Psychologist and psychoanalyst Michael Bader, writing in this morning's Salon.com about the right-wing's manufactured victimhood and grievance, highlights the narrative that the far-right has adopted, and which also provides the Malignant Loser fuel for his fascistic MAGA movement. An excerpt:
"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." (our emphasis)
The right-wing's victimization narrative that they push to their malleable audience provides a justification for them taking illegal actions (i.e. January 6, voter intimidation, threats against public officials) since they're justified by the false "patriotic" ends in their confused minds (a white Christian nation, gun obsessed, intolerant and isolated in the world). It's a way of co-opting the actual victims of an unjust system, and cloaking themselves with righteous anger and revenge. Bader observes:
"Broadly speaking, progressives have identified with victims and fought to defend and care for them. Modern conservatives like Trump and [Tucker] 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." (our emphasis)
We'll keep hearing lines from the Malignant Loser like "I am your retribution" and other pretensions of being injured unfairly during the 2024 elections and beyond. His audience eats it up, having been conditioned by years, decades, of being told by the right-wing media they're the actual victims of society, not the poor family living on food stamps and dwindling hope.
