SEX PANIC AND THE PUNITVE STATE 10

I continue looking at Roger Lancaster’s (RL) book.*

RL – with a becoming honesty, given his genuinely and decently liberal stance – examines the phenomenon of “feminism and the state”. (p.209)

He notes that there is “a surprising amnesia” when it comes to “the history of women’s reform movements”, as one (female) author noted in her own book about “the rise of the carceral state”. Another (female) author speaks of “the feminist alliance with the state”. (p.209)

He takes this hugely un-discussable bull by the horns: “the dangers of viewing rape and domestic violence through a law-and-order lens should have been obvious”. This is the heart of the Victimist mutation in this country, driven by political efforts to attract voters. The Republicans started it, perhaps – I think – seeking to attract women voters without looking like they had embraced feminism in its more outré ‘liberal’ forms such as the Democrats had done. Hence Reagan’s law-and-order approach, a solid red-meat and red-blooded Republican option.

So, I think, once a political Party embraced the option as a way of garnering votes (and, worse, of playing-to the voters) then the more awful and horrendous and terrible the Problem, the more electorally profitable for the pols as they rode to the rescue.

This was on top of the advocacies’ own selling-strategy: the more awful and horrendous and terrible the Problem, the more pressure could be exerted on pols to accede to the advocacies’ agendas and demands.

The media, of course, would lap it all up like catnip – and thus the more awful and horrendous and terrible the Problem, the more competent, relevant, concerned, and ‘serious’ they would look as they published the various stories and visuals that had already been slyly crafted on the model of old Hollywood silent-film Innocent Victim/Evil Perp scripts.

Like examining a monster killer tornado or hurricane, you can watch this Thing taking shape as multiple smaller dynamics begin to get sucked into its vortex.

And all of this takes place in a dynamic Theodore Lowi** analyzed years and decades ago: Congress, for its own reasons, had come to quietly abdicate its oversight responsibilities, “delegating” its powers to “interest-groups” – which were Business, Labor, and Agriculture in the immediate postwar era, and then about 1970 or so those “interest groups” came to include the assorted Identity-Group advocacies (based on race or gender or what-have-you).

To all of those “interest groups” – assisted by the now ubiquitous “experts” (paid by Congress or by the “interest groups”) – Congress allowed its legislative power to “drain out” (Lowi’s phrase for it): those “interest groups” would be allowed to pretty much write the laws and regulations and policies, which Congress would simply rubber-stamp with its Constitutional authority and power (having yet retreated from its Constitutional responsibilities to soberly deliberate and examine such proposed laws before passing them).

And this, I think, explains three things, among others: first, the Findings that preface the SO Mania Regime laws which were so highly dubious when they were first published and are now demonstrably so obscenely inaccurate and yet the Congress displays utterly no desire to go back and reconsider its legislation in light of the research that has now been done; Congress didn’t pass these laws and adopt these Findings for the country – it did so for the advocacies that wrote them and the demographics those advocacies allegedly represent. And while the Consequences for the country may not be good, yet the advocacies still hold to their agenda … and it is the advocacies who have been allowed by Congress to control the whole thing.

Second, and this is especially so in the case of the SO Mania Regime laws, Members – many of whom are themselves attorneys – are sufficiently worried about the consequences and quality of these laws that they so very often resort to various legislative-rules ploys to prevent their vote for the laws from being publicly connected to them; thus there are suspensions of the rules and voice-votes and any other diversions by which a Bill can be passed into law without the names of those Members who voted for it being made public (and the Member later held responsible for his/her vote).

And of course the ultimate sop to the pols’ consciences is the LBJ approach to legislation: “pass the damned thing – we can always go back and amend it later”. Thus, even as the Mania Regime laws demonstrate both their fundamentally unsound basis in fact and their lethal (and expensive) consequences on so many levels, the laws remain and are followed by further laws: the pols are trying to “amend” what doesn’t work, although really they almost invariably wind up simply intensifying the originally rotten dynamics they had allowed to be set in motion with the original law.

Third, the habit of naming laws after the most PR-attractive victims or their cases, rather than after the essential purpose of the law itself. This is the demographic dynamic compressed into a very small place: you as a Citizen and voter and taxpayer are to be distracted and manipulated by the ‘story’ and not by the actual dynamics (and the consequences) that the law is going to set in motion. This is the carnival midway magician’s old scam: distracting you from the real movement by flapping some bright and shiny diversion. OZ and the citizens of OZ – that’s what Congress and We have become.

In saying all this am I seeking to ‘disrespect’ or ‘re-victimize’ the ‘victims’? No – I am simply saying that in the grave and sober matters of erecting useful and workable legislation, no distractions can be allowed to override the vital responsibilities that both legislators and Citizens bear to ensure the integrity and efficacy of the laws.

RL goes on quickly to note that there were other ways of addressing rape and domestic violence: “in other developed democracies relationships among victims’ rights, women’s rights, and judiciary procedures took less toxic forms, and women’s movements internationally have tended to maintain a critical distance from the power of the state”. (p.209) And “generally, they have not made harsh criminal penalties a central demand”. (p.209)

But I would point out here that it is not simply the formally criminal penalties but rather the “administrative” consequences built-into the assorted Registration schemes that tag and track a Citizen for decades or for a lifetime. In that regard, I think that the developed democracies of Europe still retain personal and institutional memories of the era of Nazi and Soviet ‘classifying’ and ‘tracking’ of citizens by the police organs of the state … and they are not about to go down that road again. No such memories were strong enough here, alas, and Congress has allowed such dynamics to start up here. (And – as I have often pointed out – those dynamics have both mutated and migrated to other areas of national life and government practice.)

And – of course – there remains the general judicial refusal to forthrightly term most of the Registration schemes’ consequences as “criminal” rather than “administrative”.

RL notes that much of the funding for the early rape-crisis-centers was drawn from the old Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) budget pot, which began to draw those movements into the orbit of the police-authority. True enough.

But you only have to read radical-feminist law professor Catharine MacKinnon’s 1989 summa, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, to see that criminalization was a key element of feminist advocacy efforts and so was built-into the radical feminist demands from the get-go, as part of their war not only on “patriarchy” but on the “patriarchal” Constitution and on the “patriarchal” Rule of Law. And in 1989 MacKinnon is talking, as she herself says, about an agenda that has been in play since the very early 1970s (and in the Clinton 1990s era of “governance feminism” would go supernova). (And those agendas have also mutated and migrated into all areas of government practice, as can now – alas – be seen.)

RL notes that “the early domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers aimed to bolster women’s liberation against the power or the state and the power of the police”. (p.209) Rape-crisis counselors began to cooperate with police and prosecutors, setting an ominous dynamic in motion.

And then and thus, with the eager help of the Beltway pols, these advocacy efforts were “co-opted” into an alliance with the police power of the state that has proven (tactically) hugely beneficial to both the advocacies and the pols, although also to the police power of the state and to the great and perhaps permanent and certainly lethal detriment of the Rule of Law and the very first principles and foundations of this country as a democratic republic.

Indeed, before long, even the early advocates themselves were engaging in a type of “vigilantism” (often spun nicely as merely ‘women’s defense’ and public ‘consciousness-raising’, I would add), and some rape-crisis centers “published the names and photographs of alleged sexual assailants; other radicals threatened to submit rapists to various forms of public humiliation”. (p.209) [italics mine]

So you can see that the SO Mania Regime’s Registration schemes were evident from the get-go, and the pols simply accepted them as part of the agenda to be rubber-stamped when the pols decided to enter upon their collusive embrace with the (thus hugely strengthened) advocacies. The various whacky and grossly inaccurate Findings gave the pols their fig-leaf while the courts – alas – so very often bent themselves and the law into pretzels in order to justify the whole shebang as being Constitutional and so very democratic and – of course – vital and helpful.

(RL goes into a fascinating exploration as to how the early 1970s feminists – white and middle class – were much more hospitable to the ‘crime/police’ approach since they did not share the experience of police that non-white females largely experienced. Nor did those white feminist activists care to consider the experience of non-white communities at the hands of unbounded police authority; discussion with Jim Crow-era black females, for example, might have provided sound warning of what happens when a police authority is both un-boundaried and put in the service of a Bad Idea.)

RL rightly mentions “the growing significance of personal horror stories”. (p.210) This element started out as part of the ‘sharing’ experience at rape-crisis centers, and then became part of a corpus of stories routinely (or doctrinally) deployed to raise the consciousness of aspiring activists.

But it then found an entirely new second career when the media (increasingly anxious for ‘customers’, increasingly eager to please any new customer-demographic, just like the pols were eager to please any new voting-demographic) began to run such stories as ‘news’. And then along came the daytime women-focused talk shows that did not resemble Sunday-morning talking-heads, but rather seemed a misch of old-time revival meetings, consciousness-raising sessions, women’s ‘chat’, and – buried deeper down – a highly emotional and manipulative dynamic that I have always felt would have been a frightful tool in the hands of Goebbels or the early Soviets, had the technology been available in their day.

It should be familiar now, how “personal horror stories” then developed a third career as ‘evidence’, both for legislative Findings and, following numerous feminist and victimist inspired deforms (used as a noun; pronounced like ‘reforms’) to the judicial system, for both civil and criminal law (as well as in the far less-noticed military law).

Two of the most significantly-fraught aspects of all this are that a) the ‘story’ itself is almost never interrogated or assessed for credibility (to do so would, of course, be insensitive and ‘re-victimize’ the teller; and b) the deployment of such a ‘story’ on one’s own behalf almost immediately conferred ‘victim’ status on the teller in any forum where s/he chose to play the card. At which point, in any setting, a certain Script pretty much had to be followed: the expression of an appropriate (and Correct) ‘sensitivity’ and emotional response (some mix of sympathy for the teller and outrage at the ‘victimizer’) on the part of all those who heard the story.

Unsurprisingly, such a Script made for great (and useful) entertainment in any PR venue: as ‘news’, as ‘testimony’, and – but of course – as made-for-TV movie scripts.

RL’s assessment is that “In the end, feminism contributed to the development of a specific sort of victims’ rights movement in the United States”. (p.210) By which he means that “mainstream feminists made common cause with law-and-order conservatives, and some in the women’s movement assisted in the promulgation of unmistakable punitive laws”. (p.210) I would add: laws that were not only “unmistakably punitive” but that were also primitive and regressive by any Western and American Constitutional standards (had not those standards already been kicked to the curb by pols eager – treacherously eager – to pander).

Nicely, he notes the Midwestern (and rightist) Women’s Crusade Against Crime (which for a while outranked the lefty National Organization for Women in the then-conservative Midwestern cities): the Crusade’s primary goal was “to support, assist, and augment the criminal justice system in doing its job”. And it was in Washington State (so curiously a blend of coastal urban-suburban liberals and inland rural conservatives) that “women’s groups spun a rape reform law as a crime-control bill” as early as 1975. Further, that “nationwide, new laws made it easier to convict men accused of rape or wife battery”. (All quotes in this paragraph, p.210)

To anybody concerned for the Framing Vision and the Constitution, the entire concept of making it ‘easier to convict the accused’ should have set vital alarm bells ringing. So-called “rape-shield” laws made it possible to lodge formal accusations without having one’s name published, and with a level of anonymity not granted to the accused – which should never have been permitted: if you want to take an issue to the very public forum of the civil or criminal law (rather than the therapeutic or perhaps even media forum) then you are demanding the public deployment of the Sovereign coercive authority of the government, and you must be willing to become public when entering the public arena. Otherwise the case against the accused is tainted from the get-go (you are accused of committing a crime so heinous that the accuser is granted the public protection of anonymity – so you must have done something really really bad).

The whole dynamic, as RL says, “set judicial practices on a slippery slope”. (p.210) How vividly and lethally true. And, of course, so many of these repellent and dangerous deforms did not long remain confined to the ‘unique’ realm of sex-cases, but instead migrated to other realms of criminal and civil jurisprudence and then to government practices, mutating even more virulently as they went.

By the time of the passage of the Violence Against Women Act (1994), enfolded into the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of that year, RL notes that it seemed “natural” that feminist advocacies would be strong and active proponents of the whole thing. (p.210)

He reflects ruefully that liberals should have worried – as few did – when “local police began sponsoring Take Back The Night rallies”. (p.211)

And by the time Bush 2 invoked “women’s suffering” under the Taliban and Saddam as justifications for those invasions, “the legacies of state-sponsored feminism were glaringly apparent”. (p.211)

I still don’t think all that was apparent enough to enough people, but here’s hoping more folks make the connection.

And his usage of “state-sponsored feminism” is surely an eye-catching but not inaccurate formulation.

The profound monstrosity of the SO Mania has been for so long and for far too long encloaked in the comfortable and comforting wrappings of just plain old nice liberal ‘concern’ and homey conservative law-and-order … when really it was from Day One a lethally insidious anti-Constitutional fabrication, a virulently mutating and actively migrating infection that endangers the integrity and deep-political health of the entire American polity, and has spread even beyond Our borders on the wings of warcraft. Nor does the future – without vital public intervention – promise anything but more of the same, and worse.

NOTES

*Lancaster, Roger. Sex Panic and the Punitive State. Berkeley: U/Cal Press (2011). ISBN: 978-0-520-26206-5 (pb). 246pp plus Appendices, Notes, and Index.

**See either of his two books: 1969’s The End of Liberalism or 1995’s The End of the Republican Era.

WE KNOW POLITICS NOW

The New York Times columnist Frank Bruni wrote  a few days ago about Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid’s recent and continued accusation that Mitt Romney has not filed tax returns for the past ten years.  (Let me say here that I am not in any way taking or implying a political position on Mr. Romney in this Post.)

Bruni’s is a lament that the SO Community knows well – and perhaps saw this all coming down the pike twenty or so years ago, as the Sex Offense Mania took shape and was catapulted off the deck of the great vessel of the Republic.

“For the dwindling few out there who still believe that big accusations require a little foundation and that truth – as opposed to conjecture – matters” … he begins.

Well, for how long has the SO Community seen that accusations (let alone legislation) not only don’t require serious grounding in truth, but that the law has actually been deformed (not really ‘reformed’) and deranged (not merely ‘changed’) to make that all easier?

Now it’s beginning to dawn on more mainstream types.

So far, Bruni notes, Reid “had backed up his claim … with absolutely nothing more than some vague reference to some unnamed guy who said something of the sort to Reid during some phone conversation some time ago”. Which sounds pretty much like a recovered-memory or other type of claim in any sex-abuse lawsuit or even criminal trial: I don’t have a lot of facts but I just know I was victimized - or, at least, I want you to believe I was victimized.

Now the pols who enabled all these deforms (used here as a noun, pronounced like ‘reforms’) are beginning to use the stuff themselves.

“But for Reid it was enough to level his charge, but also, as the days pressed on, to double and triple down on it, his language and manner growing more righteous even as his evidence grew no more detailed or persuasive”. Surely Reid is taking a page from the old Victimist game-book here. The less facts you have, and the more people are beginning to ask questions, then the more you ramp up the righteousness and the vividness of your claims.

But it gets worse. As the SO Community might well imagine.

In an interview Reid responded: “Well, do I know that’s true? … Well, I’m not certain”. Which is, laudably, more frankness and honesty than you get in the standard Victimist Script. But then, in the Script, there are plenty of maneuvers to be deployed at this point, to take the focus off the credibility of your claims and put it on the ‘horrific’ experience implied in your (un-tested) story.

And, in best Victimist playbook form, Reid upped the ante by then claiming that actually Romney’s fortune (which in the scenario is his key ‘offense’) is “probably greater than published estimates”. In other words, if you don’t believe my story, then I am suggesting that this guy is guilty of even a hell of a lot more than you imagined. Sound familiar?

Bruni is now on the scent. “And so a wild supposition was magically transformed into the given from which yet another bit of speculation blossomed, and any concern with provable information was long gone, a casualty of the craven rules of political engagement these days”. But those craven rules migrated over from the craven rules of Victimist law deforms that the pols have been liberally (but without possibility of tracing their vote) passing into SO Mania legislation for nigh on twenty years now.

People who do this, Bruni says, have put their “conscience on ice”. Which is a vital deform that had to be imposed in order to launch the whole SO Mania to begin with.

“Spew first and sweat the details later”, figures Bruni. And how true it is. And has been – in SO Mania matters – for all these years. And – of course – by now enough deforms have been introduced into the legal system that you rarely have to do any “sweating” later on anyway: no prosecutor or jury is going to ‘re-victimize’ you by either a) asking you probing questions about your story or b) holding you legally responsible for any crimes (perjury, say) that you may have committed in the process of achieving your laudable and heroic goal of ‘justice’, ‘closure’, and ‘sending a message’.

“Speak loosely and carry a stick-thin collection of backup materials, or none at all.” Bingo. The ‘story’ is all. If it’s vivid and gripping, then it will be a good-enough ‘hook’ and your script – pitched to a jury like a script is pitched to a Hollywood producer – will ‘sell’.

But here Bruni goes off the scent, perhaps because he is writing for a ‘liberal’ paper and it’s a tough election year: “It has spread beyond the practiced rabble-rousers of the far Right, and Democrats are exuberantly getting in on this unbecoming, corrosive game”.  The Democrats have been buying-into and funding this game since their embrace of Victimist law deforms long decades ago. And – yes – the Republicans started it in Reagan’s day with their embrace of Victimism, but the Dems quickly got into a ‘bipartisan’ collusion, on behalf of their radical-feminist and other assorted Victim-Identity demographics, united not in a common Citizenship and dedication to the commonweal, but rather merely in a common – if multiform – Victimization.

So it’s not quite the whole truth of the matter to lament that “Republicans were by and large willing to play faster, looser and flat-out nastier”. In fact, I’ll say that Karl Rove, arch-spinmeister with the professional morals of a feral alley-cat, wouldn’t have gotten as far as he did with his plans if he hadn’t been able to take advantage of the already-established deep and vital corrosion worked by Victimist deforms that weakened not only the integrity of the Beltway and the Rule of Law, but also the general public’s intensifying inability to sniff out truth from untruth, fact from fiction, after years of watching the spectacle of the SO Mania unfold.  

Ditto, Bruni notes, that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee last week had to issue a formal apology to Republican money-bags contributor Sheldon Adelson, who was accused of “profiting from a Chinese prostitution strategy” at a casino he runs in Macau. And you can see in this Adelson bit (as you saw with Julian Assange) how easily now ‘sex offenses’ have become a handy political tool, or assault weapon.

It seems to Bruni that the operative political ‘philosophy’ here is that a target “[M]ust be discredited and neutralized by whatever means necessary. Details, schmetails.”  This has always been a Victimist play, and I would point to the sustained efforts by ‘secular liberals’ to do the same thing to the Catholic Church by turning it into a piñata for sex-abuse claims and trials, such as the recent Philadelphia show-trial and the Santa Clara trial (about both of which I have written on this site).**

And along those lines, Bruni also notes that Reid’s defenders claim that since Romney won’t release more than a year’s worth of tax returns then that somehow “makes clear that he is hiding something”. In other words, if you don’t give us what we want, then we’ll just claim that your very refusal is grounds (if not also “proof”) that you must be hiding even more stuff. Shades of the Catholic Church in the abuse ‘crisis’.

Bruni asks: “Is this a road we really want to continue barreling down?” Well, the country has been zooming down this road since at least the beginning of the SO Mania Stampede, and – contrary to Bruni’s limited view of the causes at work here – it didn’t all start with the current presidential election cycle. Not hardly.

But he still has some acute insights.

“The new shape of the news-media universe doesn’t help. Balkanized into micro-niches where partisans can have their passions stoked and prejudices reinforced, it gives reckless allegations many place to land and even stick before they get a sober look.” This, as the SO Community knoweth full well, has been going on for quite a long time. And for many that “sober look” is yet to come.

But – in best Victimist playbook form – Reid remains “unbowed … inconsistent too”.  Bruni reports that Reid had told a bunch of (friendly, I imagine) reporters in his home state (Nevada) that “a number of people had whispered to him of Romney’s alleged tax evasion”, although at another juncture Reid issued a statement referring only to a single but “extremely credible source”.  This is a classic from the playbook: you buttress your un-grounded assertions by claiming that lots of people have told you (although you can’t quite name them or recall them specifically). Although Reid slathers it all on rather thickly by then immediately using another trusty bit from the same section of the playbook and claims that he has one hugely reliable source (also – as Bruni notes – unidentified).

And then Reid takes it over the top by saying in twenty-five words or less what the playbook usually recommends that you pussyfoot around: “I don’t think the burden should be on me … the burden should be on him [Romney] … he’s the one I’ve alleged has paid no taxes”.  In other words, once you’ve made your (un-grounded and unsubstantiated) accusation, then the burden of proof is on the guy you’ve accused. This is Victimist jurisprudence 101, but you’re not supposed to expose its ugly kisser to the public – you’re supposed to finesse it.

But Reid doesn’t have to play the Game quite so cautiously – he is, after all, a Senator and a highly-placed one at that.

So much for the first principles of Law in this country: that the burden of proof lies with the accuser. (Except in military sex-offense law, where under Reid’s tutelage that vital Framing principle was overturned in favor of the ‘victim’.)

Said the Speaker of the House (Republican John Boehner): “It’s one of the problems that occurs here in Washington. People run out there without any facts and just make noise”.  But Washington has been erecting this sort of ‘problem’ into legislation for decades now. And at this point the pols have been infected with the same plague-bacillus that they’ve been spreading throughout the entire national culture and the legal community for all those same decades.

So the Victimist Playbook is now becoming the Beltway Playbook.

This can’t be good.  Nor can it end well.

NOTES

*The print-version appeared in The New York Times, Sunday, August 5, 2012, on page 3 of the ‘Sunday Review’ section.  After garnering 330 or more comments in three days, the Times has closed down further commenting.

**In the specifics of the Rule of Law, of course, it is precisely “details” [such as i) evidence (admitted according to rational objective evidentiary standards), ii) the presumption of innocence of the accused, iii) the focus on adjudging the specifics of matching the accused’s actions and the Charges lodged and not puffing up a ‘show trial’ to ‘send a message’ and iv) the commitment to both objective and rational proceedings and to the principles of the Framing Vision]  that comprise the working structural members of the Rule of Law.

And in this regard I note the acute but profoundly alarming observation made by Theodore Lowi in separate books published in 1969 and in 1995: that liberal politics are precisely antithetical to Law and the Rule of Law, because Law and the Rule of Law provide solid obstructions against the deal-making ‘flexibility’ so vital to modern liberal (Identity-based) politics.

You have only to read radical-feminist law-professor Catharine MacKinnon’s 1989 summa Toward A Feminist Theory of the State to see her striving mightily to ensure the ‘deconstruction’ of Law and the Rule of Law and the traditions based on the Framing Vision and the first principles of the Constitution. And since her book arrived precisely as the 1990s – era of ‘governance feminism’ flourished under the Clintons – were dawning, then you can see what a perfect storm was brewing in the Beltway.

And you can see now, I think, on just what grounds the profoundly and vividly anti-Constitutional foundations of the SO Registration and Mania Regime were ‘justified’ in the minds of the pandering, deal-making pols in the Beltway and in the several States: both the deal-making pols and the Victimists share a lethal presumption, i.e. that if Law and the Rule of Law stand in the way of getting your deal/providing ‘justice’ for the alleged Victim, then Law and the Rule of Law have to go.

Hey hey, ho ho, the Rule of Law has got to go! And as Frank Bruni may now begin to realize: so it has.

So much remains to be done.

LINKS

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/opinion/sunday/bruni-truculence-before-truth.html

SEX PANIC AND THE PUNITVE STATE 9

I continue looking at Roger Lancaster’s (RL) book.*

Having given us Janet Reno’s stunning bit of treacly but treacherous boilerplate from 1997, RL quickly continues expand upon its implications.

“The liberal hero of yore – the risk-taking individual who takes responsibility for his or her own fate and triumphs over adversity – gave way to the aggrieved victim who perpetually recounts unhappy experiences and calls for the punishment of others”. (p.205)

I point out that “responsibility” here is not used in the simple and in some ways shallow legal sense, but in the much more profound existential sense: every human being has – and cannot shuck off – the ultimate responsibility for adopting and sustaining her/her Stance toward his/her life experiences.

This is not to say that every person is in control of or can exercise complete control over the experiences that s/he will have in life. This is not to say that every person is somehow completely responsible for whatever experiences enter into his/her life (although one can so shape and conduct one’s life that some experiences are less likely or more likely to happen).

But every human being is indeed responsible for the Stance that s/he adopts toward whatever experiences arise.

In 1971 or thereabouts a university psychology professor came up with the phrase “blaming the victim” in a book – if I rightly recall – of the same title. If any of what I’m saying here seems a bit ‘off’, then chalk it up to the eager taking-up of his phrase and slopping it like paint over everything; he struck a hugely congruent chord (and a useful one) with the then-emerging social-constructionist and Victimist approaches to living a life: you can’t be blamed for your experiences because they are mostly caused by ‘structures’ or forces operating beyond you and therefore anybody who is experiencing life-problems is really a ‘victim’ (tah-dahhhhh!) and should not be dismissed or ‘judged’ or ‘stereotyped’ as having somehow failed to ‘get it together’.

All of this dove-tailed nicely with an emerging ‘liberal’ politics that was seeking to build new demographic groups to replace the old New Deal Democratic electoral coalition of Northern industrial blue-collar workers and Southern Jim Crow supporters and ‘Old Left’ liberals, a coalition dating back to the 1930s that had been shattered by the civil-rights developments of the late 1950s and especially the early 1960s.

Alas for everybody, the new electoral coalition would be constructed of groups not united by class or economic interests, but rather by a common experience of ‘victimization’: by whites against non-whites in the matter of Race, by males againt females in the matter of Gender, by native-born against immigrants in the matter of being outsiders, by grown-ups against youth in the matter of being too young to really sustain mature participation in politics and national affairs.**

Very useful as a purely political tactic, this shift in favor of being a ‘victim’ held within itself much deeper consequences for the country and its culture, and RL will characterize these consequences as being fundamentally a “redefinition of core values”. (p.205) More specifically, that the new model for adult-living was now “the aggrieved victim who perpetually recounts unhappy experiences and calls for the punishment of others”. (p.205)

I add here that in the interest of enlisting ‘bipartisan’ support from the Right by appealing to ‘law and order’, this entire tactic then had to distort itself in order to become heavily enmeshed with crime: the arch-crime was to ‘victimize’ anybody, and ‘victimizing’ had to be dealt with through law-enforcement and the immediate and forceful and expansive deployment of criminal law. By the mid-1970s the country was already on the way to expanded police-state type activity and more specifically it was on the way to the SO Mania Regime, which with the Domestic Violence Regime became the first really broad government effort to start effecting a police state, under the doubly-attractive and bipartisan rubric of engorging the government coercive police authority in myriad ways in order to (pick one or several: protect-against, punish, or prevent) victimization. And, of course, the particular types of victimization raised up for the public’s attention would conform to the agendas of the various ‘victimized’ Identity groups, especially the radical-feminist advocacy’s concern with ‘sex’ and ‘males’.

RL notes that by the late 1980s and very early 1990s there were already voices being raised warning of the deeper consequences of this whole trend. There were books about “the spread of an increasingly irrational therapeutic culture of victimization” and of a “culture of complaint” and “a nation of victims” and even Alan Dershowitz weighed in with a book entitled The Abuse Excuse. (p.205)

RL observes rightly that “the emergent culture of victimization was not without paradoxes , contradictions, and flash-points”: because “it embraces a privatized view of justice, so far as the accused is concerned, while dispensing empathy, forbearance, and state largess so far as the victims of crime are concerned”. (p.205) I would add that there is nothing wrong with concern for victimization – if it is genuine – but you have to apply a vital cost-analysis when you try to alter fundamental legal principles and principles of objectivity and even truthfulness in order to somehow ensure a wide government embrace of such empathy and forbearance and largess.

Also, since from the very beginning the New World provided a lethal and foreboding challenge to anybody trying to start up a life here, the country had – even long before 1776 – developed a “traditional disdain for complainers and malingerers”: male and female, you had to shoulder your pack, and work hard and long in order to build yourself and your family a civilized life in this New World. And this remained true right up into the 20^th century.

Like sailors on a ship, persons had to carry their weight in order to keep the whole shebang afloat. Everybody had to “do their bit” – as Brits used to say during the Blitz. And that meant putting up with a lot of hard knocks and setbacks and overcoming all sorts of adversity in order to construct a basis for an individual, familial, and social and cultural life. Life in the New World was not a game for kids.

When, then, it became politically necessary to embrace ‘victimization’ in the early 1970s, there were going to be huge consequences and costs at very profound cultural levels if suddenly the new model of Citizenship and even adulthood was going to be the ‘Victim’.

The first sly effort to neutralize or wish-away these costs and consequences was to insist that to ‘put up with’ adversity was simply to collude in your own ‘victimization’ and to keep a stiff upper lip and just ‘get on with it’ and ‘do your bit’ was simply going to perpetuate your particular version of victimization.

The second and even more sly effort – evident in Janet Reno’s speech in 1997 quoted at the end of the immediately prior Post in this mini-series – was to actually claim that to loudly and vigorously embrace your victimization was a form of good, old-fashioned, red-blooded traditional American courage and heroism.

Which should have been a huge warning flag: Victimism as it was mutating here was going to require turning the entire American cultural value system upside down. (And – as the SO community knows so vividly – the legal system as well, and the first-principles of the Framing Vision and the Constitution too.)

Thus too the Victim, envisioned as “noble” and “entirely innocent” will also be able to sidestep the ancient human cultural distinction expressed in the West by the distinction between the “deserving poor” and the “malingering poor”: the latter were simply looking to mooch a free ride from everybody else, the latter were trying to be industrious and carry their weight but circumstances indeed beyond their control had temporarily blunted that effort. (p.206)

The ‘new American Victim’ – as outlined in Reno’s sly speech – would be ‘deserving’ simply because such horrific things had (allegedly) been done to her/him. Indeed, as I have said, the ‘new American Victim’ would heroically and courageously take up the torch of the hardy frontier settler and the hard-working immigrants of the Great Age of Immigration (1880-1920) and would thus ‘deserve’ all possible honor, respect, aid, and indulgence.

Neat.

Or rather, neat as a conceptual construct moved around on a mental chessboard. In actual historical events, the whole Thing worked out quite differently, and not in the happy sense of that word.

Nicely, RL observes that these huge transformations – almost invisible here, especially in their costs and consequences – have not gone unnoticed abroad. He quotes a “middle-aged Mexican shopkeeper” who offered as her thought that “You [Americans] … used to be a nation of businessmen; you buried the dead and faced forward to the future. Now you are a nation of commemorators, memorial builders. You cannot let go of your hurts. You cannot stop inspecting your neighbors for signs of transgression. You are becoming a nation of victims”. (p.206)

I would add that “inspecting your neighbors for signs of transgression” is even more ominous that simply as an indicator of victimhood: it evokes clear dynamics of German society under the Nazis or East German Communist society, where neighbors were constantly observing their neighbors for signs of un-Correct or ‘counter-revolutionary’ behavior that would be reported to the Gestapo or the Stasi. Now that both the Nazi and East German regimes are gone, we have access to their files and can see that a vast amount of the secret-police workload consisted in processing and sifting-through mountains of ‘reports’ voluntarily sent to them by persons who had ‘detected’ signs of such transgressions on the part of this or that neighbor.

And – as the SO community can well imagine – it all went into a file; once somebody suspected and reported you, then you were ‘tagged’ and there was a file on you. Who can forget the huge problems in the former East Germany as its secret-police files were discovered and made public, and citizens got to see just who among their erstwhile friends and neighbors had reported them to the “organs of state security”? Having thought about that, look at the Registry regime, especially in its Adam Walsh Act incarnation, now being pushed upon States by the feds through the (specious) promise of more tax money to implement it. You see where this Thing has gone in this country.

And then – and it must have hurt a decent liberal like RL to realize it – he asks the question: “The Left Makes a Right Turn?” (p.206)

“The Left was scarcely an innocent bystander in the development of new modes of identity based on victimization and trauma”. (p.206) And with that I can only agree wholeheartedly. The Left, that started out in the 1950s being very anti-government-authority, had by the 1970s, and increasingly so since then, become very government-friendly indeed. In fact, it depended almost completely on the government for the monies and political enabling that erected the agendas of its various victim-Identity groups into national law and policy, police-state regimes and all.

“Talk about social oppression leads to victimization narratives”. (p.206) Yes indeed. And every victimization requires a Perp and every Perp deserves to be tagged and punitively dealt with and any concern for Constitutional niceties and legal principles is just collusion with victimization or obstruction of the victims’ need for ‘justice’ and ‘closure’.

Moving on to what he terms “The Blame Game” (p.208) RL notes that the country’s leftist social movements have historically “held the politics of complaint in dynamic productive tension with the politics of liberation”. (p.208) By complaining effectively you can help increase ‘liberation’ by getting this or that thing changed.

Which is all true. You can struggle against instances of “oppression” while “keeping the promise of freedom in clear view”. (p.208) But I note that clearly something else is operative in all this, since in the past forty years the country has wound up imprisoning a larger percentage of its Citizens than any other country, including Stalin’s back in the day.

Even more acutely, RL notes that this “productive tension” turns out to be “not always a stable mix”. (p.208) [italics mine] And here he starts penetrating to the dark beating heart of Victimism as it has mutated here in this country. Because after the initial ‘high’ of liberation, as leftist initiatives begin to demonstrate their weaknesses and leftist influence begins to decline from its constructive beginnings (as, for example, in this country since the heyday of the 1960s and early 1970s), then the “emphasis” shifts to “grievance, injury, and resentment”. (p.208)

Yes, but the ‘valorization’ of all that grievance, injury and resentment was built-into the Victimist gambit from Day One. And I would say that even though the leftist zeitgeist is now in decline, that simply means that the Advocacies and their political enablers are going to have to “double-down” (like Bush in Iraq for all those years) and intensify their efforts.

First, because in a difficult but vital presidential election-cycle the Party has to appeal to all its fractalized, single-issue, Victim-Identity ‘bases’ and keep them happy by continuing to give them what they demand.

Second, because once you have created a matrix of tax-fed cottage industries around your initiative, then they are all now expecting continued funding and are threatening to withdraw their political support for you if you don’t provide it.

Third, because once you have created a profound and huge ‘crisis’ to justify starting the whole Thing to begin with, then how can you suddenly back away and say it wasn’t such a big crisis after all or that suddenly it’s all fixed now?  

And this is especially so if you as a politician are threatened with numberless gaggles of ‘victims’ now showing up outside your office, putting themselves in front of the cameras like baby harp-seals and claiming that you, a heartless and faithless politician, are now clobbering and ‘re-victimizing’ them by withdrawing all the tax money you had been feeding them for decades?

With Victimism as it has mutated in this country the Beltway – to borrow Thomas Jefferson’s deathless phrase – now “has a wolf by the ears”. (Meaning: you are now holding the lethal beast so closely that if you let it go it will bite your head off, and yet if you hold on you are locked in a death-embrace with it until … something gives.)

The Beltway pols and all the State pols have left themselves now with few options: either keep feeding this Thing tax money and further corroding the Constitutional Rule of Law or else run the almost certain risk of being pilloried in the treacherously-hungry mainstream media as being ‘anti-Victim’ and/or ‘pro-Perp’.

 The Victim retains his/her public status not on the basis of any heroic or courageous struggle, but simply on the basis of having (allegedly) been victimized. (p.208)

Thus, RL observes, “the retrograde … politics of victims’ rights” have so rapidly “bent diverse strands of liberal, progressive, and leftist activism into a profoundly conservative shape in the modern state”. (p.208)

I would only disagree about one thing here: the bending has not been into a “profoundly conservative” mis-shape, but rather into a profoundly regressive shape. No genuine American conservatism (or, for that matter, genuine American liberalism) can or could ever work such a profound corrosion and corruption of the Rule of Law and the first principles of the Framing Vision and the Constitution. What has happened as a cost, consequence, and highly predictable result of the Victimist mutation in this country has created a profound back-tracking and regression to the type of law and culture that hearks back to primitive times of yore, long pre-dating the bright and truly progress-producing characteristics imparted to this nation in the Framing Vision and such further extensions of that Vision by Lincoln and Martin Luther King.

So much, then, remains to be done.

NOTES

*Lancaster, Roger. Sex Panic and the Punitive State. Berkeley: U/Cal Press (2011). ISBN: 978-0-520-26206-5 (pb). 246pp plus Appendices, Notes, and Index.

**Thus the general-purpose composite ‘victimizer’ became the patriarchal white older American male.

SEX PANIC AND THE PUNITIVE STATE 8

I continue looking at Roger Lancaster’s (RL) book.*

RL then considers how the government set out “institutionalizing victimhood”. (p.200)

All of the States and the District of Columbia now have adopted some form of a victims’ bill of rights and thirty-three have actually amended their State Constitutions to do so.

He rightly observes that “these newly minted rights tilt law enforcement practices away from a constitutional emphasis on rights of the accused while embedding a punitive pre-emptive orientation even more deeply in institutional practices everywhere”. (p.200) I would add that this dynamic has been carried on even more lethally in the courts, where the zero-sum of ‘rights’ between accused and accuser has resulted in a subtraction from the Constitutional rights accorded the accused and an addition to these “newly minted” victims’ rights. There’s no way to put a happy-face on that, or to wish it away. From the get-go, victims’ rights had to be taken from slices made into the corpus of rights accorded to the accused in Western law and the Constitution.

He mentions the ‘right’ of the victim to be protected from the accused, and rightly traces its origin to feminist and womens’-services advocates who saw such a demand as a neat way to prejudge the accused in domestic violence case: i.e., the accused is soooo dangerous, that the accuser has to be protected by the government and the police. Once that thought is planted (by a helpful media) in the public mind, then any accused is effectively pre-judged before anybody gets to the court-room and the legal process.

The presumption of innocence, RL rightly notes, is gone – even reversed.

I have always thought that the reversal of such a profoundly basic and essential principle of Western law should have raised a red-flag from Day One. And many legislators were themselves law-school graduates (although as Joe Biden cheeribly admitted, law school “bored” him – no wonder he was just the Senator to steer the Violence Against Women Act and its add-ons through the political process).

And once this dynamic is in play, the assumption of guilt “favors pre-trial detention and thus gives prosecutors a powerful weapon to wield against the accused” since isolated and incarcerated defendants “are more likely to seek a plea bargain or enter a guilty plea than are those who remain at home awaiting trial”. (p.200) It is anybody’s guess how many guilty-pleas and plea-bargains were made under such duress, deliberately fabricated by the pols and administered by the prosecutors, the whole shebang eagerly amplified by the media.

Victimism is lethal to a democracy as well as to Constitutional jurisprudence. It requires – if you think about it – that the common-bond of the Citizenry and of The People be fractured, bluntly and forcefully sliced-up into Victims and Perps (or potential Perps). Somebody should work out a pie-chart of the population: each Victim group, its claimed ‘oppressor perps’ (and potential perps) … and draw lines through the pie for each pairing from each Victim group: by the time you get through, most of the Citizenry is somehow a sheep or a goat or perhaps both simultaneously.

But the sex-based Victim groups (shading so complexly into the Domestic Violence groups) enjoy – at the moment – the greatest cachet, reflecting the pols’ eagerness to placate the radical-feminist Advocacies and their hanger-on pandemonium who get a cut of the sizable government monies allocated for the Problem generally.

RL notes the claim that participation – and influencing outcomes – by Victims in various phases of the legal processes is “therapeutic”. And so it may well be; in the same way that road-rage against somebody you feel has cut you off at a traffic light is – for a moment – “therapeutic”: you feel a really neat surge of power and – not to put too fine a point on it – vengeance. Until, anyway, you realize what you’ve done, especially if – say – you cause an accident or injury to somebody while in the process of getting your “therapeutic high”.

It is anybody’s guess how many such persons are now trudging around the country, their initial ‘high’ gone, an awareness of damage caused (especially if it was disproportionate to the allegated offense or if the initial report they made was a false one). But then would an addiction dynamic kick in? Since the first high has worn off, might you need to somehow get another dose? Surely psychological ‘addiction’ experts are flexible enough to consider that type of addiction, on top of all the other types said to be rampant in the country.

But – and RL discusses this (p.201) – how genuinely and lastingly ‘therapeutic’ can such vengeance be? While ‘getting back at’ somebody for some hurt real or imagined has always had its seductive charms, hasn’t the more mature and enriching course been to first master your own responses to your experiences and then, once those are mastered, to consider what retributional options might be available?

And – as RL also considers – what, really, are the reliably-known dynamics of “trauma”? Why is it that some people are not ‘traumatized’ by substantial events that they experience, while others are ‘traumatized’ by much less substantial events? (All of this presumes that sufferers honestly report their internal experiences, which is a verrry big presumption – especially when the government has gone and guaranteed that if are ‘traumatized’ you can collect some free money.)

Worse “the prevailing rhetoric of the victim’s movement is that no punishment is ever severe enough”. (p.200) That’s true. Although to no small extent this demand is slyly masked: no punishment is ever severe enough because we are always ‘discovering’ how utterly horrific even the most minor ‘victimization’ can be. It’s not, then, that the victimists are trafficking in state-abetted vengeance; it’s just that they are honestly reflecting the ever-increasing ‘knowledge’ that is constantly being ‘discovered’ to the effect that even the most minor instances of victimization can have ‘soul-killing’ consequences.

This is especially true in the sex-and-violence arenas, where things have now reached the point that it is difficult to draw distinctions and gradations for the purposes of sentencing those convicted: it’s no longer the guilt for the Charged Crime that drives matters, it’s the presumed horrificness of the victim’s (claimed) internal experiences. There might as well be just the one crime of Victimizing, which would carry a minimum twenty-to-life sentence.

RL discusses “emotional pre-sentencing testimony” by victims (or their kin or friends) – as if the judge were not able to make his/her own assessments from all the trial material. And once again, it injects a queasy soap-opera or melodrama note into what should be more serious proceedings (people’s liberty, property, futures, or even lives are at stake here).

But I would also add – as we have seen in the recent Santa Clara trial where a man assaulted an old man he claimed to have sexually molested him 40 years before – the hardly unpredictable gambit of introducing emotional ‘testimony’ about the alleged molestation (which had itself never been examined or proven) at the beginning of the trial as a justification for the A&B he admitted he committed. And the jury bought it and refused to convict him of A&B even though he admitted he had done it.

RL notes legal experts who have pointed out how lethally all of this undermines the necessary impartiality of judges and jurors. (p.201) But I point out that it was precisely a demand made by radical feminism** that, ‘impartiality’ and ‘abstraction’ are nothing but patriarchal and macho refusals to enter into the pain of the story and that the justice system therefore needed to be ‘reformed’ to make it more ‘sensitive’ to – as radical-feminists put it – women’s very special and non-macho way of processing and constructing experience: by feeling – the theory goes – rather than by thinking or ‘abstracting’. Also you shouldn’t be so insensitive and macho as to ask questions about deeply felt stuff (such as the truth or accuracy of stories told in police reports or under oath) … Radical-Feminism gave Victimism a philosophical ‘justification’ for gutting the American justice system of some of the most primary principles and practices of Western and Constitutional law. And that’s what happened to the Rule of Law, in case you were wondering.

Nicely, RL quotes attorney and author Wendy Kaminer that “the prosecutor and defense are not engaged in a ‘duel about punishment’; they’re engaged in a duel about guilt”. That’s the way it should work and did work. But now in victim-friendly law you can’t really ‘duel’ about guilt because the victim’s story cannot really be questioned … so what’s left to do?

Further, Kaminer rightly asserts that defendants should be the center of attention at trials because they are the ones being tried. And because it is their liberty or property or even life that hangs in the balance. It is therefore a gross and fundamentally grotesque deformation and derangement of the trial-process to make anybody else the center of concern. Trials are not primarily spectacles; they are workaday processes to handle the vital but lethal deployment of the government’s sovereign coercive power against an accused Citizen.***

RL neatly gives Kaminer’s neatly-put conclusion: “It’s hard to argue with the desire to reform trials in order to help victims heal – unless you consider the consequences. Because the victims’ rights amendment decreases the rights of defendants. It’s not simply a grant of rights to the crime victims; it’s a grant of power to the state.” (p.202) And – I would only add – it’s a grant of rights to the victims that are taken from the accused. (And while the formal Victims’ Rights Amendment to the Constitution has failed, the government has continued to keep the ball rolling in lesser venues, especially courts and law-enforcement policies.)

All of which “naturalizes vindictiveness”, as RL nicely puts it. (p.202) And such a naturalization of one of the more primitive human emotions is nothing less than a deliberately-induced regression in the nation’s civic and cultural life. If this or that genuinely guilty perpetrator may often said to be ‘primitive’ (and in need of some growing-up as a Citizen and an adult), the entire Citizenry is seduced into such regressive primitiveness by participating – even if only as a spectator from a distance – in the staged state-administered vengeance-sessions that so many trials have now become.

Nor does RL mince around the more delicate of the lethal ‘reforms’: “If vindictiveness seems natural, even honorable, today, it is thanks in no small part to the careful placement of white, infantilized crime victims at center stage in the national political drama”. (p.203) In a sly but viscerally powerful PR move, the Victimists, themselves fronting for the government police-power (either from the Left or the Right), hold children up to the cameras like  – I’ll say it – baby harp seals. Despite the fact that the alleged myriads of missing and exploited children are mostly fictional.

Yes – there are instances of genuine outrages against children, but are they enough to derange the Constitutional walls that protect Americans from the power of a government gone wild? (And still going wild – as the National Defense Authorization Act **** clearly indicates.)

And “during the 1980s and 1990s, victimization emerged as a durable new source of identity”. I can’t begin to calculate how vulnerable so many people are in modern-day America to the seductive lure of an easily-acquired sense of ‘identity’ and of ‘social status’ and of ‘belonging’ and of ‘achievement’ (how easily now the term ‘hero’ is tossed around). On some of the websites where victim-interested types tend to comment, you can almost feel the strong pull.

 And “as a quasi-religious movement, the new victimology extended an evangelical invitation to every corner of society”. (p.204) Here I’d only note that aside from ‘men’ generally, the most sustained assault target of the Victimist-nourished SO Mania Regime has been a church – namely, one of the largest and most established.

And, in that regard, recall that the ‘invitation’ was then sweetened by the lure of easy money, as legislators made it even easier to present a story from the long-ago, claim ineffable trauma, and collect a hefty settlement. The possibilities for mischief here are not small.

And such victim status also brings with it “privileges”. In that role, one can “enjoy the empathy and indulgence of otherwise unreceptive authorities” (especially once the Beltway let it be known that federal money would be available to receptive authorities, and federal hostility would be visited upon unreceptive ones). (p.205)

And – as RL rightly continues the catalogue – “victimhood too comes as a relief, a disclaimer of personal responsibility” and the victim becomes “the undisputed hero of his or her story”. (p.205) Although this is a heroism too-easily acquired: rather than achieving anything by dint of sustained personal effort, one simply declares oneself a victim and perhaps preside over a spot of vengeance courtesy of the government and perhaps even a few moments in some form of media attention.

But that was the scam the government itself lured so many into.

It was Janet Reno, when she was Attorney-General in the Clinton years, who really opened up new vistas for Victimism in a 1997 speech at a victim-rights conference: she “sanctified” it as the core of American identity by asserting to the crowd and the cameras that “I draw the most strength from the victims, for they represent America to me: people who will not be put down, people who will not be defeated, people who will rise again and stand again for what is right … You are my heroes and my heroines. You are but little lower than the angels”. (p.205) [italics mine]

There are two tropes woven into this astounding bit.

First, that being a Victim is now a credible – indeed valuable – social role and identity. Is this a good message to be sending to the young? Is this really a life-project or life-role that can sustain a productive society and a common-weal? And, of course, every ‘victim’ requires a victimizing perp – so for that huge chunk of society that embraces its victimhood, an equally hefty chunk of society has to be cast in the role of victimizer. And the presumption will have to be continued: this country and culture and society runs and works mostly through victimization. And how develop a robust respect for and loyalty to the Framing Vision if that is your basic take on what makes this country work and run?

Second – and this is truly a sly pre-emptive gambit – Reno tries to make the ‘victim’ into some modern version of frontier settlers: hardy, scrappy, resilient, no-nonsense, refusing to take No for an answer, and – so familiar now – courageous and ‘heroic’. And yet this is hardly the presentation mainstream Victimists proffer to the public in the endless horrific ‘stories’ and the claims of ‘soul-killing’ ‘traumatization’, especially in sex-matters where you are supposed to believe that the merest incident of the lowest-grade ‘abuse’ can derange and derail personal competence and development.

But Reno’s spin lets you get to have your cake and eat it too: hugely fragile and damaged and yet at the same time possessed of a sturdy and robust and mature life-competence.  

But this is all spin. It’s political pandering to a useful demographic. And yet that’s a demographic that demands the most lethal and profound derangements of American law and jurisprudence and – ultimately – civic competence that would support a commitment to the common-weal.

And can it seriously be accepted that what has become victim-friendly jurisprudence and the general manipulation of the public Stance toward an accused is accurately describable as “right”?

And lastly, I note that queasy, childishly sentimental faux-theological flourish about “the angels”. For a secular-Left government, Victimhood is somehow now a quasi-religious substitute for any genuine religious life. As if you could nurture yourself spiritually merely on the governing dynamics of Victimhood as it has mutated in this country.

But her speech served shrewdly to provide a talking-points memo for ‘the faithful’ and you can see echoes of her spin still surfacing 15 years later in various comments on various sites.

As I have often said, the government – from both Left and Right – has embraced Victimhood and helped mutate it into the monstrosity that it is today.

And the Rule of Law, and the boundaries of truth and honesty that are vital to any genuine civic competence and integrity, are much the worse because of it.

NOTES

*Lancaster, Roger. Sex Panic and the Punitive State. Berkeley: U/Cal Press (2011). ISBN: 978-0-520-26206-5 (pb). 246pp plus Appendices, Notes, and Index.

**The radical-feminist law professor and activist Catherine MacKinnon goes into this at length in her 1989 book Toward a Feminist Theory of the State.

***And have you noticed that this tendency has migrated to other equally lethal arenas? So, for example, the killing of ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or whomever happens to get hit by gunfire or drone-fire in this or that of Our military misadventures becomes merely a spectacle to be played on the evening news (if footage is available)? Victimism has made vengeance – albeit mostly through a deformed legal process – a ‘spectacle’; and those who watch it start to resemble Roman crowds at the gladiatorial arena. (If you watch the Starz satellite channel, their series “Spartacus” plays on this reality, I think: when the gladiators are in the Roman arena, the camera spends much of the time on the crowds, leering, cheering, jeering, and generally giving in to their most primitive instincts. It is not a pretty sight – but I think it is very revealing and deserves much thought.)

****You can see here  an article by Morris Berman, author of the recently-published book ominously entitled Why America Failed. He discusses the National Defense Authorization Act signed by Obama in December, 2011.

As Berman puts it, this is the “indefinite detention bill”: and “it has no temporal geographic limitations, and can be used by Obama or any future president to militarily detain U.S. citizens” so that “as in pre-Magna Carta days, you can simply be swept up and put away forever with no explanation of why, no right to call or lawyer or anybody else, and no right to a trial.” It is, he opines, “probably the greatest rollback of civil liberties in the history of the United States”.

Definitions are elastic: “literally anyone can be described as a “belligerent”, or as they are now called, “covered person”. And “the universe of potential ‘covered persons’ includes every citizen of the United States of America … who could one day find himself or herself branded a “belligerent” and thus subject to complete confiscation of his or her constitutional civil liberties and nearly never-ending incarceration in a military prison”.

Recalling that America now has “more people under ‘correctional supervision’ that there were in the Russian gulag under Stalin at its height”, he observes ruefully that “the distinctive characteristic of American democracy, from 1776, was the protection of the individual and the preservation of individual rights” but now “that no longer exists”. I would say that the SO Mania, driven by Victimism and also by the Radical-Feminist dismissal of the Constitution and all its protections as mere props for ‘patriarchy’, worked powerfully to undermine the integrity not only of the legal system and of the government itself, but of any official respect for the Rule of Law.

So I can’t help but think that all of this was clearly waiting in the wings when the curtain first went up on the SO Mania two decades and more ago: the dynamics that render so many vulnerable to the classification as “belligerent” or “covered person” are pretty much the same that opened so many Americans up to the classification as “sex offender”. And to read some of the Radical-Feminist and Victimist tracts, all men were almost by definition rapists and ‘sexual terrorists’. Half the population, ‘classified’ in a single sweep.

Berman also notes that even before the passage of this law, the president had the ‘legal’ power to declare anybody on the planet a “terrorist” and have him/her assassinated. There need be no trial since guilt was presumed.

I think you can see here where Victimism as it has mutated in this country in the past decades has actually weakened the Constitutional protections for Americans. But worse: it has gotten too many Americans used to the idea that Evil can easily and quickly and with certainty determined, and that such Evil has no rights and that if you just know somebody is Evil then it’s only a matter of carrying out the punishment.

And it clearly has gotten the government into some very dark habits. Before Dick Cheney suggested that this country would have to take a walk on path to the Dark Side, I think Victimism as it has mutated here was already paving that path.

And yet, judging from how the SO Mania Regime was given so much unthinking and well-intentioned public support or at least acquiescence, so many will find themselves with nothing to say except “It seemed like a good idea at the time”. But that won’t repair the damage.