The Grand Old Party of Crybabies

This excerpt is adapted from Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence (Center Street) to be published on Sept. 13.

It was a dark day for democracy. The loser of the election refused to concede the race, claimed the election was stolen, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from loyal supporters, and is running for executive office again.

I’m referring, of course, to Stacey Abrams. To this day, even as Abrams campaigns for governor again in the 2022 election, she still refuses to concede that she lost the last one.

But conservatives have their own victimhood complexes these days; we are, after all, a nation of victims now. All that differs is whom we see as our oppressors. The worst victimhood narrative that afflicts modern conservatives is their budding belief that any election they lose must have been stolen. Instead of distinguishing ourselves as the party that strives for excellence and rejects the easy path of victimhood narratives, we simply created our own.

While Donald Trump promised to lead the nation to recommit itself to the pursuit of greatness, what he delivered in the end was just another tale of grievance, a persecution complex that swallowed much of the Republican Party whole. Trump took a page from the Abrams playbook. His claims were just as weak as Abrams’. She claimed voter suppression in her 2018 defeat, he claimed voter fraud two years later. He filed scores of lawsuits over various claims of fraud, as was his right, but they came nowhere close to changing the outcome in a single state, let alone the several swing states whose results he needed to overturn. In many cases, judges the president himself had nominated ruled against him, a sign of health in our nation’s institutions. Of the 62 lawsuits he and his supporters filed, he lost all but one, a minor victory in Pennsylvania that affected few votes. A Supreme Court with a strong conservative majority ruled against Trump twice. Top election officials in virtually every state, regardless of party, said they’d found no evidence of any significant level of fraud. Our institutions did hold, in the end. But they shouldn’t have been tested.

Beyond all the court decisions, statements from election officials, and a general lack of evidence of fraud, what I keep coming back to is this: Why do I see Republicans insisting that the presidential election was stolen, yet accepting the legitimacy of the congressional ones? At times, the Republican party seems to be moving toward the position that any races it wins are legitimate and any it loses were stolen. That’s not a tenable view. It’s just the preferred conservative brand of victimhood, a knee-jerk kind of sore losing more common to playgrounds than great republics. I say this as a conservative with some pretty well-established conservative bona fides; my last book was called Woke, Inc. Republicans could’ve become the one major party that moved beyond grievance and aimed only for greatness; instead we placed grudges about elections at the core of party identity. Once victimhood becomes part of the essence of both parties, it’s just a national identity.

Being a sore loser is a danger to democracy no matter which party it comes from. It chills me to see the Democratic Party moving in the same direction. In part in response to the victimhood narrative of a stolen election, Republicans in many states passed a variety of voter reform laws, so far at least 33 bills in 19 states. Many of these reforms strike me as minor tweaks that won’t affect elections much one way or the other; some of them seem to be symbolic gestures that legislators are “doing something.”

But President Joe Biden and other top Democrats call them Jim Crow 2.0. I guess that’s because “the New Jim Crow” was already taken by one of their other victimhood narratives. They apply the Jim Crow label to a number of Republican-led voting reforms, most of them pretty innocuous. Claremont McKenna College professor of government Andrew E. Busch sums it up by saying, “Jim Crow 1.0 entailed widespread murder and violent intimidation, onerous taxes, rigged literacy tests, and a flat prohibition on blacks voting in the primary elections of the dominant party, leading to results such as Mississippi’s 7 percent voter-turnout rate for African Americans. ‘Jim Crow 2.0,’ mean[while], requires that voters show proper identification, vote in the correct precinct, and request their absentee ballot every two years instead of every four. Someday, historians will marvel that anyone ever took seriously the argument that these two regimes bore any relation to one another.”

The Jim Crow analogies don’t stop there. Democrats are still making hay of it. The latest story is that the filibuster is also a form of Jim Crow when it’s used to stop their own voter reforms. Presumably Democrats didn’t think the filibuster was a Jim Crow relic when they used it a record-breaking 328 times in the 2019–2020 congressional term. I’m not sure whether we’re on Jim Crow 3.0 or 4.0 now. Regardless, the power of the well-worn analogy allowed Biden to say that the 2022 midterms will be illegitimate if Republicans win: “I’m not going to say it’s going to be legit,” he told a reporter. “The increase [in] the prospect of being illegitimate is in direct proportion to us not being able to get these reforms passed.”

Ironically, Republicans and Democrats are converging. Maybe no one likes a sore loser, but it seems everyone likes being one. Wallowing in this shared victimhood narrative may soothe the sting of defeat, but it’s poison to the rule of law. Republicans were in prime position to reject identity politics, including the game of identifying as a victim, but instead we used stolen election stories as a backdoor to embracing our own victim identity, pursuing the easy path to power. Fighting fire with fire might sound appealing, but water’s actually the better choice.

It reminds me of the final passage of George Orwell’s Animal Farm: “Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” That, I fear, is the destiny that awaits a nation of victims. We’ll become indistinguishable, someday soon, low creatures yelling the same tired victimhood narratives at each other and filling in the variables of victims and villains with our preferred names.

Evidence of America’s disturbing trend toward mutually assured victimhood is everywhere, but if you’re looking for a useful recent example, Sarah Palin’s ill-considered libel lawsuit against the New York Times will do well. As Palin would no doubt say, the Times started it. In 2017, after a Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) supporter shot Republican congressman Steve Scalise and several others at a baseball practice, the Times wanted to run an editorial connecting the shooting to conservative violence. It had to make multiple leaps in logic to do so. First, the writer brought up a shooting six years earlier when a mentally ill man wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and killed six others, vaguely suggesting that he might have been motivated by a map Palin’s PAC had released putting competitive electoral districts like Giffords’ under crosshairs. Then-Times editor James Bennet, dissatisfied with mere insinuation, added multiple lines saying that the map had directly incited the shooting of Giffords. That claim was utterly false, with no evidence to support it except the Times’ own wishes. It quickly realized its mistake after a conservative outcry and issued a series of corrections, though none mentioned Palin by name. A couple weeks later, Palin sued for libel.

But she lost. As the jury deliberated, the district court judge said that no matter the verdict, he would dismiss Palin’s suit because she hadn’t met the very high bar public figures must meet to win defamation cases. A public figure has to prove not just that the defendant made false statements about them, but that they acted with actual malice — that they knowingly or recklessly said something false intending to cause harm. This legal standard was established, ironically, in the landmark case New York Times v. Sullivan. The judge said that the Times’ speedy efforts to check and then correct its article mentioning Palin were evidence it lacked actual malice. The jury ended up reaching the same decision as the judge, although, as Palin’s lawyers will no doubt point out on appeal, a few jurors received news alerts on their phones informing them of the judge’s decision as they deliberated.

Not only did Palin lose; she deserved to lose. What the Times did was sloppy, arrogant and prejudiced, and it’s understandable that she was angry. But at the end of the day, the paper did quickly notice and correct its mistake, and defamation law is clear. We value free speech highly in America, and that includes the freedom to harshly criticize the public figures who have so much influence over the direction of the country. As the court pointed out in Sullivan, with so much speech flying around, it’s inevitable that some of it will be false. To keep spirited debate about public figures going, we have to give them less protection from false claims. The deal in America is that if you want to be famous, you have to have thick skin. Palin chose to play the victim instead, spending millions of dollars and several years hounding the Times over a mistake it had immediately acknowledged and fixed. She should’ve just moved on.

There are only two ways to win a culture war: defeat the other side, or infect it with your own values. No matter who wins the next few elections, Republicans are losing the culture war, and it’s not just because liberals control the media, universities, Hollywood, or even business. Republicans aren’t just losing to wokeness and its many victimhood narratives. They’re losing because they’ve adopted the tactics and principles of their opponents and, in doing so, stand for nothing but the pursuit of power. Democrats may have been the first to master telling tales of victimhood, but lately Republicans have decided to join them in spinning out stories of persecution. They sacrifice core principles for short-term political gain.

It’s easy to be a sore loser; it’s harder to figure out how to win. The comforting blanket of stolen-election stories allows those who embrace them to avoid self-examination and introspection and place all their electoral shortcomings at the feet of others. This is how the woke left wins — not with a bang, but with a whimper. Not by winning a battle of arguments with the other side, but by getting the other side to adopt its own values and methods without even realizing it, even as they continue to battle one another.