The Church of Grievance

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Thursday, April 26, 2018

In the days and weeks after the awful massacre at Stoneman Douglas High School, a number of students put themselves forward, to the front of America’s ceaselessly reiterated debate about gun rights. That they would have an immediate — even urgent — prominence is predictable. But it is the predictable exception to American political debate, which is usually conducted under the pretense that all its participants — politicians, experts, journalists, and news addicts — belong to a cult of policy expertise. Victims have a unique and growing role in our political culture.

Conservatives also make rhetorical use of victims. The families of 9/11 victims were solicited for their views on everything from intelligence gathering to foreign policy. President Donald Trump, whose political success comes from his intuitive understanding of America’s mass culture, made very effective use of victim politics in his 2018 State of the Union address, drawing attention to, among others, the parents of two teenagers, Nisa Mickens and Kayla Cuevas, who were murdered in 2016 (MS-13 gang members have been charged with the crime).

The most obvious reasons for deploying victims in our political life in this way are that tragic news events drive public conversation and that suffering commands human attention and sympathy. Faced with human suffering, we fall silent, or at least think we should. And silence is a reasonable enough proxy for consent. It’s good enough for an activist who wants to achieve reforms, even at the price of cutting deliberation short.

But something is changing in victim politics. It is no longer an emotive call for political reform, or restitution for wrongs done. The young activists whom conservatives call “social-justice warriors” practice politics in a form that looks spiritual, and their Marxoid political theories are effulgent with longings and aspirations that point far beyond what we normally think of as politics.

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It’s worth examining the change. At this point, conservative complaints about the political use of victims are a generation old. Twenty-six years ago, in his book A Nation of Victims, Charlie Sykes documented the shift in the American political imagination. Sykes was especially preoccupied with spurious claims of victimhood. Drawing from Tocqueville’s observation that Americans “are forever brooding over advantages they do not possess,” he noted the way in which displeased customers inflated their trivial grievances into oppressions and how some Americans recast their debilitating personal habits as disabilities. My gambling isn’t a moral problem, it’s a disease! The burn from my coffee isn’t the predictable result of my clumsiness, but the fault of McDonald’s. “A community of interdependent citizens has been displaced by a society of resentful, competing, and self-interested individuals who have dressed their private annoyances in the garb of victimism,” Sykes wrote.

He traced the victim mentality to a number of sources, even back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and to our novel belief that no harm can befall us that’s not in some way the fault of society, and that therefore every one of life’s misfortunes calls for recompense from the treasury of resources common to society, or at least from the closest source of wealth.

Although Sykes’s account is thorough, he could not fully anticipate the mutation of victim politics into something even larger and more destabilizing. Some conservatives have tried to explain the preeminence of the victim in our politics as the result of cultural Marxism and the teachings of the Frankfurt school. Faced with the manifest failure of the proletariat to take up its assigned role as the true sovereign of history after the Bolshevik Revolution, a group of left-wing theorists built on the work of Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci and came up with a new proletarian class, or classes. Sometimes called “the subaltern,” other times simply “the oppressed,” this new proletariat was defined by its exclusion from hegemonic cultural power. This cultural hegemony has many names, and we encounter them constantly, in a less sophisticated form, when feminists denounce the patriarchy, when sexual minorities critique heteronormativity, and when racial minorities define their mission as the upending of white supremacy.

The new dominance of victim politics has exerted a gravitational effect on all of American political discourse. The shift in Marxist rhetoric from the proletariat to the subaltern has foreshadowed shifts in American politics writ large. In the 20th century, Americans often claimed their rights and privileges as members of the middle class, demanding what was owed to “people who work hard and play by the rules.” Many Americans who were a bit poorer or a bit richer than the middle class still politically identified with that great mass of citizens. It was a rhetoric built around the idea that the middle class works to create wealth and deserves its share of it.

Now, Americans group themselves into ever smaller and more-besieged minorities. “Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already,” Thoreau said. In our world, anyone more micro-aggressed than his neighbors constitutes a minority of one. Unsurprisingly, this form of politics is best suited to young people, preferably in college, who live in a world where they are still shaping their identity and their labor is just a notional feature of their life in the future.

Our political vocabulary is now about what is owed to each individual or group, regardless of the value of the work performed by that person or group. And claims for rights are made in a corporate persona. Instead of each person’s speaking for himself, people now issue political demands “as a member of” this or that community. It’s almost as if each individual finds meaning only insofar as he conforms to an abstracted or imagined political model. “Speaking as a woman” simply cannot be done by a female who is not a feminist.

If the abstruse theories of a handful of Marxists could move the world on their own, National Review wouldn’t exist. But the new victim politics has taken off because it fulfills certain needs of its practitioners. It allows an alternative entry into the heavily guarded political discussion of America’s ruling class. And it offers a sense of purpose and identity that, in another age, would have been found in religion.

The American ruling class broadcasts its soulless utilitarianism when it comes to politics. It tries to make every political problem into a mere technical policy challenge. But there is a loophole for those who are not initiated into this highly abstract form of political discourse. Utilitarianism admits just one criterion for allocating sympathy, resources, and attention: suffering.

So if you want to participate in political debate, but you don’t want to master all the academic studies on your particular problem or interest, take account of all the methodological biases of these studies, and then find a platform where you can make your case — if, in short, you don’t want to become a nerd — your only chance of having a public voice is to become, or represent, a victim. This is the only chance to put passion — or spiritedness — back into a political conversation that is usually lifeless and technical.

It is also likely that the new victim politics is channeling energy that would otherwise express itself in other projects. The ever-narrowing mission of the art world is a likely culprit. Haunted by the corruption of commercialism and disillusioned with the pursuit of genius for its own sake, almost the entire artistic world has looked to politics to find a new purpose. And so every field, from abstract sculpture to film to stand-up comedy, has started to mimic the hectoring voice and social goals of progressive politics. Those seeking to express or sublimate their deepest longings almost inevitably turn away from contemplation and creation and toward activism. Tragedy and comedy are supposed to offer catharsis and make living in an imperfect world easier. But, given an overtly political role, these forms now essentially withhold that salve; their mission is agitation in the service of social reform. We have an art world that satisfies us less and diverts more dissatisfaction into the political realm.

Borrowing from the thought of Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, the Christian social critic Alan Jacobs showed that “woke” social-justice activists often don’t use political terms when talking about the imperatives of their identity politics. Instead, they invoke mythic ones. This partly explains why their response to unwelcome campus speakers takes on the form of an exorcism, with chants repeated in a loud, prayer-like cadence. Sometimes the shouts are enacted as an antiphony — a call and response. At other times, an exemplar is pulled forward to speak and the entire supportive group amplifies that voice by repeating the person’s words.

Here victim politics recasts disagreement as desecration and defilement. Someone who walks into these environments looking for the intellectual parry and thrust of debate is instead told, “Your job is to listen.” The expectation that no one would dare to interject or question the personal testimony of the victim of oppression is not so different from the expectation of silence during the reading of the Gospel in a church service, or during a homily. Your job is to listen.

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And it is here, I would suggest, that the politics of the victim touch something deep in the soul of modern man. They are in some ways the residue of Christian thought and ritual in a Western world that offers little traditional religious education or formation. The premise of victim politics is like a mirror image of devotion to the Suffering Servant. Just as in Christianity, so in social-justice politics: The wounds of the primordial victim testify to the broken state of human nature and society at large. For Christians, the cross is a kind of throne, and the crown of thorns becomes a sign of authority. The paradox of Christianity is that the Lord reigns as King precisely because he offered himself as Victim.

Putting this Victim at the center of the social order, in ritual or in preaching, begins the redemption of all humanity. The faithful confess to the ways their sins contributed to the fate of the victim. The ritual is meant to moralize and inspire those who witness it and motivate them to more fully participate in the effort of redemption. It can also provide its adherents with a demonology that fills the world with invisible oppressors and tormentors, making them oversensitive and fearful.

The religious aspect should be evident to anyone who offers a rational critique of some identity-politics shibboleth only to be told “You’re denying my identity” or “You’re erasing my existence.” It’s a mysterious response at first. You offer an argument and are told that you disbelieve in someone’s existence. It sounds like an accusation of atheism, for a good reason: You’re being charged with heresy, and if you do not desist, you reveal yourself as morally reprobate, as one who would, with full knowledge, repeat the Crucifixion. Or if you prefer the current academese, you are one who “reifies the structures of oppression.” You love yourself more than you love the victim-god standing before you, the one exposing his wounds and offering you forgiveness on condition that you recognize his pain, confess your unearned privilege, and promise obedience.

Depending on your disposition, you can take this mimicry of the Christian myth and ritual and its transmutation into politics as either a perverse compliment about the endurance of Christian thought or a kind of demonic parody. Either way, we are not here contending over something exclusively political. Once the explicitly political claims are filtered out, what is left over in victim politics is a churchly way of being in a world that has escaped the bonds of religion. We are contending with a longing for recognition and esteem and for a mission that has a transcendent horizon; no form of human governance can ever satisfy such desires.

And so we must be careful. An anti-PC politics that takes the form of mockery will win converts only among those who are already primed to be disillusioned. Conservatives need to think more holistically. We need a politics freed from the strictures of utilitarianism so that it may admit human passions, in forms other than suffering. The aspirations for transcendence that young people feel so keenly need outlets for expression and cultivation in art and in the devotional life of religion. Young people need to feel that their travails have purpose and meaning beyond the way they might manifest societal dysfunction or be recast as a symbol of political oppression. If we want a politics that is less histrionic, and a society that offers something more empowering than the campus star chamber, what we really need is to re-create our civic, social, and familial life so that people’s disappointments and outrages will be met with compassion and understanding, or channeled into great works of art and humble prayers. No small task, I know.

Mitch McConnell Is Winning the Long Game

By George Will

Thursday, May 31, 2018

Franklin Roosevelt, afflicted by the disease at age 39, died in April 1945 at the polio-recuperation facility he had created in Warm Springs, Ga. Before then, Mitch McConnell, living in Five Points, Ala., began going there for treatment for the polio that struck him at age two, in 1944.

After paralysis by polio, an inner iron undergirded the ebullience of FDR, who hitherto had relied on privilege and charm. McConnell, who had none of the former and is parsimonious with the latter, acquired while overcoming polio the patience and grit that on June 12 will make him the longest-serving leader of Senate Republicans, surpassing Bob Dole.

Since McConnell and his mother, returning from two years of intermittent treatments in Warm Springs, bought his first pair of walking shoes, he has played “the long game,” which is the title of his 2016 memoir. In his 33 Senate years, he has become a major figure in the history of two of the government’s three branches — the legislative, and now the judicial as he oversees the reshaping of federal courts.

If McConnell’s low emotional metabolism allowed him to become agitated, he would do so about complaints — mostly from people inattentive to events or uninformed about possibilities — that Republican control of the two political branches is not producing results. McConnell says:

The largest tax reduction in 31 years has contributed to the best economy in 18 years. Defense spending is up, many Dodd-Frank banking rules and the Obamacare individual mandate have been repealed. Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, blocked for 38 years, has been approved, as has a reconfigured National Labor Relations Board, a source of much Obama-administration mischief. The Congressional Review Act, under which Congress can disapprove many regulations issued by federal agencies, has been used 19 times since it was enacted in 1996 — 18 of them in this Congress.

This, says McConnell, constitutes the best 18 months of center-right governance in his Senate career, which began when Ronald Reagan’s second term did. There also are the judges.

Some conservative warriors in the bleachers — people inordinately proud of their muscular spectatorship — deny McConnell’s toughness. Bruised Democrats know better. By preventing a vote on President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland — invoking a rule first suggested by Democratic senators Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer: Supreme Court justices should not be confirmed in presidential-election years — McConnell kept open the seat of Antonin Scalia, who died in February 2016. The election produced a president unburdened by jurisprudential convictions but deferential to the Federalist Society and other conservatives who think about such things. Furthermore, the White House counsel’s office, which oversees judicial nominations, is an island of professionalism attached to a seedy carnival.

To reshape the circuit courts of appeal (of 179 authorized positions, 21 have been filled in 18 months, and there are 14 current or announced vacancies), McConnell ended requiring a supermajority to stop filibusters of Supreme Court nominees. Filibusters had always been possible but were never practiced. Not even, McConnell notes, during the ferocious fight over the nomination of now-justice Clarence Thomas. This nomination went to the Senate floor without the Judiciary Committee’s recommendation and barely passed (52–48), but was not filibustered.

To prevent Republicans from reciprocating with filibusters against Obama’s packing-by-enlargement of the nation’s second-most important court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Democrats changed Senate rules to bar filibusters of judicial nominees other than those for the Supreme Court. McConnell removed that pointless exemption to make possible the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch.

McConnell is amenable to ending filibusters of nominations to executive and judicial positions (the Senate, he says, is “in the personnel business”). But without filibusters of legislation, he says, the nation might have socialized medicine, guaranteed government jobs, card-check workplace unionization, a ban on right-to-work laws, and other afflictions. He notes that since popular election of senators began in 1914, Republicans have never had more than 60 senators. And in the last 100 years, Democrats have simultaneously held the presidency, the House, and the Senate for 34 years, Republicans for only 20.

Almost 30 years after the end of his presidency, Ronald Reagan still shapes events because of his nomination of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who often has been 20 percent of a court majority. Three decades from now, McConnell will be shaping the nation through judges who today are in their 40s, some of whom might be destined to be Neil Gorsuch’s colleagues. This is the long game.

Obama Says ‘I Didn’t Have Scandals.’ So What Are All These?

By David Harsanyi           

Tuesday, May 29, 2018

At a Las Vegas tech conference last week, former president Barack Obama told an audience that his presidency had been scandal-free. “I didn’t have scandals, which seems like it shouldn’t be something you brag about,” Obama joked, according to Newsweek. We hear this talking point quite often from Democrats.

Now, perhaps the president didn’t experience the fallout from a scandal, which is very different from never having been involved in one. For this confusion, Obama can thank the political media.

Why does it matter now? For one thing, historical revisionism shouldn’t go unchallenged. Democrats are running to retake power, and many of them were participants or accomplices in numerous corrosive scandals that have been airbrushed.

The other reason, of course, is that when we start to juxtapose the mythically idyllic Obama presidency with the tumultuous reign of Trump, we’re reminded that many journalists largely abdicated their responsibilities for eight years — which has a lot to do with the situation we find ourselves in today.

It’s not about Obama’s brazen lying about Obamacare or even recurrent abuse of power. I’m talking about supposed non-scandals like “Operation Fast and Furious,” a program devised by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) that put around 2,000 weapons into the hands of narco-traffickers (and an Islamic terrorist), leading to the murder of hundreds of Mexicans and at least one American, border agent Brian Terry.

The body count could have been higher when a homegrown extremist who, with another assailant, attempted to murder the audience at a “Draw Muhammad” contest in Garland, Texas with one of the Fast and Furious weapons. An off-duty police officer killed both of the attackers.

Despite the incompetence, absurdity, recklessness, and fatalities of the program, the entire affair never really received scandal-like attention. No one lost his job. There will almost certainly be a tweet from Trump this week that political media will afford more attention than a story in which an American border agent was murdered with the gun Obama’s ATF provided.

Not even when the administration refused to cooperate with congressional investigators was it handled like a scandal. Not even when a federal judge rejected Obama’s assertion of executive privilege in efforts to deny Congress files relating to the gun-walking operation was it treated as a scandal. Not even when we learned that Obama attorney general Eric Holder misled Congress about when he was made aware of the program did it rise to the importance of a Trump tweet. Holder became the first sitting attorney general in American history to be held in contempt of Congress — a vote that included 17 Democrats — and Obama still never paid a political price.

As it was, the Obama administration persistently ignored courts and oversight, breaking norms because it was allowed to do so. The president was articulate, friendly, and progressive. He might have executed an American citizen without a trial (not a scandal!), but his contempt for the process could be forgiven.

It’s why Obama could secretly send planes filled with cash to pay a ransom to a terror state (using money earmarked for terror victims) and most reporters and analysts would regurgitate the justification they heard in the echo chamber. One Politico reporter might drop a 14,000-word heavily sourced investigative piece (two officials involved in the program went on the record) detailing how the Obama administration undermined law enforcement efforts to shut down an international drug-trafficking ring run by the terror group Hezbollah operating in the United States, and most major news organizations never even mentioned the piece.

When they did, it was usually to give space to former Obama officials to smear the reporter.

It needn’t be said, but if the names were changed to Trump and Russia, the president would be accused of sedition. But by any conceivable journalistic standard, it’s a scandal that should have triggered widespread coverage. So when we see mass indignation over every single hyperbolic statement from the current president, it’s a bit difficult to buy the outrage.

An Obama official famously bragged to The New York Times Magazine that he could rely on the ignorance, inexperience, and partisan dispositions of reporters to convey administration talking points to help push through preferred policy. Rather than being hurt or embarrassed by this kind of accusation of unprofessionalism, many reporters are more reliant on the same people than ever before.

Yet many professionals who supposedly deplore the authoritarian nature of an administration that doesn’t answer CNN’s questions were generally quiet when Obama spied on reporters. The Obama DOJ spied on the Associated Press in an attempt to crack down on internal leaks. The DOJ tapped around 20 different phone lines—including cell phone and home lines—that snared at least 100 staffers who worked for the outlet. The Justice Department spied on Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2010, collecting his telephone records, looking at his personal emails and tracking his movements.

Color me skeptical, but somehow I doubt similar Trump efforts would be framed as a “rare peek into a Justice Department leak probe,” as if we were pulling the curtains back on a fashion show. It would be, rightly, depicted as an assault on democracy.

Then again, spying was also never really given the scandal treatment during the Obama years. As Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan became aware of an operation of illegal spying of a legislative branch staffer over torture files and misled the media about it. Did the president know? Shrug. The story hardly made a dent. Likewise, Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, admitted he misled Congress about spying on American citizens. No scandal.

Today both these people are on TV chumming around with serious journalists who allow them to continue to make reckless, unsubstantiated political statements all the time. It isn’t Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” who asks Clapper tough questions, it’s Meghan McCain on “The View.”

There was unprecedented politicization of the government under Obama — most of it, I imagine, excused for being part of a good cause. The NLRB. The Justice Department. The IRS. The Office of Special Counsel, which reviews whistleblower allegations, found that IRS employees urged callers to vote for Obama, wore pro-Obama swag, and campaigned for Democrats in conversations with taxpayers — all of it illegal.

But far more seriously, IRS leadership, specifically Lois Lerner, aggressively targeted conservative groups before elections. The IRS admitted as much in an apology letter. Lerner was held in contempt by Congress for refusing to comply with investigators’ demands. She never answered questions for this genuine attack on democracy.

What difference does it make, right? While the extent of the incompetence and negligence during the Benghazi terror attack on September 11, 2012 is still unknown, what we do know is that Obama and a number of high-ranking officials in his administration lied about what happened for partisan reasons. Susan Rice went on a number of national television shows and claimed that Benghazi was a “spontaneous reaction” to “hateful and offensive video,” even when she knew it was a sophisticated and pre-planned terror attack. (Rice is now on the Netflix board, and Obama is a very rich man. At some point you’ve made enough money, but that time is not yet.)

Although they knew it was a complex terror attack, Obama and Hillary Clinton cut television ads to placate radicals in Islamic nations by repeating the claim that a video perpetuated the attack, and apologizing for American free speech — a scandal in itself.

Worse, however, the administration detained the man who produced the offensively amateurish “Innocence of Muslims,” and initially charged him with lying about his role in the production of the video. This was a blatant attack on free expression. Yet most of the mainstream press continued to take the administration’s word for it and report that the video was the cause of the “protests.”

Democrats in general just kept pretending that every accusation was merely a partisan, racist plot to undermine the president. Whether it was bypassing process and oversight to fund cronyistic green projects that enriched political and ideological allies with tax dollars, or the Secret Service’s embarrassing debauchery or Hillary Clinton’s attempts to circumvent transparency or, perhaps the most immoral, the Veterans Affairs’ negligence regarding veterans, they would never admit they faced a scandal.

This double standard in coverage makes today’s often sanctimonious reactions to Trump a bit difficult to take. Many reporters will snarkily point out that most of the stories critics latch onto have been reported on or broken by mainstream journalists. It’s true. There are plenty of good journalists out there. But it’s the intensity of the coverage and the framing of the events that is evidence of ideologically motivated coverage.  And every time Obama or his allies claim that they were scandal-free, millions of Americans are reminded of the obsequiousness of most media coverage.