The Left Discovers Victimocracy’s Downsides

By Noah Rothman

Monday, February 26, 2024

 

Among all the most entertaining subgenres of center-left commentary, those focused on the author’s discovery of an essential and long-held feature of conservative folk wisdom are the most amusing.

 

This phenomenon was on display in a recent New York Times exposé on the degree to which women in the dating scene still expect men to foot the bill for an evening out. This adherence to traditional gender roles cannot be the product of ancient convention or even evolutionary biology; it must be gleaned from progressivism’s hyper-attuned social consciousness. And so, men paying on dates is repackaged as a learned response to inequitable pay gaps in the workplace or the disequilibrium in employer-provided “reproductive care.” For progressives who embark on this journey of self-discovery, it’s less important that Right and Left arrive at the same conclusions about the dynamics between the sexes than that they get there via a process that preserves their sense of superiority.

 

The latest example of this sort of commentary comes to us via New York magazine’s The Cut, an increasingly parodic vertical covering “women’s lives and interests.” In it, author Kathryn Jezer-Morton expresses her fear that she may be incubating in her home two young men who will grow up to be monsters — i.e., conservatives. Despite having been raised “in a spirit of loving gender agnosticism,” her sons, ages ten and 13, have displayed disturbing tendencies typically associated with men. That isn’t the source of Jezer-Morton’s trepidation. By her own account, she is supportive of her children’s passions, even those specific to American males. What piques her anxiety are the signs that these outward displays of maleness are early indications that her kids will one day succumb to the distorting messages broadcast by the masculinity-industrial complex.

 

Like the Times before her, Jezer-Morton devotes a disproportionate amount of her essay to establishing her own sterling progressive credentials. Toward that end, she attributes the sort of virility she hopes to discourage in her boys to a variety of left-wing bugbears.

 

The author does not provide any specifics that illustrate why a conservative political orientation in men is undesirable. It’s merely assumed that her audience doesn’t need those details spelled out for them. She attributes the baleful condition in which America’s men currently languish to the “logic from the free-market economy,” in which success means “earning a windfall” rather than “just doing steady business year after year,” and the sense among men that conventional feminism “feels unfair” because it is predicated on the presumption “that women started from a position of inferiority.” That description of feminism would be alien to its first-wave founders, and market economics actually discourage hazardous speculative ventures with a commensurate downside risk. But Jezer-Morton was on a roll.

 

And what she was rolling toward was, in fact, quite valuable. The author summoned just enough self-awareness to observe that capital in the modern social landscape has been redefined by progressives possessed of an insatiable “appetite for stories about emancipation.” Because she believes prolonged exposure to the left-wing ideology dominant in the academy is the surest way to prevent latent conservatism from manifesting itself, that’s a problem. Straight men, she confesses, “feel the need to start from a place of grievance, because otherwise there’s no way to bounce back and beat the odds.”

 

Here, we dispense with the inscrutable patois native to the bleeding-edge blogs and arrive at one meaty and productive observation: “The appeal of a grievance-based identity makes it hard to convince straight white boys that they in fact have plenty going for them, and that they have no reason to feel aggrieved,” Jezer-Morton wrote.

 

Our contributor to The Cut has arrived at a conclusion that will strike conservative readers as downright banal. How many articles, television and radio programs, and books have been written by center-right authors and commentators about the pernicious effects of a culture that commodifies victimization? How many conservatives devoted their careers to pointing out the diminishing returns in a social marketplace in which achievement is measured by the relative experience of adversity? How often has the American Right warned that boosting demand for victimhood narratives guarantees an inflated supply? Jezer-Morton’s observation is only revelatory if the author and her readers alike have insulated themselves against even casual contact with conventionally conservative social mores.

 

The implications of this discovery clearly rattled the author. If she were to put her conclusions into practice, that would proscribe subjecting her offspring to imperious lectures about what they should believe and to whom they should perceive themselves subordinate. It would involve “letting reactionary and unformed pseudo-ideologies breathe the same airspace as us,” and it requires entertaining (if only for argument’s sake) the idea that “sexism works both ways.”

 

“I suspect that progressive-leaning white parents’ own anxiety about our reputations plays a part in our conversations with our teenage sons,” reads Jezer-Morton’s concluding confession. Her admissions end there, but they might not have. The very culture she is inveighing against is one for which she advocates in this very piece. The pervasive sense of victimization to which she hopes her sons will not aspire is retailed by the institutions of higher learning that she expects will educate her boys out of their creeping cultural conservatism. The author warns of the inefficacy or even counterproductivity of high-handed efforts to socially engineer progressive men while, at the same time, displaying academia’s mistrust of individuals’ ability to navigate a social milieu in healthy and productive ways.

 

Jezer-Morton’s commendably candid essay is not a lament about national dysfunction or the unhealthy proclivities of modern American men. It is a condemnation of a theory of social organization she and those who share her worldview helped to cultivate. Maybe if she had read some of the conservatives that she spent so much time and energy avoiding, the author would have arrived at her conclusion much earlier.