More bothersome to me than this shallow and callow approach to news is what it reveals about the story of victimhood that seems to so excite the right-wing these days.<\/p>\n
I remember a time when the right-wing thundered in righteous indignation over the subversive and un-American nature of claiming moral authority and material advantage by victimhood — the core of the conservative critiques of affirmative action, political correctness, hate crimes, the value of diversity, and welfare. They highlighted with glee any case where race-baiters, scammers, or any other purported victim claimed race, gender, or some other prejudicial factor without good cause. But that was the 1990s. By the 2000s, right-wingers had begun to adopt the tactics of those few authentic race-baiters as their own.<\/p>\n
In 2008, Sarah Palin mastered this flip — flinging charges of sexism and misogyny against all of her critics as she winked and engaged in name-calling and gutter politics. She was a post-modern demagogue — and excited all the passions for and against her that demagogues rely on to gain power — but she explained away all criticisms of her as part of her victimhood, as a right-winger and a powerful woman. It was a brilliant move.<\/p>\n
Marked by Sarah Palin’s rise, the right wing has constantly claimed victimhood: Michelle Bachman warned of concentration camps for conservatives; Rush Limbaugh claimed he was on the president’s enemies list; Glenn Beck declared that his words were so powerful, powerful people were attempting to silence him; Matt Drudge warned that the FCC was considering enacting a tax that he called, “a Drudge tax;” TownHall sent out emails claiming conservatives would be denied medical treatment under ObamaCare; \u00a0and of course, Sarah Palin herself has posited giant conspiracies against her, and positioned herself as the victim of her neighbors, bloggers in Alaska, her daughter’s one-time boyfriend, David Letterman, Katie Couric, Rahm Emanuel, and of course, the “lamestream media.”<\/p>\n
Andrew Breitbart himself doesn’t seem to claim to be a victim. He happily engages in political war. But the news his sites promote are consistent with this culture of victimhood that has come to dominate the right-wing. There are few better examples than this video as discussions of policy or of politics are left behind in favor of a short video in which a right winger is shown as the victim of the left. Congressman Bod Etheridge’s reaction was no doubt inappropriate. But calling this an “assault” is such a glaringly obvious attempt to play the victim. It’s unclear how much the video was edited — but the facial blurring of the anonymous college student further adds to the obviousness of this attempt — but in typical Breitbart fashion, it has the potential to extend the story as the identity of the student is released in the coming days.<\/p>\n
This culture of victimhood is pernicious because it is self-reinforcing — and helps insulate the right-wing from adapting to political circumstances — and may even, in the worst of all worlds, lead to the Republican nomination of Sarah Palin for president.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[reddit-me]Andrew Breitbart, while claiming to be some sort of serious journalist, more closely resembles the papparazzi that hound celebrities. (And as he apparently regularly checks any blog references to himself: Hello Andrew, and welcome.) The stories he has broken seem to place as much emphasis on the “reporter” as on the subject — most notably […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[47,953,955,4,458],"tags":[2882,2883,2885,1986,389,1769,161,2718,2884],"class_list":["post-5193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-criticism","category-election-2012","category-palin-election-2012","category-politics","category-the-opinionsphere","tag-andrew-breitbart","tag-bod-etheridge","tag-drudge-tax","tag-glenn-beck","tag-matt-drudge","tag-michelle-bachman","tag-rush-limbaugh","tag-townhall","tag-victimhood"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8qcx-1lL","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5193"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5195,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5193\/revisions\/5195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}