Embracing Victimhood

T
here’s an altercation now ongoing among conservative pundits, sparked by an essay by New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari attacking what he called “David French-ism,” a reference to National Review writer David French.

Briefly, Ahmari, an Iranian convert to Catholicism, sees conservatives and religious Americans as under siege, having been “coercively squeezed out of the public square” by hostile progressive forces uninterested in compromise and comity. This requires fighting back with “war and enmity”  and recognizing that “civility and decency are secondary values.”

Much has already been written in response to Ahmari, but I want to focus on something political scientist Greg Weiner wrote at the conservative site The Bulwark. He identifies in the Ahmari approach “a foundational, and unbecoming, principle of intellectual Trumpism: the politics of victimhood.” The irony, says Weiner, is that

this is precisely the sort of siege mentality — guarding the sacralized status of victim and the political entitlements… that the right used to mock in the identity politics of the left.