The Victim:An Identity That Both Left & Right Found Irresistable

Why the Right and the Left Bear Joint Responsibility for the Politicisation of Victim Identity Part 2

Although the Left and Right disagree on most important issues they both worship the victim. Exploring how this has come about is the purpose of this essay.

Historically, the politicisation of the victim’s cause was most closely associated with conservative public figures. It was the influential law-and-order lobby—in both Britain and the US—that first pressed for new rights for victims. Promoters of right-wing law-and-order policies in the 1960s and 1970s argued that society had become too lenient towards criminals while ignoring the plight of the innocent. Early victim advocates insisted that the balance between the rights of the offender and those of the victim had to shift decisively towards the latter.

Critics of the justice system also fashioned a vocabulary that still dominates victim politics. They claimed that victims suffered ‘trauma’, ‘secondary victimisation’, or a ‘second wound’ through their treatment by the justice system itself. Victimisation was increasingly represented as a deeply personal psychological experience—one that rendered the victim invisible. That framing resonated with people who felt ignored by public institutions. Before long, such individuals were portrayed as the ‘silent majority’, whose interests politicians of various stripes claimed to champion.

Appeals to the silent majority became a central motif of Republican law-and-order campaigning in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1964, the victim surfaced as a prominent theme in the presidential campaign of the conservative Republican Barry Goldwater. But it was Richard Nixon who made fear of violent street crime a major focus of political debate. As the sociologist Frank Weed argued in his study of the American crime-victim movement, Nixon’s 1968 success in foregrounding law and order helped elevate the law-abiding, innocent victim into a key item on the public agenda.

It was conservative—not liberal—politicians who first demanded legislative initiatives to support crime victims. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration adopted the cause with particular zeal. Reagan was the first US president to proclaim a ‘Victims’ Week’, intended to widen public recognition of victims of crime. In 1982 he established the Presidential Commission on Victims of Crime and, four years later, launched the Family Violence Task Force. Reagan’s Task Force on Victims of Crime helped place the case for a federal constitutional amendment on the political agenda.

In Britain, the institutionalisation of official support for victims also occurred largely under Conservative Home Secretaries. During the Thatcher years, Victim Support developed close links with the Home Office and exercised considerable influence over policy. In 1986 it received a government grant of £9 million and became increasingly involved in delivering professional services. The Victims’ Charter, published in 1990 by the Major government, illustrates the significance Conservatives attached to the issue.

Yet although the victim issue rose to prominence in the Reagan–Thatcher era, it was never confined to the political right. Weed noted that the ‘crime-victims issue was one that all political factions could support’, and another American study concluded that ‘strange bedfellows’—liberals and conservatives alike—helped shape contemporary victim policy, under the guidance of the Reagan and Bush administrations.

If the right helped set the public-policy agenda, other pressure groups took the lead in shaping the cultural narrative of victimhood. Conservatives tended to define victimisation in relation to crime, and especially street crime. Feminist, leftist, and liberal activists broadened the term victim, helping to create a climate in which powerlessness itself could be interpreted through the prism of victimisation. By the 1990s, concepts such as ‘secondary’ and ‘indirect’ victimisation suggested that even tangential involvement in a distressing episode could be assimilated into a victim worldview.

For the political right, the victim offered a new point of contact with what it regarded as an alienated silent majority. Amid moral uncertainty—when traditional conservative values seemed threatened by the so-called permissive society—the victim became a potential focus for renewing civic solidarity. Lois Haight Herrington, an Assistant Attorney General during the Reagan administration and chairwoman of the Task Force on Victims of Crime, hoped that citizens’ responsibility towards victims would revitalise community. She warned that crime ‘atomises society’ by making people fearful and distrustful. To counter this divisive force, she argued, society needed to be “cemented” through shared values. From this standpoint, a moral stance against crime and public empathy for victims would strengthen ties to family and community. Sympathy for victims appeared to offer a route back to an elusive sense of social cohesion.

But conservatives were not alone in turning towards victimhood. The moral uncertainties of the right were mirrored by a crisis of confidence on the left. In the 1960s and 1970s, liberal and radical politics underwent a significant transformation: many groups once regarded as agents of change were increasingly cast as victims of the system. The women’s movement followed a similar trajectory. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, feminists often resisted representing women as victims. By the late 1970s that position had shifted. Campaigns began to foreground the woman victim—battered, violated, raped. Suffering, too, became a political resource.

Radical victim advocates accused conservative law-and-order ideology of ignoring the “real” victims of society. Yet they largely accepted the newly constructed narrative of victimhood, disputing not its premises but its allocation: who, precisely, qualified as a genuine victim. Victimology was less challenged than politicised. Political forces began to contest which experiences entitled people to the status of victim, turning victim identity into a moral and political prize.

In the early 1970s, the American radical criminologist Richard Quinney observed that who counts as a victim depends on political perspective. What was at stake, he suggested, was not merely analysis but morality itself. Quinney argued that a narrow focus on crime victims preserved the status quo while obscuring the many victims of the system. He called for an expanded image of victimisation: not only the victims of crime, but the victims of police force, war, the ‘correctional’ system, state violence, and oppression of any kind.

This broadened conception aligned with liberal, leftist, and feminist efforts to extend victimhood beyond crime and into every domain of social life. Once injury—broadly defined—became the basis of legitimacy, any group could plead its case through the language of victimisation. Radical activists did not merely stumble into this redefinition; many promoted it consciously.

A comparison of the first edition of William Ryan’s Blaming the Victim (1971) with his later revisions captures this expansion. The book’s core argument was that victims of inequality—black Americans, for example—were unfairly blamed for society’s problems. Ryan indicted not the law-breaking criminal but the system itself. By the mid-1970s, however, his conception of “the victim” had widened dramatically: the victim was no longer an exceptional figure, but potentially anyone dependent on wages rather than wealth.

This inflation of victimhood was not driven solely by critics of economic inequality. Feminism played a decisive role in constructing the emerging culture of victimhood. Many early grassroots initiatives—battered women’s refuges, rape-crisis centres, telephone hotlines—were pioneered by feminist activists and helped publicise the plight of the female victim. Where Ryan implied that virtually anyone outside the ruling class could be a victim of the system, some radical feminists argued that virtually every woman was a potential victim of male violence. The threat of male violence was depicted as routine—permeating women’s public and private lives.

By the early 1980s, the narrow conception of the victim as a casualty of an indifferent and permissive justice system had given way to a broad, all-encompassing definition. New categories proliferated: murdered and missing children, elder abuse, child sexual abuse, marital rape, date rape, stalking, drunk driving, hate crime, and more. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, victimisation expanded until it encompassed virtually every distressing experience.

The moral legitimacy attached to victim status made it difficult for any group to resist joining the bandwagon. But it would be a mistake to reduce this trend to cynical opportunism. Something more revealing was happening. Across the political spectrum, established ideologies were losing traction. During the 1980s, radical left ideas were weakened by the disintegration of the Soviet bloc and the perceived failures of redistributive welfare experiments. Conservatives, too, faced the erosion of their traditional worldview. The ideological battles of previous decades seemed to leave everyone exhausted. As Alan Wolfe observed, ‘the right won the economic war, the left won the cultural war, and the centre won the political war’. In such circumstances, victory felt strangely hollow. Unable to interpret the world through older intellectual vocabularies, competing movements reached for new paradigms—and victim culture, with its emotional appeal, offered something to everyone. Conservatives blamed liberal cultural elites; feminists and leftist activists blamed capitalism or patriarchy.

This pervasive sense of victimisation became one of the most distinctive cultural legacies of the 1980s. In the absence of consensus on conventional moral questions, agreement around victim identity acquired growing significance. Even disputes over authenticity reinforced the overall framework: each claim legitimised the next. One American sociologist observed that different movements converged informally to generate ‘a common mood of victimization, moral indignation, and a self-righteous hostility against the common enemy—the white male’. And soon the “enemy” claimed victim status as well. A men’s movement emerged insisting that men, too, were an unrecognised and marginalised class of victims.

Liberal and feminist representations of victimhood sat uneasily alongside the traditional law-and-order view. In hindsight, it is striking that—despite intense mutual hostility—the broader consensus around victimhood not only survived but remains largely unquestioned. Culture wars, wokeness, and multiculturalism have produced bitter conflict, yet the sacralisation of the victim has remained notably resilient.

The experience of the 1980s and 1990s suggests that the old categories of left and right, liberal and conservative, do not adequately explain the rise of victim culture. Victim culture is a synthesis. Cultural feminism may have supplied its most influential idiom, but it coexists with conservative concerns about order and authority. Competing definitions of victimisation can coexist because they share a deeper premise: that victim status carries moral weight. The debate is not neatly polarised. Many feminists have adopted elements of law-and-order rhetoric; many opponents of feminism have adopted causes framed in the language of harm, safety, and protection.

---

The Moral Authority of the Victim—Beyond Question

A key innovation in the sacralisation of the victim in the 1970s was the insistence that victims are blameless. One of the most effective rhetorical devices of victim advocates was to treat any questioning of claims as ‘blaming the victim’. Radical criminologists extended the charge: not only victims of crime but disadvantaged groups more broadly, they argued, were unfairly blamed for their circumstances. Ryan’s Blaming the Victim helped delegitimise criticism by recasting it as an act of moral cruelty rather than argument.

The idea of the blameless victim endowed self-proclaimed victims with formidable moral authority. As Weed wrote, victimhood increasingly functioned 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’.

Victim advocates went further: victims were not only blameless, they had to be believed. The presumption of credibility gathered momentum in cases involving children. The injunction to ‘believe the child’ was soon accompanied by the claim that ‘children do not lie’. In recent decades, ‘believe the victim’ has been institutionalised to the point where the accused may be treated as guilty until they prove innocence. That is why campaigns expanding the definitions of sexual harassment, bullying, and microaggressions often insist that what matters is the alleged victim’s subjective experience, not the intention—or even the actions—of the accused.

Increasingly, allegations of victimisation are grounded less in what occurred than in how events are perceived and interpreted by those claiming victim status. The most extreme example is the concept of microaggression, framed as a victimising experience in which the decisive factor is whether the claimant feels their identity was disrespected. To question that claim is recast as the unforgivable offence of ‘victim-blaming’.

In recent decades, critics have begun to challenge the politicisation of victimhood and its privileged status. Many have reacted against the way cultural elites elevate some victim groups while disregarding others. While some movements (for example, Black Lives Matter) are said to enjoy special cultural and quasi-legal privileges, other identities are treated as illegitimate or invisible. Yet this backlash rarely amounts to a principled rejection of victim culture. More often, it is a protest against who gets to wield victim status, not against the status itself. That is why opponents of politicised victim identity so often end up presenting themselves as the “real” victims. The emergence of white identity politics—and, in some cases, its drift towards white nationalism—testifies to the power of victim culture even among those who claim to resist it.

If even critics accept the premise of victim culture, society will remain under the spell of a fatalistic zeitgeist. Victim consciousness distracts us from acting as authors of our lives. If society is to move forward and free itself from the corrosive influence of wokism, it will have to show the door to the professional victim.

In our final discussion on this subject, in Part 3 we will examine the marriage between victim identity and therapy culture