election between Al Sharpton and Mitt Romney, the virtucrat would have to go for Sharpton. In an earlier election between Louis Farrakhan and Ronald Reagan, he would, after much moral hand-wringing, probably have taken the high ground and abstained from voting. One of the reasons that virtucrats tend to be anti-American is that America, however correct its position in foreign affairs, however clearly on the side of justice and generosity, is never—at least not yet—the underdog and therefore can never have virtue on its side.

However repellent the professional victims, those who make a nice living off their victimhood—the race hustlers, the academic feminists finding a phallus in every chalice, and others—there is of course a core of truth to the oppression most victims have felt. Everyone knows of the travails of slavery and beyond, the battles of women for equality in the workplace and elsewhere, the mocking and shunning of homosexuals, and the degrading of other victim groups; it was genuine, and painful—its victims truly were victims, and a blot, though one would hope far from an ineradicable one, on our country. Anyone with a conscience in decent repair recognizes and regrets this. 

Yet the victims of our day make their appeal not to conscience but to guilt. An appeal to guilt is almost entirely negative; rather than awaken the best in one, it insists those who disagree with one are swine. An appeal to conscience, on the other hand, is an appeal to one’s ethical feeling, to one’s sense of fair play; it is fundamentally an appeal to act upon the best that is in one, one’s better nature. 

The brilliance of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. was their appeal to conscience, reinforced by their nonviolent means of achieving their respective ends of Indian independence and the abolishment of vile segregation laws. The victims of our day work at inducing guilt, exacting punishment where possible through boycott and disqualification, and above all capturing, as they have no doubt they do, the high ground of superior virtue.

Given the large constituency of victims in America, Hillary Clinton, as a woman, has already climbed aboard the victim train in the hope of riding it to the presidency. “When women are held back, our country is held back,” she said in a recent speech. “When women get ahead, everyone gets ahead. Our mothers and sisters and daughters are on the front lines of all of these battles. .  .  . But these are not just women’s fights. These have to be America’s fights and the world’s fights. We have to take them on, we have to win them together.” What a rich ragout of victimhood and virtue in those words!

In the next presidential election, Hillary Clinton figures to have pole position as the victim candidate. Behind her platform, her discrete policies, the merits of her case, her campaign for the presidency will stress, either blatantly or subtly, the great bonus in virtue that awaits, in the cant phrase, shattering the glass ceiling of politics by putting a woman in the White House. Whatever her baggage of malfeasance, her wealth and glittery résumé of good schools and top jobs, she retains, and will doubtless insist upon, her victim status. Even her most dubious supporters, Michael Tomasky writes in the Daily Beast, “want to see her succeed. They yearn for her to slay the beasts of sexism and gender-role definitions that she has taken it upon herself to battle.” Hillary Clinton’s victory would mean a great triumph for victimhood, no doubt about it. What it might mean for the country is of course another question altogether.

Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard. His latest book is Masters of the Games: Essays and Stories on Sport (Rowman & Littlefield).