Conservative Family Trees and the Cult of Victimhood

One of the most reliably entertaining spectacles in American politics occurs when conservatives play the victim card. A group that is overwhelmingly composed of prosperous white males, conservatives are obsessed with the delusion that nobody knows the troubles they’ve seen. They are madly envious of women, people of color, sexual minorities, and the poor for whatever public sympathy they get for their suffering, and they desperately want in on the action.

This is the origin of the fake populism that is one of the hallmarks of modern conservatism. Among the reasons Richard Nixon was a political genius was that he was the first leader to grasp that one of the things conservatives secretly wanted most was a big ol’ pity party. In classic moments, like the Checkers speech and the “silent majority” speech, he gave it to them. And conservatives ever since, from Reagan to Sarah Palin to Chris Christie, have followed suit.

In the last week, we’ve seen yet another example of the cult of victimhood run amok. This time it came in the form of an essay gone viral by Princeton freshman Tal Fortgang. Writing in his school’s conservative journal The Princeton Tory, Fortgang claims he’s frequently been met with the demand to “check his privilege” on campus. Well, okay, if that’s the case (though who knows if it is), I can see why he was annoyed. It’s a fundamentally anti-intellectual move to demand that someone argue from identity, rather than principles and facts.

That said, I can see why people may have made that demand, because Fortgang does sound utterly insufferable. Read the way he passive-aggressively accuses his opponents of racism, for example:

I do not accuse those who “check” me and my perspective of overt racism, although the phrase, which assumes that simply because I belong to a certain ethnic group I should be judged collectively with it, toes that line.

It’s not so much the accusation I mind (though there’s that), but how he tries to have it both ways. He goes on to say that he “condemn[s]” these unnamed interlocutors “for casting the equal protection clause, indeed the very idea of a meritocracy, as a myth.” Meritocracy a myth! Why, the very idea!

It goes on in that vein; I’ll spare you the rest. Fortang is a college freshman, after all, and it reads very much like the kind of thing a young, upper middle class, white dude with a pretentious vocabulary (see: “Weltanschauung”) and no experience in the real world would write.

What’s fascinating, though, are two things. One is that the essay and this kid have been taken up as a cause célèbre on the right. It’s become so popular, in fact, that it’s been reported on in mainstream outlets like the New York Times. The second thing of note about the essay is the move Fortgang makes to prove that he’s not really privileged—that deep down inside, he truly is one of the wretched of the earth. He doesn’t cite any of his own experiences. Instead, he plays the sympathy card by exploiting his Holocaust survivor grandparents. Tacky, right? Here’s what he writes:

Perhaps it’s the privilege my grandfather and his brother had to flee their home as teenagers when the Nazis invaded Poland, leaving their mother and five younger siblings behind, running and running until they reached a Displaced Persons camp in Siberia, where they would do years of hard labor in the bitter cold until World War II ended. [. . .]

Or maybe it’s the privilege my grandmother had of spending weeks upon weeks on a death march through Polish forests in subzero temperatures, one of just a handful to survive, only to be put in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where she would have died but for the Allied forces who liberated her and helped her regain her health when her weight dwindled to barely 80 pounds.

Those are, of course, harrowing stories, but they are not his stories. To drag out them out to score cheap political points is pretty gross. But Fortang doesn’t seem particularly endowed with self-awareness—or with the capacity for shame. The lad will go far within the conservative movement, I predict.

We’re actually hearing a lot of heart-rending stories about the oppression and struggles endured by grandparents these days. As Mark Leibovich recently reported in a New York Times Magazine story with the delightful title of “How Not to Seem Rich While Running for Office,” today’s plutocrats face a huge obstacle: they have struggled with zero major obstacles or hardships in their lives. This makes it very hard to craft biographiess and stump speeches that can make the candidate relatable to the average Joe and Jane Sixpack. What to do? The answer, it seems, is to wheel out the grandparents. Cue the violins.

Leibovich mentions the case of congressional candidate Ann Callis. She’s a judge, and the daughter of a man who’s “a megawealthy lawyer, casino owner and one of the most well connected Democrats” in Illinois. On the campaign trail, she doesn’t have much to say about dear old Dad, but she’s overflowing with heartwarming tales of her plucky Irish immigrant grandma, As Leibovich describes:

Granny Callis (the youngest of 11 kids!) kept plugging away and moved from New York to Southern Illinois. There, with the help of a priest, she became a nurse at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Granite City. She eventually rose to be a head nurse.

Another congressional candidate, multi-millionaire New York Republican George Demos, apparently loves to talk your ear off about his grandpa, a Greek immigrant who worked as a dishwasher. Except it turns out he barely knew the man, who died when he was in the first grade. Leibovich cites many similar examples.

If Thomas Piketty is right, and inherited wealth is becoming increasingly dominant in our society—and there is every indication that this is the case—desperate political candidates will be have to reach back further and further into the family tree for examples of relatives, however distant, with a hardscrabble story to sell to the voters.

Elite candidates’ and commentators’ appropriation of narratives of real oppression and hardship for their own political advantage is likely to continue apace. Tal Fortgang’s self-serving deployment of his grandparents’ survival of the Nazi death camps is perhaps the most outrageous example of late, but it’s far from the only one, and it certainly won’t be the last.