The Politics of Victimhood

943-dsNVL.AuSt.55Originally published by Defining Ideas

Gabby Giffords, the former Democratic Congressman from Arizona who was shot in the head at a campaign rally in 2010, has come under fire recently for exploiting her horrific experience for political gain. Using her celebrity as a famous victim of gun violence, Giffords has created a Super PAC, Americans for Responsible Solutions, focused on gun control legislation. Her group has produced political ads for Democratic candidates that feature other victims of gun violence, and that suggest the candidate’s opponent supports policies that contribute to such violence.

Even supporters of Giffords’ own party are uncomfortable with this electoral tactic. At Politico, Alex Isenstadt wrote recently that Giffords “has unleashed some of the nastiest ads of the campaign season, going after GOP candidates in Arizona and New Hampshire with attacks even some longtime supporters say go too far. And Republicans on the receiving end are largely helpless to hit back, knowing a fight with the much-admired survivor is not one they’re likely to win.”

Exploiting one’s personal experiences is, of course, nothing new in politics. Ancient Roman candidates were expected to show off their scars earned in fighting for Rome. Marc Antony fired up the Roman people after the assassination of Julius Caesar by brandishing his bloodstained and torn toga. During Reconstruction in the United States,  “waving the bloody shirt” became common among radical Republicans who used the casualties and suffering of the Civil War as a weapon against Southern Democrats.

In those cases, however, it was service and sacrifice in war that were used for political advantage. Today, any sort of suffering from any cause, especially on the part of those considered victims of historical oppression, is used to obscure rational discussion and debate with clouds of pathos and emotion.

The questionable assumption we often accept about suffering is that enduring terrible experiences automatically make one an expert on the broader issues related to the causes of suffering. That’s why like other public victims of gun violence, Giffords has spoken out as if her experience has made her an authority on gun policy. Thus she has attacked politicians for disagreeing with her on the issue of guns not by making a coherent argument, but by conjuring up her own experiences and sentimentalizing other victims of gun violence. Having created a fog of emotion, she then argues for policies, such as more restrictive background checks for those buying guns, even though there is no evidence that such procedures keep guns out of the hands of those determined to get them. After all, the man who shot Giffords had undergone a thorough background check. Worse yet, such emotionalism sets aside the critical Constitutional issue––the Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms.”

Focusing on any one citizen’s unfortunate experience obscures the fact that public policy affects millions of people with differing views on what aims we collectively pursue and put into law. Moreover, policy must adhere to the constitutional limits on government action and conform to existing law. The complex clash of conflicting beliefs and respect for the law requires clear, coherent thinking of the sort difficult to achieve when issues are clouded with emotion and sentiment. It also requires open deliberation and debate, which are short-circuited by indulgence of the ad misericordiam fallacy, the use of pity, compassion, or sympathy to entice, or browbeat, people into accepting a conclusion not earned by argument. Giffords indulged this fallacy last year when the Senate did not pass gun-control legislation she favored. Speaking of Senators who had voted against the bill, she later wrote, some “looked into my eyes as I talked about being shot in the head at point-blank range.” It may sound harsh, but as National Review’s Kevin Williamson writes, “Being shot in the head by a lunatic does not give one any special grace to pronounce upon public-policy questions.” Nor does it give one the expertise, knowledge, and sober arguments necessary for public political debate on contentious issues.

Another example of the deleterious effects of using personal experience to trump sober reasoning was Republican Senator John McCain’s campaign against waterboarding, in which he freely exploited his own harrowing experience of being brutally tortured as a prisoner of war for six years during the Vietnam conflict. The pathos and horror of that experience made it difficult for critics to appeal to the simple fact that waterboarding was not torture under the U.S. law defining torture.

Yet calling on his own experience at the hands of the North Vietnamese, McCain clouded this critical discussion with lurid emotional appeals to most people’s lack of knowledge about what defines torture in U.S. law, and to their understandable sympathy for McCain’s six years of suffering. As a result, McCain’s efforts gave bipartisan cover to President Obama, who on entering office issued Executive Order 13491, which forbade waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques that had successfully yielded actionable intelligence from enemies of the United States. As a result, our interrogation tools have been severely limited, which has lessened the value of capturing terrorists for interrogation. McCain’s remarkable fortitude and courage in surviving such an experience are worthy of our admiration, but they did not make him an expert on the legal complexities of interrogation, and the grim imperative to extract from terrorists information that could save lives.

Both Giffords and McCain personally suffered horribly so it’s understandable that their experiences would shape their responses to relevant political issues. Yet others use suffering by proxy as a political trump card. In particular, those endorsing identity politics depend on the historical suffering of their group in order to gain political leverage and foreclose deliberation and debate.

Proponents of identity politics define individuals by their race, ethnicity, or sex, which in turn are defined by a history of oppression and exclusion. This history casts members of those groups as victims, no matter how far removed they actually are from oppression today. As victims, then, these groups have grievances that they claim the larger society has a moral obligation to address, mainly in the form of various kinds of reparations, such as affirmative action, government transfers, or other government set-asides based on race or sex. In the political arena of deliberation and debate over policy, the emotions aroused by that historical suffering bestow a specious authority on the self-proclaimed victim, who now is beyond criticism or accountability for the coherence or validity of his arguments. Critics are instantly branded as “insensitive” or “uncaring” at best and “racist” or “sexist” at worst.

Attorney General Eric Holder has been a prominent example of this mentality. During his tenure, he aggressively has attacked states that have legislated voter identification requirements. In his retirement speech he said that protecting “voting rights” was his “top priority” as Attorney General, and he pursued this priority even after the Supreme Court upheld voter identification laws in their 2013 decision of Shelby vs. Holder. His efforts on this issue were predicated on the past history of Jim Crow era restrictions on black voters, a backbone of the segregation outlawed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Holder has consistently referred to that history of discrimination last practiced more than half a century ago. In a 2012 speech before the Council of Black Churches, he subtly linked the Jim Crow voting restrictions to the photo identification laws when he said that these “discriminatory” laws threaten “some of the achievements that defined the civil rights movement”—achievements that “now hang in the balance.” Later on he added, “We have to honor the generations that took extraordinary risks” to gain equal access to the polls, and warned, “this fight must go on.”

In July of this year, Holder repeated his commitment to this crusade: “I will not allow people to take away that which people gave their lives to give, and that is the ability for the American people to vote.” These references to the Civil Rights movement suggest that asking for a photo ID before voting is similar to the exclusionary legal restrictions such as literacy tests common in segregated states.

Supporters of Holder’s position have taken the same tact. Commenting on Florida’s pending voter ID legislation in 2012, the Advancement Project warned, “We are particularly concerned about the impact of this election year’s voter removal practice on eligible voters of color protected under the Voting Rights Act, given Florida’s documented history of erroneous discriminatory purges in the past.” The suffering of blacks during the Jim Crow period, which included lynching, legal exclusion, and everyday incidents of brutality and humiliation, has become a proxy for what in fact is, under state law, the mild inconvenience of acquiring a photo ID necessary for scores of other public transactions.

Like Giffords and McCain, Holder also appeals to personal experience. His sister-in-law was one of the students who in 1963 desegregated the University of Alabama, as Governor George Wallace famously blocked the “schoolhouse door.” Linking his own political efforts to this family history and iconic moment in the Civil Rights movement enhances Holder’s authority and provides cover for his constitutionally dubious and politically partisan efforts against red-state governments. Similarly, like many affluent and powerful blacks, Holder is fond of referencing personal experiences, such as being pulled over by the police for no reason, to gain some credibility as a victim of ongoing racism.

By using suffering as a political trump card, people like Holder not only cloud sober debate with sentiment and emotion, but also shut the debate down by accusing critics of being racists attempting to undo the achievements of the Civil Rights movement. In July of this year, Holder leveled this charge against those protesting his arguably radical politicization of the Department of Justice: “There’s a certain level of vehemence, it seems to me, that’s directed at me [and] directed at the president,” Holder told ABC. “You know, people talking about taking their country back. . . . There’s a certain racial component to this for some people. I don’t think this is the thing that is a main driver, but for some there’s a racial animus.”

Some of Holder’s supporters are less restrained. Michael Eric Dyson, a professor at Georgetown University, recently claimed that Holder has “weathered the storm of an enormous racial backlash against black people in power at the top,” and has had to endure “vicious and acrimonious, if you will, articulations by people in the Senate” disturbed by “American power in a black man.” Such ad hominemsmears short-circuit a public discussion of the issues and policies Holder and others pursue.

The trump card of suffering might be politically useful, but using it is a dishonest tactic that inhibits informed deliberation and debate. Relying on emotion and sentiment, no matter how understandable they are as a response to suffering, have since ancient Athens been the agents of bad policies and dangerous political decisions, and tactics for pursuing political advantage at the expense of the public good. They have no place in our already conflicted and divisive public political discourse.

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  • frances951

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  • UCSPanther

    Gabby Giffords gets shot by a schizophrenic madman who should have been taken off the streets sooner, then goes on a crusade to collectively punish law-abiding firearms owners for a crime committed by a lone madman, and does so in a disgusting belch of rotten politics and hypocrisy.

    Pretty much sums up that little chapter…

    • Patriot077

      Yes, and all the while, forgetting 9 year old Christina Green’s father specifically asking that his daughter’s killing in the same incident not be used as a political wedge to force gun control legislation.
      And somehow failing to ever mention the killing of a very decent constitutional US District Judge in that incident, Judge John Roll.
      God forgive me, at this point, I have no respect whatever left for Giffords. And very little sympathy. She should be grateful she lived. Six did not. Pity she doesn’t use that to work to improve our understanding and treatment of the mentally ill instead of trying to take self defense away from law abiding citizens.

    • Yehuda Levi

      The left argues with emotion, the right with reason.

      What differentiates human beings from all other animals on the planet is our ability to reason. Decisions about gun control and every other political issue should be decided by using that wonderful tool, not emotion.

      Emotion is important, but one should not make political decisions based on it.

      • UCSPanther

        Dead on.

  • DaveGinOly

    Gabby Giffords, et al, don’t understand the difference between the exercise of a right and the commission of a crime. The exercise of a right never intentionally harms an innocent party, while a crime is an act that intentionally harms an innocent party – they couldn’t be more separate and distinct. But when gun-controllers talk about “limiting access to guns” they are nearly always talking about interfering with the exercise of a right, something that by definition threatens no one, and not talking about punishment for the criminal misuse or firearms, or even measures that would prevent their criminal misuse. Even SCOTUS, when it says that the right is subject to “regulation,” confuses the exercise of a right with acts that intentionally cause harm to innocent persons. Why does an act (the exercise of a right) that is intrinsically harmless to innocent people require any “regulation” at all? What purpose does regulation of the law-abiding serve? Because the law-abiding make up the vast majority of the population, the inescapable conclusion is that the purpose of gun control (and similar laws) is to control the people in general, and not intended to control the criminal minority in particular.

    • UCSPanther

      Not only that, but gun control crusaders often want to violate the right to not be subject to unreasonable search and seizure, the right to property ownership and the right to not be a victim of collective punishment for the acts of madmen, criminals and other assorted killers.

    • Servo1969

      Yes, that’s what it always boils down to-
      Because a crazy person shot someone with a gun I shouldn’t be allowed to own one.
      That’s pretty much it.

      • kcsummer

        Too bad they don’t give equal time to incidents such as the horrendous Oklahoma beheading – there would have been two or more victims had not someone been present who used his weapon to stop the assault. Too bad he didn’t get there in time to save both ladies – still – they ignore this kind of thing all the time. They have SELECTIVE and SELF-SERVING recall.

    • Gee

      I believe one of your Presidents said it best.

      “I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.” -James Madison

  • herb benty

    Gabby’s liberalism and the thought that human evil can be eliminated by limiting freedom and liberty are both wrong, and should not be listened to.

  • catherineinpvb

    /”Republicans on the receiving end are largely helpless to hit back, knowing a fight with the much-admired survivor is not one they’re likely to win.”/

    Tired of Repubs themselves, playing themselves as ‘helpless victims’. Yes, they CAN do something. . .start with the truth of the matter – and so change the Dem narrative; and stay on it. Republican ‘Leadership’ demands the truth; as does all voting contsituencies. . . .

    They can start. . .’With all due respect’. (They can begin with a lesson on how Political Correctness, can undermine an entire culture and nation; something a gun, cannot do. That false narratives are more damning; than any citizen, owning a gun.)

    • kcsummer

      Well there are two choices then, using your scenario – they can just stand down or they can fight back and POSSIBLY not prevail. Isn’t it better to at least TRY? “Predicting” the outcome of things like impeachment or border control has lead republican idiots to think they better not “do that” because the wrath it stirs up MIGHT overwhelm them. DOING NOTHING, “going along” because “maybe” we might get burned is STUPID. At least fight for geez sake, grow a spine and a couple of cajones – either that or resign your jobs because you are now incapable, being spineless, of doing what you were elected to do

  • EaglesNest

    With all due respect, if she can prove that her position would have prevented her own shooting, it might bear a moment to listen. The problem is; she cannot. This is the question the Republicans need to respectfully ask: Can she prove that the gun control measures she is pushing for would have certainly prevented her attacker from shooting her? The answer is – no.

  • bigbiz2

    Just cant fix stupid…even with a bullet to the head..

  • tagalog

    If Gabby Giffords thinks her agenda is going to be followed in this election year, she’s got a hole in her head!

    Oops, sorry.

  • Mad Dog

    Now that she’s brain damaged, she’s a batter Democrat than ever.

  • Danny Noonan-Miss

    Gabby Giffords was shot by a left-wing lunatic who was a mentally disturbed former volunteer of hers. So many of these copy-cat shootings (and that is what these are about even though the media does not mention copy cats anymore in their rush to outlaw guns) are done by Leftists who’ve become disgruntled with society or something to that affect. Maybe we should outlaw Leftists from every having a gun, but to try and outlaw everyone from having a gun is just plan stupidity.

  • Nabukuduriuzhur

    The Lord rebuke Giffords in Jesus’ Name.

    Why? Because she’s suffered, so she wants others to suffer like she has. That is about as evil as it gets.

    • herb benty

      The godless left are wide open for the enemy, as they don’t believe there is an enemy!

  • Biff Henderson

    Who’s the victim?

  • 1970greenie

    Regarding voter ID, if it is the ability to vote that is truly the issue then simply organize an effort to obtain ID for those who do not have it. If, however, the real issue is the ability to foster voter fraud then voter ID would be a bad idea.