A Leftist Who Defies Victim Culture

By Stephen G. Adubato

Friday, October 23, 2026

 

On February 1, 2021, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Instagram Live to open up about her experience of hiding in her office bathroom during the January 6 Capitol riot the previous month. But rather than offering a political analysis of the event, she opted to speak about how it triggered traumatic memories of being sexually abused years ago. One commentator complained that by “participating in the emotional and communicative channels opened up to her and her generation by trauma culture and social media, she made her own story the center of the events on January 6, 2021.” The commentator went on to lambast Ocasio-Cortez’s narcissistic choice to use social media “as a public confession booth for generating likes and clout.”

 

These comments are found in the introduction of a new book about the excesses of left-wing “trauma culture” published not by a conservative press like Penguin Random House’s Sentinel or Regnery Publishing, but by the lefty Verso Books. And its author is far from a right-wing reactionary: Rather, it is the self-identified Marxist Catherine Liu.

 

Those already familiar with the 62-year-old University of California, Irvine professor won’t be surprised: Liu has made a name for herself with her sharp critiques of the left’s turn from class-based politics to “woke” identitarianism. Her 2021 book Virtue Hoarders denounced the “professional managerial class” for having the gall to prioritize its own attempts to continue climbing the proverbial ladder of capitalist ascent while “insisting on its own progressive heroism” and alleged advocacy for “underprivileged minorities.”

 

Her latest book, Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering, builds on her previous critiques of the left’s turn toward identitarianism and political correctness, this time zeroing in on how trauma culture “promised liberation from repression and oppression but has never delivered.” Instead, it has been used to “individualize suffering” and to undermine solidarity by “demanding submission to a regime of vulnerability and accommodation.”

 

Liu’s upbringing made it difficult to go along with trauma culture’s demand to flaunt one’s hardships in order to gain social and professional currency. “My parents and grandparents lived through the most turbulent and violent times in 20^th century history,” she told me in an interview. Her mother’s parents were from northwestern China, and her father, who came from a peasant background, was kidnapped as a teenager by the Kuomintang army in 1949.

 

Her father eventually got a job as a translator at the United Nations, which allowed Liu to visit China with him every other year in the 1970s. “My mother found my Chinese relatives poor and uncouth, but I found them heroic and wonderful. The poverty was shared, not abject,” Liu told me. “Nobody had running water or electricity in the countryside then, but everyone was animated by a sense of purpose.”

 

Still, despite her esteem for her family’s work ethic, she describes them as “very controlling, neglectful and authoritarian.” Having grown accustomed to the roughness of daily life and “a strong sense of working class culture,” she could never get on board with the left’s turn from class politics to identity. Eventually, she managed to carve out her own heterodox space within left-wing cultural and media studies, learning to be unfazed by being treated as “a misfit” in her department. “My colleagues in the English department think I am a vulgar, unrefined, heavy-handed Marxist,” she told me.

 

Plenty of other theorists have critiqued the left’s shift away from class politics. But Traumatized offers a comprehensive overview of this shift, looking at strictly political factors as well as at how mental health professionals and celebrities like Oprah Winfrey have played a role in “co-opting” leftist rhetoric in order to steer it away from genuine attempts to restructure society and redistribute wealth. Trauma culture’s enabling of narcissistic tendencies and passing them off as “progressive” only serves to distract from working-class issues and further elite interests, Liu argues. So-called radical progressives like Ocasio-Cortez are foot soldiers of this coup.

 

As a privileged suburban millennial who was taught by my teachers and peers to use my “mental health” as a get-out-of-jail-free card to absolve myself of responsibilities and accountability, I found that Liu’s latest book read more like a personal attack than a work of cultural analysis. Well, perhaps calling it a “personal attack” indulges my narcissism. Maybe it’s better to think of it as a form of wisdom literature—something along the lines of Ecclesiastes or the book of the prophet Isaiah—which simultaneously excoriates our moral weaknesses while opening the door to our salvation.

 

What, I asked Liu, can fragile millennials like me do in order to grow up and start taking responsibility for ourselves? As much as I know it’s stupid, sometimes I feel like I lack the strength to get over myself and get the job done. It would be all too millennial of me to blame my parents and teachers for not giving me the tools to do so, for enabling my laziness and lack of responsibility. So what’s a snowflake like me to do?

 

While she assured me “we all have low morale at certain points,” she emphasized the need to “put boundaries” around one’s feelings and look at the bigger picture. “You’ve all been raised in this very antisocial way where your feelings can take precedence over the needs of the social contract of a collective group,” she said. “It’s actually really healthy to be able to not let your feelings overwhelm you and to say, ‘Okay, I’m having a really hard time about this, but all of these people need me … so I kind of have to suck it up.’”  Though her position is not explicitly religious, it certainly hints of certain Christian ideals like that of “dying to self” and humbly “taking up your cross.”

 

I remarked to her that the majority of my peers who publicize their suffering have only gone through minimally or mildly terrible life experiences—for example, my college classmates who kvetched about growing up in working class neighborhoods and having to deal with antiquated gender norms—whereas the ones who have had truly horrifying experiences—who come from war-torn countries, grew up in extreme poverty, were literally raped or abused—are generally less interested in talking about their trauma than in trying to forge a better life for themselves. She chalked this up to the fact that most of those people come from cultures in which one earns respect through one’s actions rather than demanding attention, and that suffering—however unpleasant—retains a redemptive quality. Suffering and self-sacrifice, for many, continue to be “framed within a religious eschatology,” something that brings you closer to a spiritual ideal “like the sacrifices of Christ or the suffering of the martyrs.” Simply put, suffering can be a means to grow spiritually and morally.

 

How has this mindset affected our body politic? On one hand, Liu fears that universities “are in so much trouble” for pushing ideological fodder in place of actually educating students. Increasingly, she added, “people who want to learn things might find the universities the last place where serious study and free discussion are taking place.” Yet she also finds reason to hold out hope. As much as they may “have a hard time reading long things,” her undergraduate students are “just as lively and curious as always.”

 

She’s also optimistic about how the two Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns focused more on class and less on identity. On whether she thinks this also opens the door for a potential left-right antitechnocratic, pro-working-class coalition, she remains skeptical. While she has hope for conservatives like Sen. Josh Hawley and his commitment to working-class issues, he still “has to appease his conservative donors.” As for the left, she’s interested in whether or not someone like Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed could appeal to working-class Midwesterners if he is indeed elected.

 

I can’t say I share all of Liu’s politics, nor do I have as much hope as she does that millennials like me can turn things around for ourselves after having been brainwashed by trauma culture all of our lives. (That may sound like a stereotypical millennial cop-out from taking responsibility for my life, but alas, I’m a product of my times.) At the same time, I can’t help but find her no-bulls–t, commonsensical attitude toward life compelling. Furthermore, Liu strikes me not only as a well-adjusted person, but as a genuinely happy person. Rather than souring her outlook, Liu’s suffering and the challenges she’s faced have sharpened her sense of purpose and her determination to give to others through her work.

 

While I can’t claim to have figured my life out, nor to have overcome my numerous fragilities, it’s through encountering people like Liu that I’m reminded that true freedom comes not from hiding from reality, but from running headfirst into it. Indeed, it seems that her lack of fragility is what grants her the freedom to embrace life as it comes to her, and to relish it all with a kind of joie de vivre lacking in most of my peers. I aspire to live with such gusto for life in all of its fullness—both the good and the bad—without demanding any filters or trigger warnings.