Pedants vs. Thugs: Examining the Bedrock of Modern Protest Movements
Ryan Cooper, over at The Week, wants us to know that The conservative victimhood complex has made America impossible to govern:
“Trump's appalling failure is only the most visible part of a vast ocean of right-wing dysfunction. For conservative zealots and media figures, the pandemic is quickly becoming just another culture war battleground—an axis of postmodern symbolic conflict, another vent for bottomless grievance, and fuel for a screeching victimhood complex. The practical effect will be to fuel infection and hamstring economic recovery. It's a stark obstacle before fixing this or any other crisis.”
Phrases that stand out—“just another culture war,” “vent for bottomless grievance,” and “fuel for screeching victimhood”—can easily describe the trajectory of progressives since 2014. The Far Right is just doing what they have always done. Take the tactics of their perceived enemies and use them for their own ends.
We saw it coming. Clarence Thomas used it in the ’90s with his claim of a “high tech lynching.” Brett Kavanaugh used it in his SCOTUS conformation hearing. Trump uses it almost non-stop in his “vent for bottomless grievance” against Congress, Democrats, whistleblowers, the press, SNL, Bill Maher, and just about anyone he finds less than blindly loyal to his nonsense.
The NRA gins up the argument that gun ownership is a sacred right bequeathed to white American men and any sort of abridgment of such right signals an attack upon what they clam to be fundamental civil rights.
In the face of COVID-19 and statewide business shutdowns, the suggestion that it is simply good practice to distance ourselves socially, wear face masks in public, and strictly monitor the capacity of restaurants, bars, and barbershops is met with not only micro-protests but armed protests in state capitols.
The progressives taught them how to do this. In lieu of guns, those protesting inequities in society arm themselves with academic theories and language designed to obfuscate less complicated solutions.
Innocent black men are shot by poorly trained police. Poverty and systemic racism creates a culture of urban black men that foments criminal activity disproportionate to their percentage of the population. Both are true and feed into one another. Instead of focusing on those two problems (police training and poverty in inner cities), Critical Race Theorists edge case further and further afield to demonstrate that the country is so thoroughly infested with bedrock anti-black racism that even mathematics and tardiness are examples of America’s original sin of chattel slavery.
If one is to fully embrace the bizarre corner the progressives have painted themselves into, women who have been brutally raped are almost exactly the same in grievance as a woman who claims to have been a bit creeped out by a Senator and then waits twenty-seven years to ratchet that accusation to being finger-fucked in a public hallway.
The differences in approach are obvious. If black men, in protest of fucking anything decided to arm themselves with automatic weapons, the National Guard would be called out to level them with tanks and anti-aircraft guns. White guys do it and we don’t even see tear gas and rubber bullets employed. The Far Right are fully supported by the conservative half of the country even if they are obvious bigots and self-proclaimed Nazis; the Far Left goes in for the attack on any moderate Democrat who doesn’t wholeheartedly agree that billionaires should be slaughtered and made into meat pastries for the homeless to eat.
The similarity is actually simple: victimhood is the social media highway to power. The more victimized you can frame your plight, the more voice you have, the more followers, the louder the din.
Amid the cacophony of complaining, identifying actual victims becomes more difficult. As it evolves into a search for genuine injustice, solutions to silly gripes takes up the air in the room. Microaggressions on the Left are suddenly no different from requiring masks on the Right. White privilege on the Right is a no different than Identity Polemic on the Left.
Cooper is right in part. The victimhood complex has made America impossible to govern. It is not, however, isolated to the conservative side of the fence.
