The Oxford English Dictionary defines a victim as someone who is “injured, damaged, or killed by something.” Experiences and stories of victimization run the gamut from the personal to the political. As a psychoanalyst, I often hear reports from my patients of feelings of victimization. I try both to empathize with my patients’ suffering and understand its unconscious meanings.
But victimhood, real or imagined, has also come to assume a central role in social, political, and cultural discourse in the U.S. A victim sensibility seems clearly to be on the rise across the political spectrum, especially on the right. But while real people are victimized in the real world all the time, not all victimization stories are the same. Some are counterfeit.
For example, talking heads at Fox News tell their viewers every night that they are victims of ruthless, power-hungry and uncaring liberal elites. They present to their audience some version of “They want to replace you with immigrants and people of color.They don’t care about you.”
While it may be true that conservatives suffer genuine victimization by virtue of jobs moving overseas, wages stagnating, communities fragmenting, health care becoming unaffordable, a perceived increase in crime and growing wealth inequality, it is also transparently false that these sources of legitimate suffering reflect a plot by liberal elites to “replace” them.
Still, the right-wing grievance machine continues to spew out narratives of victimization. Consider former Fox News star Tucker Carlson’s opening monologue from 2022, in which he opposed aid to Ukraine while seeking to stir up feelings of grievance in irrational, dangerous and counterfeit ways:
There is nothing in the world worse than finding out that your deepest fears are justified…. That’s the nightmare scenario, that there really is a zombie in the closet…. Let's say you're a kid and you've convinced yourself that your parents really don't love you… They claim they do, but you can tell they don’t really mean it, that they aren’t being sincere…. And then one Christmas morning, confirmation! ...
You discover that they've forgotten to buy you presents … it just slipped their mind. Instead, they spent all their time and all their money buying gifts for a kid down the street that you don’t even know. … So all the things that you asked for, they gave to another 9-year-old…. Well, how would that make you feel? You would be crushed but you would also be vindicated … you would know with dead certainty that your parents really didn’t love you…. They're not really even very interested in you.
That's how a lot of Americans felt last night watching the House of Representatives approve another aid package to Ukraine.… Nothing against Ukraine, but we could probably use a lot of that money here right now.
Carlson’s rendering of his adult audience as unloved, betrayed and abandoned children is common today in conservative political circles. This kind of rhetoric produces counterfeit victims. It’s like a race to the bottom, where the group that can make the best case for being victimized earns the most care, concern and outrage. Trump, of course, is the ultimate victim. When announcing his third presidential run, he said, “We will be attacked. We will be slandered. We will be persecuted, just as I have been.”
There is another, darker side to the victim mentality. The belief in one’s own victimization is the ultimate rationale for striking out at others without guilt or remorse. It is like a ”Get Out of Jail Free” card, justifying heinous actions by reframing them as revenge, retaliation or even a form of twisted self-care, because the “right” to fight back is now morally justified. We see this all the time, including in the debates about the morality of the current conflict in Gaza. Jewish suffering in the Holocaust justifies the killing of Palestinian civilians. The catastrophes Palestinians have suffered since the Nakba of 1948 are used by Hamas as a justification for its atrocities.
So when Carlson tells people that evil Democratic elites are ruthlessly trying to replace them, the resulting sense of victimization that he evokes easily becomes a justification for right-wing violence. Why would storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 be “bad” if those doing the storming were fighting against an insidious plot to take away their freedoms? If the election was stolen, then stealing it back makes moral sense. If brown people are being given unbridled access to our borders, benefits and jobs — as part of a sinister plot by liberal Democrats to replace hard-working white Americans — then putting immigrants in cages and breaking up their families can easily seem morally legitimate. It should come as no surprise that victims often become victimizers. We see it all the time in the observation that those who abuse children were themselves often abused as children.
Finally, consider all the ways that victimhood alleviates guilt. If we feel guilty about hurting others, that guilt can be diminished by drumming up a story about how those “others” are, in the first place, hurting us. Making oneself into a victim “solves” the problem. In this way, victimhood can seem almost morally adaptive; after all, a victim can’t really be condemned for acting in self-defense.
Some might argue that counterfeit claims of victimization can be seen on the left as well. There are certainly examples of students and consumers of culture making suspect claims that certain words or images traumatize them. Painter Phillip Guston was unable to show works that included bizarre figurations of people in Ku Klux Klan robes, a proscription lifted only when viewers were given a pamphlet written by a “trauma specialist” urging them to “identify your boundaries and take care of yourself,” and offering a detour around the Klan-themed works. More recently, an art history professor at Hamline University in Minnesota was fired for showing her class a 14th=century painting of the prophet Muhammad, because many religious Muslims (although not all) view visual depictions of the Prophet as blasphemous. At a town hall, an invited Muslim speaker even compared showing the images to teaching that Hitler was good.
Some people can be made uncomfortable by hearing or seeing these kinds of “triggers” — but a trigger is not the same as a trauma. It’s difficult to equate seeing a controversial painting or hearing a professor voice an unpopular view with a returning combat veteran who has PTSD and dives to the sidewalk when a nearby car backfires. Furthermore, shaming or punishing authority figures for such perceived transgressions almost always leads to dangerous forms of censorship.
So there is no equivalence or symmetry between the ways that the right and left make claims of counterfeit victimization. Broadly speaking, progressives have identified with victims and fought to defend and care for them. Modern conservatives like Trump and Carlson, however, are basically propagandizing when they position themselves and their audiences as injured parties in order to justify anti-democratic and xenophobic measures aimed at seizing, holding and expanding their power. Their aim isn’t to defend victims, but to stir up a mob that they hope will get rid of the democratic norms that currently provide some restraint against their political aims.
It would be demeaning and patronizing to deny the suffering that real people in the real world endure when they are victimized. But when a media or political figure pushes a corrupt agenda designed to promote a counterfeit story of victimization, and run it up their respective flagpoles to advance narrow political self-interest, their actions threaten to victimize all of us.
