{"id":10438,"date":"2017-08-03T16:42:41","date_gmt":"2017-08-03T23:42:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=10438"},"modified":"2017-08-05T09:03:05","modified_gmt":"2017-08-05T16:03:05","slug":"the-problem-of-competitive-victimhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-problem-of-competitive-victimhood\/","title":{"rendered":"The Problem of Competitive Victimhood"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson
\nNational Review<\/em><\/p>\n

Divisive identity politics are fading in favor of a shared American identity.<\/p>\n

The startling 2016 presidential election weakened the notion of tribal identity rather than a shared American identity. And it may have begun a return to the old idea of unhyphenated Americans.<\/p>\n

Many working-class voters left the Democratic party and voted for a billionaire reality-TV star in 2016 because he promised jobs and economic growth first, a new sense of united Americanism second, and an end to politically correct ethnic tribalism third.<\/p>\n

In the 19th century, huge influxes of Irish and German immigrants warred for influence and power against the existing American coastal establishment that traced its ancestry to England. Despite their ethnic chauvinism, these immigrant activist groups eventually became indistinguishable from their hosts.<\/p>\n

Then and now, the forces of assimilation, integration, and intermarriage make it hard to retain an ethnic cachet beyond two generations \u2014 at least without constant inflows of new and often poor fellow immigrants.<\/p>\n

The strained effort to champion the victimized tribe can turn comical. In the 1960s, my family still tried to buy Swedish-made Volvo automobiles and Electrolux vacuum cleaners. But it proved hopeless to cling to a fading Swedish heritage.<\/p>\n

For all the trendy talk of the salad bowl and the careerist rewards of hyping a multicultural ancestry, America still remains a melting pot of diverse races, ethnicities, and agendas.<\/p>\n

The alternative of adjudicating which particular group is more victimized and in greater need of government reparations is a hopeless task in a multiracial society \u2014 one that inevitably results in internecine strife among identity-politics groups.<\/p>\n

Recent scholarly studies, here and abroad, have found that the aggressive effort to win government preferences for particular ethnic and religious minorities descends into \u201ccompetitive victimhood.\u201d In other words, such groups battle each other even more than they battle the majority.<\/p>\n

After all, who can calibrate necessary government set-asides and reparations for a century and a half of slavery, for ill treatment of Native Americans, and for descendants of victims of the Asian immigration exclusionary laws, of segregation, of the unconstitutional repression of German citizens during World War I and of Japanese-American internment during World War II?<\/p>\n

In another paradox, immigrants came to and stayed in America because they saw it as preferable to their abandoned homelands. Romanticizing a forsaken culture that one has already decided offered far less opportunity and security than America is incoherent.<\/p>\n

In the aftermath of the election, for all the shrill charges that Trump is a racist, bigot, nativist, and xenophobe, the identity-politics industry is silently making some subtle concessions. For example, the National Council of La Raza announced that it will wisely drop \u201cLa Raza\u201d and change its name to the less politically correct UnidosUS.<\/p>\n

The old La Raza dream of a permanent victimized class of millions of Spanish-speaking citizens \u2014 championed by ethnic elites on the basis of shared race \u2014 will neither win the Democrats the Electoral College nor prove sustainable as immigration policy returns to being measured, legal, and diverse.<\/p>\n

Despite denials, La Raza activists could never escape the reality that \u201craza,\u201d as its Latin roots testify, is an exclusionary racial term (as opposed to \u201cgente\u201d).<\/p>\n

\u201cRaza,\u201d a buzzword of the 1960s, actually had come into popular political usage some 30 years earlier in Francisco Franco\u2019s fascist Spain (Franco wrote a novel, Raza) and as the chauvinistic idea of \u201crazza\u201d in Benito Mussolini\u2019s dictatorship in Italy.<\/p>\n

Other changes reflect election realities. Now, the Democratic party \u2014 stunned by the 2016 loss of its proverbial electoral \u201cblue wall\u201d of Midwestern states \u2014 is talking of a new agenda dubbed \u201cA Better Deal.\u201d<\/p>\n

The obviously more inclusive message is that wounded Democrats want to unify their constituencies \u2014 rather than continue with divisive racial, gender, and ethnic arguments \u2014 in order to win back the suffering middle classes. The latest \u201cDeal\u201d is designed to resonate with the old populism of Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s \u201cNew Deal\u201d and Harry Truman\u2019s subsequent \u201cSquare Deal.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2020, Democratic candidates will certainly avoid stereotypical putdowns of \u201cclingers,\u201d \u201cirredeemables,\u201d and \u201cdeplorables.\u201d<\/p>\n

These were past coded smears used by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to define supposedly illiberal conservative working-class voters, who were written off as too ignorant to know what was good for them and certainly were no longer needed in the Democratic party.<\/p>\n

But no longer: \u201cThem\u201d is out, and \u201cus\u201d is back in.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/article\/450094\/identity-politics-2016-election-democrats-try-more-inclusive-message<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Divisive identity politics are fading in favor of a shared American identity. The startling 2016 presidential election weakened the notion of tribal identity rather than a shared American identity. And it may have begun a return to the old idea of unhyphenated Americans. Many working-class voters left the Democratic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1123,1099,1092,111,92,330,120,383,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2Im","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9879,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-end-of-identity-politics\/","url_meta":{"origin":10438,"position":0},"title":"The End Of Identity Politics","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 18, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/via Defining Ideas (Hoover Institution) \u00a0 \u00a0Image credit: Barbara Kelley Who are we? asked the liberal social scientist Samuel Huntington over a decade ago in a well-reasoned but controversial book. Huntington feared the institutionalization of what Theodore Roosevelt a century earlier had called \u201chyphenated Americans.\u201d A \u201chyphenated\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Election 2016"","block_context":{"text":"Election 2016","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/election-2016\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":763,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/americas-problem-of-assimilation\/","url_meta":{"origin":10438,"position":1},"title":"America’s Problem of Assimilation","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 28, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Defining Ideas The current Supreme Court term has been dominated by the Constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act, the healthcare legislation better known as Obamacare. But the Court has recently heard another case, this one concerning the controversial Arizona immigration law passed in 2010. Though\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Immigration"","block_context":{"text":"Immigration","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/immigration\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":943,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/achievement-trumps-identity-politics\/","url_meta":{"origin":10438,"position":2},"title":"Achievement Trumps Identity Politics","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 28, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Jeremy Lin\u2019s so-far-brief but amazing performance for the New York Knicks has set the world on fire in a mere month. Most NBA superstars are not 23-year-old Harvard graduates. And they are rarely devout Christians and second-generation Taiwanese-Americans. The fact that Lin is\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Identity Politics"","block_context":{"text":"Identity Politics","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/identity-politics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6537,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/president-rouhani-and-peace-studies\/","url_meta":{"origin":10438,"position":3},"title":"President Rouhani and Peace Studies","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 23, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO's The Corner\u00a0 There is a long history of foreign authoritarians channeling left-wing talking points when they appeal to an American audience, apparently on the theory that they score points against the American establishment. Bin Laden and Dr. Zawahiri used to quote back Noam Chomsky to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Iran"","block_context":{"text":"Iran","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/iran\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8345,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/is-race-following-gender-in-becoming-a-fluid-identity-construct\/","url_meta":{"origin":10438,"position":4},"title":"Is Race Following Gender in Becoming a \u2018Fluid\u2019 Identity Construct?","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 16, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Among many careerists and politicians, tweaking one\u2019s ethnic identity is becoming increasingly widespread. by Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0\/\/ National Review Online Not long ago, the New York Times uncovered the artifact that Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush had once listed himself as \u201cHispanic\u201d on a Florida voter-registration form. Bush is married\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Identity Politics"","block_context":{"text":"Identity Politics","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/identity-politics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/images-81.jpeg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8008,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/voting-no-on-obamas-immigration-policies\/","url_meta":{"origin":10438,"position":5},"title":"Voting ‘no’ on Obama’s immigration policies","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 13, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ TSM Everyone finds a lesson in the Republican midterm tsunami. One message was that so-called comprehensive immigration reform and broad amnesty have little national public support. Polls have long shown that, but so do last week's election results. 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