Diagnosis: Tribal Victimhood

how a kind neighbor diagnosed a terminal illness in the polity

The Los Angeles Times published a column entitled, “What can you do about the Trumpites next door?” Please read it, if you haven’t already. It unintentionally opens a window on a dynamic in our country that is of inestimable importance in the quest to understand our division as a nation.

I strongly suspected it was a hoax until I checked out the author’s Twitter feed. The piece generated binary responses: Team Blue praised the author’s “courage” and “generosity” to her neighbors; Team Red reacted with astonishment at how the neighbors were being discussed, seeming to think her attitude was more appropriate to neighbors who had, for fun, run over her cat.

[For convenience, I’m lumping everyone who is Woke or a Biden voter or both in under “Team Blue” and everyone anti-Woke or a Trump voter (whether a rabid fan or a “critical race theory under Biden/Harris will be worse…” reluctant one), or both, under Team Red.]

The author writes about her kind neighbors, who plowed her driveway for her without being asked and without requesting payment. She is perplexed by how much, if any, thanks she owes them for their generous gesture.

In a moment of such stunning obliviousness that one has to wonder if the editor left it in as a deliberate snub, she writes (intending to criticize people on the right), “Loving your neighbor is evidently much easier when your neighborhood is full of people just like you.”

She moved to their neighborhood as a “pandemic getaway,” and if helping with snow removal is a loving act—as someone who lives in New England, I see it as such—they certainly have no issue loving a neighbor who is nothing like them.

Who Owes Amends, and To Whom?

The author writes:

But I can offer a standing invitation to make amends. Not with a snowplow but by recognizing the truth about the Trump administration and, more important, by working for justice for all those whom the administration harmed.

The author here reveals something far more important than mere self-righteousness: she shows the depths of Team Blue’s tribal victimhood.

The Currency of Victimhood

Victimhood is currency in our culture, and has been for some time. Both Team Blue and Team Red have tribal victimhood complexes. (Ironically, one of Team Red’s pieces of tribal victimhood is that they are expected to cater to other people’s victimhood complexes.) Trump was the master of exploiting this, starting with the media and extrapolating outward to claim victimhood from all angles and in every quarter.

Team Red sees itself as the victim of indoctrinating educators, including but by no means limited to college professors; biased media; and experts with political agendas. One can point at things like surveys of political affiliation among journalists or the percentage of teacher union money that goes to Democrats vs Republicans and see where some of it comes from, to be sure, though good-faith arguments can be made that much of this is exaggerated to varying degrees. To understand our divisions and overcome our disunity, Team Red would have work to do, and I will address that in a later essay.

The snowplow column gives a fantastic opportunity to examine Team Blue’s tribal victimhood. It is the more important to examine, because it is the one that must be addressed if we have a chance of overcoming where we are as a culture. America was far more unified in the past, even through decades of conservatives being obsessed with the elites, namely media and professors, that they believed to be victimizing them. The amorphous blob of “the media” or “the commies graduating from education programs” can be separated from one’s neighbors in a way that today’s political divisions do not allow.

The column is a stunningly revelatory piece. Re-read it, or at least, think it through again, but imagine that the author is speaking of a neighbor who broke her windshield in a fit of anger, or physically assaulted her. She could be expressing reasonable concern that thanking him for a kind gesture would let him off the hook of doing what he actually has a moral obligation to do—paying for a replacement windshield, or paying her medical bills and compensating her for pain and suffering.

It makes more sense in that light, does it not?

The angst over how grateful to be for a kind gesture from people she regards as her moral inferiors makes sense in the case of interpersonal victimhood; it is flatly ridiculous in the case of neighbors who simply have different politics. In the assault example, an extremely good-hearted person might be willing to forge some sort of cordial future relationship, but only after the guilty party had demonstrated contrition and evidenced a change of character. (That is not a melodramatic example on my part, as Rep. AOC has been widely lauded for using the language of abusive relationships to explain why the country can’t move forward.)

A country probably can’t survive if half of it feels so personally victimized by the other half that they honestly believe that 74 million people owe them personal amends. The relationships our communities depend on are untenable if every American left of center believes that their neighbors, merely by supporting and/or voting for the former President, have harmed them and owe them personal amends. This is even more dire because the amends they believe they are owed are only acceptable in the form of agreeing with them and then adopting the goals of political activists, which Team Blue sees as a bare minimum standard to be a good person. They believe this in the same way that I believe the guy who stole my bicycle owes me a replacement. It is, to Team Blue, the logical and reasonable amends that must be made for the harm done by supporting the former President.

This is not projection on my part: the author offers her kind neighbors the opportunity to make amends “by recognizing the truth about the Trump administration and, more important, by working for justice for all those whom the administration harmed.”

Here is the demand: agree and take up activism, the definition of goodness that we have set, or else you are in our moral debt. This is not symbolic; this is moral debt to the point that the author is reticent to reciprocate, or even extend gratitude, for neighborliness on the lines of plowing a driveway. (For you people who have never had to shovel your car out, this is, depending on the amount of snow, somewhere from thirty minutes to two hours of hard physical labor in freezing temperatures that the woman was spared.)

When Team Blue asserts that everything is political and certain topics are not up for debate because, they say, Team Red “doesn’t think (they) have a right to exist” or “challenges (their) humanity,” they are being hyperbolic but not using hyperbole. They really believe it. To them, intellectual conflict is abuse and political disagreement is harm.

Their insistence that “accountability” is required before moving on is their saying what they mean, not just for the Capitol rioters (literally everyone agrees that all lawbreakers should be prosecuted, particularly the ones who got violent) but for the “enablers” of Trump, including, as the column eloquently demonstrates, his voters. (Note that the column said nothing about their participating in the Capitol riot or otherwise doing anything illegal; merely supporting Trump is enough to put them in the author’s moral debt.)

This really is where we are. The game of who can amass political power by being the victimest victim of all has been played to such a ridiculous extent that Team Blue honestly believes that they have been personally harmed by each and every one of Trump’s 74 million voters.

Is this fixable?

Theoretically, yes. Realistically, probably not. A significant part of the Team Blue membership that feels this way would have to change. They would have to accept that Team Red has a right to disagree, and that a Trump vote did not create a moral debt (and certainly not a personal moral debt for which Team Red is obligated to make amends and seek absolution).

Doing this would require personal transformation in the form of a paradigm shift, but it would also require much more than that.

It is one thing to recognize that other people have the right to be wrong, even on matters of dire importance and of deep personal significance. It is another to overcome a knee-jerk tendency towards victimhood. It is yet another to give up a worldview that provides you with cultural power, a community, and an identity. Even if a significant percentage of Team Blue could manage all of that, they would still have to find tremendous courage to stand up to their fellow Team Blue members—and more than once. Many times, until the change took hold.

How much easier is it to crack on the must-be-racist neighbors who cleared your driveway, compare them to Hezbollah (yes, she really did—I told you to read it), and get patted on the back for being superior to the bigot rednecks?

As a nation, we could overcome this if we wanted to, but the majority of the work would have to be done by those left of center.

I fear that they don’t want to. They are high on their sense of righteousness. It is surely intoxicating to feel that 74 million Americans are in your moral debt, that you are so morally superior that you don’t even owe them reciprocal neighborliness when they get out in frigid temperatures and plow your driveway just to be kind.

We won’t. Not because we can’t, but because we don’t want to.

I don’t mean to end this on a depressing note. This is one of the rare things I’ve written that made me happy, despite its pessimistic conclusion. I have wondered why overcoming our divisions seems so unlikely, and I believe I see an important piece of why that reality exists. Clarity is empowering, as is saying what one is seeing, loudly and clearly.

Perhaps others: smarter, older, more experienced, and more compassionate, can find ways to implement positive change. Stranger and less probable things than a triumph of human goodness have surely happened.

After all, there are American footprints on the moon.