Quote of the day—Jonathan Chait

On the left, victimhood is a prime source of authority, and discourse revolves around establishing one’s intersectional credentials and detailing stories of mistreatment that reinforce them. Within the ecosystem of the left, demonstrating that you have suffered harassment or microaggressions is a big win. But among the country as a whole, the dynamic is very different.

Jonathan Chait
April 22, 2018
Democrats Have Great Female Presidential Candidates. They Need to Avoid the Victim Trap.
[The Brady Campaign and other anti-gun organizations repeatedly make this error. Apparently they don’t seem to understand that when they use someone who was shot in a mass shooting as their spokesperson they are not presenting someone who is an authority on solutions regarding those type of events. The truth is they are being represented by someone who is an expert victim with no experience as a victor.—Joe]

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6 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Jonathan Chait

  1. There’s another point. There is a real difference between a person who is a victim, reports on the events in question, and then goes on with his life. It’s a very different matter to be a “professional victim”, a person whose paycheck comes from promoting his victim status. Worse still is when the victim status is pretense but the payoff is all too real — Al Sharpton is one classic example of that kind of weasel.

    • To be fair, I’m pretty sure Sharpton could be used as an example for many kinds of weasel.

    • Actually, that third type is best described as “professional victim pimp”. Sharpton and Mark Kelly are good examples.

  2. Grievances are the currency of the left. If you’re not wealthy in grievances, or a skilled grievance miner, you have nothing to offer that system.

    That is true of course, only so long as we’re still in the demoralization/agitation/revolution stages. Once the Normalization stage is reached, those with grievances will no longer be needed and so they’ll be among the first to be eliminated.

    • The best lines from Ms MacDonald’s speech are:
      “Any female student who thinks she needs a female professor in order to envision a scientific career has declared herself a follower rather than a pioneer—and a follower based on a characteristic that is irrelevant to intellectual achievement. Marie Curie did not need female role models to investigate radioactivity. She was motivated by a passion to understand the world. That should be reason enough for anyone to plunge headlong into the search for knowledge.”

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