Wokescolds, tribal victimhood identities, and class enemies

The Return of Ancient Prejudices, by Victor Davis Hanson, surveying the political and social landscape:

What is behind the rebirth of these old prejudices? In short, new, evolving prejudices.

First, America seemingly no longer believes in striving to achieve a gender-blind, racially and religiously mixed society, but instead is becoming a nation in which tribal identity trumps all other considerations.

Second, such tribal identities are not considered to be equal. Doctrinaire identity politics is predicated on distancing itself from white males, Christians and other groups who traditionally have achieved professional success and therefore enjoyed inordinate “privilege.”

Third, purported victims insist that they themselves cannot be victimizers. So, they are freer to discriminate and stereotype to advance their careers or political interests on the basis of anything they find antithetical to their own ideologies. ...

And what fuels the return of American bias is the new idea that citizens can disparage or discriminate against other groups if they claim victim status and do so for purportedly noble purposes.

And what might those "noble purposes" be? IMO, they call come down to dependency on the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of "class enemies."

Beria was Stalin's chief of internal security. He said quite simply that anyone could be arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced without knowing anything about him or her except their Communist class identity. This idea is waxing strong in America today:

One of the echoes of Marxism that continues to reverberate today is the idea that truth resides in class (or sex or race or erotic orientation). Truth is not something to be established by rational inquiry, but depends on the perspective of the speaker. In the multicultural universe, a person’s perspective is “valued” (a favorite word) according to class. Feminists, blacks, environmentalists and homosexuals have a greater claim to truth because they are “oppressed.” 

Favored classes have the virtue of having "revolutionary truth" ascribed to them, while unfavored classes have no redeeming virtue within or redemption without.

Party members signed death warrants for “enemies of the people” knowing that the accused were innocent, but believing in the correctness of the charges. In the 1930s,collective guilt justified murdering millions of Russian peasants. As cited by Robert Conquest in The Harvest of Sorrow (p. 143), the state’s view of this class was, “not one of them was guilty of anything; but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything.” 

As, for example, Caucasians and the concept of "while privilege." Inveighing charges against class enemies is the "noble purpose" behind the nearly-countless victimization hoaxes being perpetrated today. But the hoaxes continue - Jussie Smollett's arrest and potential prosecution do not signal the end. Why? Because, as Quillette explains,

[I]f you don’t follow conservative media, you may not have a sense of how often stories of hate crimes turn out to be false or a sense of what the false cases tend to look like.

Even fairly incompetent hoaxes might therefore succeed, which brings us to our second point: Hate crime hoaxes aren’t hard to pull off.

Especially with a compliant mainline media and Left-wing political establishment that wants the hoaxers' claims to be true.

No segment of American society is off limits for striking against class enemies. Recently, the Southern Baptist Church was stricken with details of child sexual abuse and assault made public, committed by some church workers and some pastors. That such acts deserve investigation and punishment surely needs no justification. But according to Stephanie Krehbiel, there is a class of church member who simply needs to be quiet, namely men. All men. Because an individual Baptist man may have abused or assaulted no one and so be personally innocent of anything -- except being a member of a class that is guilty of everything.

I covered earlier that we are seeing the the birth and growth of a new kind of social dynamic that never existed before: the victimhood culture. It never existed before because its birth and growth depend on social media and its enabling of instant tribal grouping across and without regard to bloodlines.

As Quillette explains,

... the third thing to know is that hate crime hoaxes thrive in a culture of victimhood. We use the term victimhood culture to refer to a new moral framework that differs from the older cultures of honor and dignity. Honor culture refers to a morality that revolves around physical bravery. In honor cultures one’s reputation is important, and it might be necessary to engage in violence to protect it. In the dignity cultures that replaced honor cultures, morality more often revolves around the idea that people have equal moral worth. Insults and slights don’t lower one’s status as they do in honor cultures, and people can ignore many minor offenses and go to the police and courts for more serious ones. Victimhood culture, which is in its most extreme form among campus activists, is different from both honor and dignity cultures. Its morality revolves around a narrative of oppression and victimhood, with victimhood acting as new kind of moral status, much like honor was a kind of moral status in many traditional societies.

Something like a hate crime hoax would make no sense in an honor culture. You might falsely accuse someone of insulting you so that you have a chance to display your honor, but you’d be trying to get them to engage in a duel or some other kind of fight. You’d be trying to demonstrate strength, to show you can handle your conflicts on your own. The last thing you’d want to do is claim to be a victim in need of help. Hate crime hoaxes make a little more sense in a dignity culture. Hate crimes are offenses against dignity, and perhaps you’d have something to gain by falsely claiming victimhood. But in a moral world less focused on praising victims and demonizing the privileged, the benefits are lesser and skepticism is greater.

It is in a victimhood culture that hate crime hoaxes are most attractive.

As I wrote before,

Victimhood culture is literally childish. It is a dynamic that resides at elementary-grade level, although, as the professors explain, college students today are far more adept and energetic in it than small kids.

 A better explanation of how the child-students in college today practice this is given by Rod Dreher in "Life Among The Wokescolds," in which he recounts what a college professor-friend related.

In one of my classes yesterday we were talking about current events, and a student mentioned that the soldier in the famous Times Square kissing photo had died. “Yes,” I said. “Too bad. Such a beautiful image, and such a moment of joy.” One of my least favorite students, a smug know-it-all in the back row, piped up. “You actually like that photo?” she said. “Well, yeah,” I replied, a bit taken aback. “That’s an iconic image of a moment of unbridled joy.”

“And do you think she consented to that kiss?” she said icily. “No, no she did not. That is a photo of an assault. That man should have gone to jail.”

Now, this happens with some regularity in classes these days. I don’t use Twitter, but I’m familiar with the term “wokescold,” and it’s incredibly accurate. Most of my students are just pure scolds. They’re deeply puritanical (though they have no idea who the Puritans were, given their virtually nonexistent awareness of history). ...

It seems to me that totalitarianism is not arriving in the U.S. via the stern face of Big Brother staring down from the screen. It’s coming from the college student who says we shouldn’t view a photo of pure, untrammeled joy. And the thing is that they can’t see that joy, not just because they’re puritans, but because they have no historical consciousness. They have no sense of what so many Americans sacrificed in the years leading up to that famous kiss because they never really learned it. ... 

... We are crazy if we don’t think for one second that the things we consider good and just today will be denounced as oppressive in 30 years. To say that we shouldn’t look at an image that shows the joy of having just defeated the f’ing Nazis is just insanity.

My students are generally pleasant, but they’re never any fun. Where’s the joy in their lives? They live to denounce. It’s like having 25 Robespierres around you three times a week. They’re always on the lookout for something to be outraged about. 

 I'd love to have some fine ending, full of hope and promise. But I do not. As Notre Dame Prof. Patrick Daneen wrote,

Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West.

Hard to put a happy face on that. Want to watch the perpetual infantilism of our children in action? The consider no more than Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein's visit by elementary school kids and adults where she encountered wokescolds of all ages.


Update: Commentary: Politicized Schools Are Radically Transforming Our Nation. Well, as Prof. Daneen said, that's what the education establishment considers its most important goal.