How Liberalism Got Hacked by Victimism
The Soviet Gulag was one of the cruellest inventions in human history. Like the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, it attracted its share of sadists. One notorious punishment was to tie naked prisoners to a tree and leave them to the mosquitoes, which swarmed the camps in the summer months.1 At best, prisoners were treated as disposable economic units for the Soviet state. At worst, they were playthings of guards who killed them for their sport.2 In every case, the Gulag was designed to strip human beings of their dignity. Into that hell were thrown dissidents and ordinary citizens, poets and peasants. Among those who came out the other side was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
The astonishing thing about Solzhenitsyn is that he refused to define himself by the horrors of the camps. “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life,” he wrote in the book that made the Gulag famous worldwide.3 It’s a sentiment almost impossible to comprehend except, perhaps, as a way of making peace with injustice rather than being destroyed by it. Solzhenitsyn turned his experience into testimony. He never traded on his suffering, nor asked to be excused from ordinary judgment because of it. He simply bore witness to staggering human cruelty, showing us the worst of humanity, but also, through those who endured it, the best.
There are millions today suffering at the hands of others. From Christians in Nigeria to the women and girls of Afghanistan, these are people who know the real meaning of victimhood in a way few of us do. In 2012, Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by the Taliban for insisting that all girls have a right to education. She went on to campaign publicly, and at continued risk – a response so alien to our own moment that it almost sounds eccentric. Partly this is because we can’t imagine living under those conditions, but it’s also that we’ve grown used to a different response to suffering. Ours is a culture that incentivises taking a wound – sometimes real, often inflated – and placing it at the centre of our identities. If you’ve opened a newspaper today or scrolled social media, you’ve already seen countless examples: personal injuries displayed like medals, worn with defiant pride, and daring you to contradict the claim.
Philosopher Pascal Bruckner calls this victimisme (victimism): suffering converted from something to be overcome into a source of status, moral authority and power.4 We’re all victims of something because to live in this world is to suffer indignity and face injuries, real and imagined. Think back to the school bully, the neglectful teacher, or the boss who humiliated you in front of your peers. What if you could make these injuries into instruments within a moral system of blame? What if, rather than overcoming these injuries, you turned them into symbols of virtue and moral authority? Those who play this game and profit by it, Bruckner calls “victim entrepreneurs”.
None of which is to say that compassion is the problem per se, nor that victimhood is imaginary. One doesn’t have to endure the Gulag to be a victim. People are bullied, neglected, humiliated and destroyed in all sorts of ways that decent societies are morally obliged to notice – and decent people do notice. When someone in obvious distress tells you he’s been badly hurt, most of us are inclined to believe him and act on it, unless we have very good reason not to, or we’ve been conditioned out of it. The question is not whether suffering exists. It plainly does. The question is what happens when victimhood becomes the most reliable route to authority.
Here’s where liberalism comes in. Compassion wasn’t something added to liberal ideology by sixties hippies doing peace signs. It was there at its roots. Montaigne, writing in 1580, well before liberalism had a name, wrote that among all other vices “there is none I hate more than cruelty, both by nature and judgment, as the extremest of all vices”. Or take Adam Smith, the supposed paragon of self-interest, who established himself first as a moral philosopher, arguing that our moral ideas and actions are rooted in sympathy for others. Centuries later, philosopher Judith Shklar built an entire liberalism on that instinct, one that begins not with a vision of the highest good, but with the rejection of the worst evil.5 Do not start by deciding what the perfect society looks like, she argued. People who do that tend to build camps. Start instead by naming what no decent society may do. And the first thing it may not do is be cruel.
This is very much the liberal inheritance we recognise today, one that exists, before anything else, to shield the vulnerable from cruelty and arbitrary power. None of it will be news to the modern “liberal” in the American sense, who makes this the foundation of their politics. But hold the classical version in mind, because it goes far beyond shielding the sensitive from microaggressions. The classical liberalism of Locke and Mill is about protecting individual freedom from state tyranny – something the right would sign up to as hurriedly as the left signed up to compassion, but they are hardly unrelated. And it is these liberal virtues – compassion above all, and the regard for human dignity – that let victimism in through the back door.
Nietzsche put this down to a master-slave morality, in which the masters embodied all that was good: vitality, pride, and the capacity for action. Or, more precisely, the good was everything they embodied. What was bad was simply everything they were not. But because the weak couldn’t compete on these terms, they inverted the whole structure. Slave morality begins not with affirmation but with ressentiment, and takes its revenge where the weak can actually win: in the realm of values. Now the master’s qualities are reimagined as evil, while the qualities exalted are precisely those the powerless happen to possess: meekness, humility, pity, the turning of the other cheek. Powerlessness gets relabelled as virtue, and suffering becomes meaningful. It’s significant that slave morality cannot affirm itself directly; it needs monsters against which to define itself.
Nietzsche saw Christianity as the great historical triumph of this inversion, but there’s a modern version he couldn’t have imagined: slave morality running most freely among the safest, richest, and most insulated people who have ever lived. Their resentments are turned into policy by a diversity consultant drafting corporate speech codes from a corner office overlooking Central Park. Codes that begin in universities now filter out into every public institution in the land. There’s a multi-billion-dollar industry built on it.6
Liberalism has inherited and universalised something from the slave-morality lineage: concern for the weak and the dignity of the individual. But liberalism organised around the prevention of cruelty has to take all suffering seriously, from claims of systemic injustice to the colleague who “felt unsafe” after someone complimented her haircut. Once a society agrees that injury confers moral authority, it has created a currency. And currency invites counterfeiters.
In 2019, on a freezing night in Chicago, a TV actor left his apartment to buy a sandwich. He returned with a story that quickly made headline news. Two masked men, he claimed, had hurled racial and homophobic abuse at him. A noose was involved, bleach was in there, somehow, and his assailants were Trump supporters: “This is MAGA country”, they yelled. The story ticked every box in the progressive media’s platonic ideal of a news story: racism, homophobia, and especially a finger pointing the blame at Satan himself, Trump. It was perfect. Almost too perfect, you might say.
Sure enough, details soon emerged that didn't quite add up. It was one of the coldest nights of the Chicago winter (around −23°C). The probability that two attackers would be loitering on a residential street at 2 am, on the off chance of finding a target, seemed low. When the police arrived, the actor – Jussie Smollett – was still wearing the noose he claimed was put around his neck. Gradually, it became obvious that far from being a botched lynching, the actor had written an improbable script too far-fetched for a TV show, let alone real life. The attackers were not white supremacists but two black brothers who knew him personally. Money had changed hands. Smollett understood his target audience perfectly, and it was their eagerness to believe it, rather than the plausibility of his account, that made it headline news. Smollett presumably saw an opportunity to elevate his status from mere actor to something the culture would prize above almost anything: the certified victim of a Trumpian hate crime.
Smollett is Solzhenitsyn in reverse. One man endured the camps of a totalitarian state and declined to put grievance at the centre of his identity. The other man invented a persecution, understanding that in a certain kind of liberal democracy, persecution had become a career asset.
Smollett is perhaps the most spectacular version of victimhood culture, but it operates in the same way in everyday life. Imagine you’re at a work meeting. Someone is challenged on a point of fact, and they respond with the magic words: “As someone who has experienced…”. They don’t even need to finish the sentence; it’s already done its work. The matter is no longer the fact under discussion, but whether you’re the sort of person who would continue to press a wounded colleague for evidence. Few among us take that route because the penalties can be severe.
Sometimes the injury is real. That’s what makes the manoeuvre so hard to contend with. Our person at that meeting may genuinely have endured cruelty, but they might also be using that experience to manipulate others. Modern victimism depends on our reluctance to press against others’ wounds, even when those wounds bear no obvious relevance to the matter at hand. We’ve been trained to think that questioning the use of suffering is the same as denying the suffering itself. It feels indecent.
This is why victimism is not an ideology but a technique. Ideologies have doctrines, histories, and sacred texts. Techniques don’t require a belief system, only usefulness. A left-wing activist and a right-wing identitarian may hate each other’s principles, assuming either still has principles, but both can learn the same trick of presenting themselves as injured and obtaining permission to do things that would otherwise look ugly.
It’s also why it travels across tribes with such ease. The left is already beholden to notions of collective grievance: classes, races, genders, and so on. There are often real and legitimate grievances here. But victimism is extremely amenable to this, because once you claim to be the victim of structural racism, say, it’s almost impossible to deny the particular instance without denying the broader historical claim. The right, meanwhile, might show contempt for this manoeuvre, prizing stoicism, responsibility, and self-command – and, at its best, it embodies these things. But it’s also discovered that grievance is too useful to leave to the other side. The left has personalised its politics until every disagreement becomes an injury. The right has discovered that anti-victimhood is more persuasive when delivered in the voice of victimhood. It’s how anti-white racism – a legitimate complaint – comes to work as a precise mirror of the anti-racist activism it despises, putting a grievance at the heart of an identity, and at its margins the inevitable emergence of white supremacist movements. Both sides accuse the other of weaponising victimhood, and both are right. When social psychologists use the term “competitive victimhood” to describe situations in which both sides in a conflict argue over who has suffered more, this is exactly what they mean.
Hamas understands all this better than the Westerners who march for them. They supply the left with a ready-made oppressor-oppressed framework, with Palestinians the victims of an evil regime. For the identitarian right, they provide a scapegoat for their own ills. It’s one grievance, bought wholesale by two tribes who agree on nothing else but the cause of their own victimhood. As Nietzsche put it, “Someone must be to blame for the fact that I do not feel well”. Today, for many in the West, that someone is the Jew.
It’s tempting to think victimism is the result of social media, and there’s certainly some truth in that.7 But it goes deeper, as we’ve seen. It’s written into the Christian inheritance and secularised through liberalism. When someone fakes a wound for advantage, the only thing that could catch them out is suspicion – the willingness to look at a claim of injury and ask, “Is this real?” But turn that same suspicion on someone genuinely hurt, and scepticism becomes cruelty.
This is the back door of liberalism that moral fraud depends on. But it’s also the only door through which the genuinely persecuted can pass. You can’t close it to the fraudster without shutting out the true victim. Nobody wants to stand guard and demand evidence of suffering in the moment it’s declared. When a man tells us he’s been racially abused, most of us will believe him, because we are decent and can’t imagine telling the same lie. When a breathless man on the ground tells us he’s been stabbed, our instinct is the same: to do the right thing. But it’s precisely that instinct which moral fraud trades on, and the more decent we are, the higher the profits. This is liberalism’s tragedy and its betrayal: the thing being exploited is the thing worth keeping.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spent eight years in the Soviet Gulag because he’d criticised Stalin in a private letter. Stalin himself had spent time in Siberian exile as a young man, put there by another cruel regime. The revolution he helped bring about, and the regime he eventually led for decades, didn’t consider itself cruel. It saw itself as an instrument of the wronged – the proletariat rising against its oppressors; the slaves victorious at last over their masters.
The grievance came first. The camps came after.
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