This Third Worldism coincided with the countercultural hostility to the dominant worldview of Western societies. Yet it was a hostility to the old order that never acquired a systematic political existence to the point where it could generate its own ideology or pose a serious alternative to the status quo. Indeed, the cultural conflicts over lifestyles and values that erupted in the 1960s and gained momentum in the 1970s did not turn into the interwar anti-parliamentary movements that some feared. Instead, the personal-is-political logic of the counterculture led it towards the embrace of identity politics, which meant a move ‘away from mass constituencies to single-issue campaigns’ (1).
Although expressed through a radical rhetoric of liberation and empowerment, the shift towards identity politics was conservative in impulse. It was a sensibility that celebrated the particular and which regarded the aspiration for universal values with suspicion. Hence the politics of identity focused on the consciousness of the self and on how the self was perceived. Identity politics was, and continues to be, the politics of ‘it’s all about me’.
Even when self-identity was expressed in group form, it was driven by the imperative of winning the recognition of others (2). As the historian Tony Judt noted, the doctrines that were developed to express the politics of identity were directed towards psychology and were often indifferent to the ‘traditional projects of social revolution’. Indeed, ‘they sought to undermine the very concept of the human subject that had once underlain them’ (3).
The emergence of different identity-based groups during the 1970s mirrored the lowering of expectations on the part of the left. This new sensibility was most strikingly expressed by the so-called ‘cultural turn’ of the left. The focus on the politics of culture, on image and representation, distracted the left from its traditional interest in social solidarity. And the most significant feature of the cultural turn was its sacralisation of identity. The ideals of difference and diversity had displaced those of human solidarity.
Phase three: The convergence of identity with victimhood
One of the most momentous developments in the history of identity politics was its convergence during the 1970s with the emerging politics of victimhood. This was not accidental. Both trends expressed the crisis of confidence of the left.
During the 1960s and 1970s, liberal and radical politics underwent a major transformation. Radicalism became exhausted and less and less invested in the project of social transformation. During this period, many of the left’s traditional allies came to be characterised as victims of the system. A similar pattern was in evident in the women’s movement. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, feminists argued vehemently against the representation of women as victims. By the late 1970s, however, this perspective had been fundamentally revised. Campaigns now stressed the woman as victim – battered, violated and raped. The left, too, regarded suffering as an important resource for mobilising a constituency behind its causes.
During the 1970s the meaning of victimisation was radically revised. Initially, the victim tended to be portrayed as the victim of a specific experience — for example, a victim of crime. However, during the 1970s, the meaning of victimisation expanded to encompass the experiences of a variety of different groups. This new approach also sought to transform the meaning of victimisation: it was no longer an exceptional form of harm suffered by an individual; it was also a condition integral to an unjust society. Through the redefinition and expansion of the victim experience, different groups claimed that being victims of society was a fundamental feature of their identity.
The redefinition of victim identity was self-consciously promoted by a new cohort of activists, who regarded their campaigns as a new form of radical politics. A comparison of the first edition of William Ryan’s classic Blaming The Victim, published in 1971, with his 1976 edition is telling. The main thesis of Blaming The Victim was that in the US, victims of inequality – black people, for example – were unfairly blamed for the problems facing society. Ryan offered a populist anti-capitalist thesis, which indicted not the criminal, but the system for its victimisation of people. By the time Ryan wrote the introduction to his 1976 thesis, his image of the victim had become far more expansive than it had been in 1970. He remarked:
‘Since 1970, I have also enlarged my vision of who the “victims” in American society really are. I had been focusing on the plight of the poor and of blacks. In fact, everyone who depends for the sustenance of himself and his family on salary and wages, and who does not have a separate source of income through some substantial ownership of wealth, is a potential victim in America.’ (4)
The thesis that virtually everyone outside the ruling elite was a potential victim suggested that, far from being an exceptional experience, victimisation was part of the existential reality of American culture.
A pervasive sense of victimisation was probably the most distinct cultural legacy of this era. The authority of the victim was ascendant. Sections of both the left and the right endorsed the legitimacy of the victim’s authoritative status. This meant that victimhood became an important cultural resource for identity construction. At times it seemed that everyone wanted to embrace the victim label. Competitive victimhood quickly led to attempts to create a hierarchy of victims. According to a study by an American sociologist, the different movements joined in an informal way to ‘generate a common mood of victimisation, moral indignation, and a self-righteous hostility against the common enemy – the white male’ (5). Not that the white male was excluded from the ambit of victimhood for long. In the 1980s, a new men’s movement emerged insisting that men, too, were an unrecognised and marginalised group of victims.
The range of hitherto unexceptional experiences reclassified as victimising expanded throughout the 1980s and 1990s. For example, groups of circumcised men in Britain and the US claimed that they had been mutilated and psychologically damaged by what is one of the earliest operations recorded in history. The National Organization to Halt the Abuse and Routine Mutilation of Males (NOHARMM) claimed to speak on behalf of the ‘victims of circumcision’. ‘We are all adult men who believe that we have been harmed by circumcision carried out in childhood by doctors in Britain’, wrote a group of 20 men in a letter published in the British Medical Journal in 1996 (6). Their claim to victim status was based not so much on the physical but the alleged psychological harm of this otherwise routine operation. They seek to restore the foreskin because it is ‘therapeutic for men’. As two campaigners argued, ‘[restoration of the foreskin] improves body image, improves self-esteem, dispels feelings of victimisation, and empowers men to make choices about their own sexuality’ (7).
Phase four: The therapeutic ethos of identity politics
A key innovation in the construction of the victim in the 1970s was its representation of the victim as blameless. Indeed, one of the most widely used rhetorical devices of victim advocates was to dismiss any querying of an individual’s or a group’s claims as ‘blaming the victim’. Radical criminologists argued that unfair blame was attached not only to victims of crime but to all disadvantaged people. Ryan’s Blaming the Victim (1971) played an important role in delegitimising any questions raised about the claims of victim advocates.
The notion of the ‘blameless victim’ endowed self-proclaimed victims with moral authority. Consequently, over time, the victim identity came to be seen almost as sacred. As one study observed, ‘victim’ was increasingly used as a moral concept. ‘Being a victim implies a certain degree of innocence or blamelessness, so that the victim is not held responsible for his or her fate’, wrote Frank Weed (8).
Advocates of victim culture did not only argue that their constituency was blameless, but also that victims had to be believed. The presumption of victims’ credibility picked up momentum in relation to the victimisation of children. The exhortation to ‘believe the child’ was swiftly followed by the preposterous claim that ‘children do not lie’. In recent decades, the mantra of ‘believe the victim’ has become institutionalised to the point where those accused of a misdeed are presumed to be guilty until they can prove their innocence. That is why those raising awareness, and expanding the definition, of sexual harassment, bullying and microaggression contend that what matters is whether or not the ‘victims’ believe they were victimised rather than the actual intentions of those whom they are accusing. This speaks to an important psychological turn in identity politics.
Victimhood provided identity politics with moral authority. Political movements that were hitherto committed to liberation and social transformation began to perceive and present themselves as victim groups. They deployed the exhortation ‘believe the victim’ as an argument for respect and validation. The argument that victims were blameless was reframed as a claim that a particular identity group’s version of reality could not be subjected to questioning or debate.
Outwardly, the latest version of identity politics – which is distinguished by a synthesis of victim consciousness and concern with therapeutic validation – appears to have little in common with its 19th-century predecessor. However, in one important respect it represents a continuation of the particularist outlook and epistemology of 19th-century identitarians. Both versions insist that only those who lived in and experienced the particular culture that underpins their identity can understand their reality. In this sense, identity provides a patent on who can have a say or a voice about matters pertaining to a particular culture.
Increasingly, advocates of identity politics assert that there are matters on which only women or gay people can speak. Cultural and identity-related boundaries have solidified and are now intensively policed. A ‘Keep Out’ sign often greets individuals who appear to question the monopoly that cultural entrepreneurs have over the understanding of their identity. Those who dare intrude into a designated cultural space are denounced as exploitative practitioners of ‘cultural appropriation’.
The dogma of believing the victim has been recycled as an argument for closing down discussion on any matter that identitarians find offensive. From their standpoint, any criticism of the causes promoted by identitarians is a cultural crime. The obligation to believe and not criticise individuals claiming victim identity is justified on therapeutic grounds. Criticism is said to constitute a form of psychological re-victimisation and therefore causes psychic wounding and mental harm. This therapeutically informed argument against the exercise of critical judgement and free speech regards criticism as an attack not just on views and opinions, but also on the person holding them. The result is censorious and illiberal. That is why in society, and especially on university campuses, it is often impossible to debate certain issues.
The end of solidarity
Since its therapeutic turn, identity politics has come to be less focused on political and social issues than its 1960s and 1970s versions were. In its current form, identity politics directs its energy towards gaining validation and respect. Old-school identity politics targeted what it saw as political, economic and social barriers, and directed its energy towards overcoming discrimination. Though it was devoted to the promotion of group identities, its principal goal was the achievement of equality. No doubt it possessed powerful separatist tendencies and a self-referential outlook on the world, but, unlike the politics of identity today, it did not project its objectives through the psychological and narcissistic language of ‘it’s all about me’. For example, 1970s feminism fought to overcome the social barriers that prevented women from achieving equality with men. Feminists who demanded to be treated on the same terms as men are very different to ones who emphasise and elevate the differences between genders, and who demand safe spaces and protection from microaggressions and badly worded compliments.
One of the least noticed but most significant features of the current phase of identity politics is its tendency towards fragmentation and individuation. There is a growing tendency towards the proliferation of identity groups and towards separatism. Moreover, everyone wants a piece of the action. Since the eruption of controversy over cultural appropriation, all kinds of new actors have piled in to stake a claim to a patent on their culture. Groups that have stood on the sidelines of cultural politics have recently embraced the language and practices of identity politics. So Chinese university students have attempted to close down discussion on their government’s behaviour in Tibet on the grounds that they find it culturally insensitive and offensive; Muslim and Jewish students have demanded safe spaces; and some conservative students have demanded protection from verbal attacks on campuses. Indeed, with growing calls to protect ‘white identity’, identity politics has become a caricature of itself.
Some proponents of identity politics refer to one another as allies. However, the politics of culture has rarely allowed the forging of strong bonds between different groups, as today’s acrimonious dispute between feminists and trans activists shows. Human solidarity is one of the main casualties of identity politics. Once different groups retreat into their respective safe spaces, there will be little common ground left for those committed to the politics of solidarity and the ideal of universalism.
Frank Furedi is a sociologist and commentator. His latest book, Populism And The Culture Wars In Europe: The Conflict Of Values Between Hungary and the EU, is published by Routledge. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)
(1) Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, by Tony Judt , Random House, 2007, p486.
(2) On the politics of recognition, see Therapy Culture, by Frank Furedi, Routledge, 2004.
(3) Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, by Tony Judt , Random House, 2007, p479.
(4) Blaming The Victim, by W Ryan, Vintage Books, 1976, pxiii.
(5) ‘Multiculturalism, Political Correctness’, by M E Spencer, Sociological Forum, vol9, no4, p559.
(6) British Medical Journal, 10 February 1996, p377.
(7) ‘The Right to Our Bodies’, F Hodges and J Warner, MEN Magazine, November 1995.
(8) Certainty of Justice; Reform in the Crime Victim, FJ Weed, Aldine Transaction, 1995.
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