One of the intrinsic disadvantages conservatives have in the P.R. war with the Left is that we weren’t brought up to think that victimhood is an appropriate foundation for a well-built life. For traditional, conservative sorts, weaned on solid Christian pessimism, it is simply the plain truth that life will always dish out insults and injuries — and that, for the common good, and as a matter of personal virtue, adults are expected to stand it with dignity, do what they can about it, ask for assistance only when they absolutely must, and repay as promptly as possible the debts they incur as a result.
Others, who clearly were raised very differently, have set themselves up in a highly profitable line of work, jerking the nation’s heartstrings with one Queen for a Day story after another. Every slight, every disparaging remark, every little misfortune, every trifling asymmetry in the allotment of life’s blessings, and every instance of life’s natural vicissitudes, however transient or trivial, becomes a violation of “social justice” — an aggression against the helpless victim, and an occasion for the reorganization of society along more clement lines. (So gossamer-skinned have we become, so sensitive to the slightest abrasion, that we have in recent years trained powerful new instruments on these affronts, zooming in by several orders of magnitude, and are now tallying “microaggressions“.) The sought-after remedy is always some act of government: an entitlement or preference of some sort, or some new constraint upon the liberties of others.
There’s no limiting principle. And if you watch for a while, you begin to realize that “social injustice” is not only infinite, but fractal. It’s a Julia set of grievances. Zoom in all you like; new affronts will appear at every scale, world without end.
Well, two can play at that game. The blogger and Twitterer “Ace of Spades” informs us that Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) has proposed a new program, aimed at giving succor to a newly demarcated class of sufferers: victims of government itself.
Learn more here.