The culture and politics of victimhood
Why is the right acting like they are victims of the world
A core premise of the woke leftist worldview is that Western society is structurally racist, and systematically oppresses women and other minorities. Discrimination, whether conscious or not, is ubiquitous and reinforces a rigid hierarchy between different groups - defined via collective identities. All group-level inequalities are a function of structural discrimination. A focus on eradicating supposed injustices and discrimination wherever they identify such is the primary motive of the woke left. As women, blacks, gays, and other minorities have been longstanding victims of structural oppression, reverse discrimination is justified. A ‘tit for tat’ strategy is advocated by the woke.
A core premise of the conservative worldview is that the right is being persecuted by academia, the mainstream media, corporate America, “globalists”, Hollywood, “big tech”, and increasingly even by the criminal justice system. Self-radicalising to unprecedented extremes, even the electoral process itself targets conservatives, as can be seen in the claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. In other words, conservatives are systematically oppressed by elites. Fighting this injustice, even via antidemocratic means, is the priority. As Democrats and the elite have pursued a persistent vendetta against the right, ‘tit for tat’ against established institutions is justified.
If these political movements sound like mirror images of each other, this is exactly what they are [1]. I call this phenomenon “victimhood politics”. There exists a hierarchy of groups, whether defined by collective identity or via political ideology. Some group higher in this hierarchy than the ‘in group' (white men for wokes, Democrats for conservatives) maintains and polices this hierarchy, and indeed is the cause of this hierarchy. This ‘out group’ is the cause of all of the problems of the ‘in group’. Therefore, the solution is for the ‘in group’ to play ‘tit for tat’ against the elite ‘out group’. As we live in a zero-sum world, the prosperity of one group must necessarily come at the expense of another.
I believe that this culture of victimhood, and the resulting in vs out group dynamics observed via its implications for the political arena, explains much of what is happening in politics today. For instance, rising levels of affective polarisation over time is a natural consequence of victimhood politics rising in salience. If you blame the other for your problems, it is natural to hate them. Of course, victimhood politics is also the key driver of many of our challenges: the sustained battery against democratic norms and the rule of law by Republicans being one of them. The corrosive nature of wokeness for our core principles of free speech, colour-blindedness, and the primacy of the individual being another. I highly doubt that this culture of victimhood is optimal from a mental health standpoint either. Received, time-tested wisdom, from stoicism to its modern-day interpretations in CBT, stipulates that one should focus on what they can change and not be concerned with what they cannot change. Victimhood culture, blaming all of one’s problems on an exogenous group, preaches precisely the opposite.
So if the culture of victimhood yields such a poisonous effect on our institutions, our society, and our discourse, how might we address it? If, to invoke the Breitbart doctrine, victimhood politics is “downstream” from victimhood culture, what explains victimhood culture?
I believe that the conventional academic narratives blaming globalisation, economic inequality, racial resentment, etc. miss the mark. Indeed, the civil rights era of the 1960s saw unprecedented racial progress in America, at a time of wealth and income inequalities the left is nostalgic for. It also saw an unprecedented crime wave, and levels of civil unrest or political violence that dwarf the current levels. Most importantly, the ‘in vs out group’, ‘tit for tat', zero-sum nature of victimhood politics is the norm for less mature democracies and the hybrid regimes of the third-world. Hence, academic narratives biased towards the very recent decades of the West miss the full picture.
An overarching explanation for victimhood culture follows logically from evolutionary psychology. Humans have evolved to consider the world in terms of in vs out groups in a zero-sum contest, especially given that zero-sum really was the norm for most of human history. As such, victimhood culture is to be expected as an equilibrium. We must understand not what drives victimhood culture, but rather why it was not such a salient feature of Western politics until recently.
Consider an infinitely repeated NE game, analogous to the ones analysed by David Axelrod. Two players each have a choice to ‘cooperate’ or ‘defect’. Payoffs follow a prisoners’ dilemma logic, in that one player can gain if they choose ‘defect’ and the other ‘cooperate’, yet both lose out if they both defect relative to both cooperating. A tit for tat strategy generally arises in such games, yet can one ensure that the cooperative equilibrium is more likely? This is precisely what norms of cooperation aim to achieve. If both players subscribe to these shared norms, then each believes that the other is unlikely to deviate as a result. Hence, both are more likely to cooperate.
In this context, Western liberal democracy represents one such shared belief system. Indeed, the success (and stability) of liberal democracy is contingent on shared norms, such as the rule of law, accepting election results, and not adopting blatant lies as central for your discourse. By constraining some of humanity’s most malign primal urges, liberal democracy has been fundamental to the legacy of the Enlightenment, hence human progress itself. Norms and institutions matter for cooperation.
Nonetheless, if one player is perceived to ‘defect’, then the other player will ‘defect’ in a tit-for-tat strategy, hence resulting in the suboptimal NE. Our current polarisation, and the gradual erosion of our institutions and democratic norms, represents such an equilibrium in this context. Both the woke left and conservatives have perceived their '‘out group’ as deviating first, hence they will deviate in turn to punish their opponent.
In other words, victimhood politics, prevalent across most of the world and much of human history, has come to the West. How we avoid succumbing to a race to the bottom, I have yet an answer. However, a shared politics of victimhood and grievance is certainly inferior to the traditional shared beliefs in individual liberty, democracy, and the rule of law. How we rejuvenate the latter culture, to the expense of the former, is one of the most pressing challenges of our times in the political realm.
UPDATE (14/09/2025): Also it is worth mentioning the role of discounting here. If players assign a high discount rate to future periods, then they will be more likely to play as if the next round is the last round. In a finite game, both players will defect in the final period, as there are no further gains from cooperation. Both players also know that the rational strategy is for their opponent to defect in the final round, which renders cooperation in previous rounds redundant. Hence, via backwards induction, cooperation breaks down.
Another possibility in explaining the nascent victimhood culture on the right is that their discount rates have fallen, although there is no way to empirically measure this, so this thesis is merely speculative. I believe the personalities of political leaders are crucial here. Suppose that one impulsive (synonymous with a low discount rate), charismatic leader rises to dominate over one coalition. Suppose also that the leader himself is highly polarising, and promotes people around him on the basis of loyalty, whilst penalising those perceived to be disloyal. Over time, selection pressures will favour those with personalities similar to the leader, whilst repelling those with opposing personalities. The result: a movement dominated by people with low discount rates; a movement more likely to defect than cooperate. This is exactly what has happened with Trumpism and the Republican Party.
Taleb has coined the term “narrative fallacy” to denote the tendency to analyse historical events as deterministic; being caused by grand socioeconomic or ideological phenomena. In reality, many causes are stochastic in nature, and could not have been predicted ex-ante. We can only analyse the victimhood mentality on the right ex-post. So perhaps fundamental narratives of political ideology matter less than the burgeoning cult of personality around one man that drives conservative politics today? In explaining why the right has suddenly shifted from a cooperate to a defect strategy, I think that the downstream effects of the MAGA movement on conservative thought is the most convincing explanation. Conservative culture now rewards personalities with a low discount rate, which induces defection. In other words, Trump is utterly corrosive and poisonous for our institutions and civil society, which is what anyone who is not a MAGA sycophant already knows.
This is not to draw a false equivalence between the actions of the woke, and the assault on democracy and the rule of law from Republicans. However, the underlying worldviews of the two yield uncanny similarities.