In The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror, Alyson Cole explains a wide range of familiar cultural battlegrounds of the 1990s—including political correctness, multiculturalism, identity politics, and date rape—by deconstructing the language of victimhood running beneath them. Political claims to wrongful treatment have been critically recast as “victimism” and presented as evidence of a cultural slide into solipsistic, vengeful weakness. Cole's study takes topics that many in political science and sociology know exhaustively well (and, indeed, have been exhausted by) and reintroduces them not by revisiting their arguments but by taking stock of their implicit terms and by making them important and interesting again. The book reminds those on the political left why these efforts of the 1990s were so easily mocked: because describing victimization is so often tied to a group identity and because it makes demands on the state for redress. Those roots and remedies are typically regarded as contemptible in a political culture that valorizes “up-by-the-bootstraps” individualism and easily transforms victims into feminized, pathetic schemers. Cole's ultimate concern is these political effects of the backlash against invoking victim status, which she terms “anti-victimism.” The Cult of True Victimhood referenced in the title is what real victims then must be: only those who deny their victim status, demonstrating propriety, responsibility, individuality, and innocence. The Cult of True Victimhood, Cole argues, “serves to undermine collectivity and depoliticize challenges to injustice” (p. 6).

The book is wide ranging and interdisciplinary, an example of what I would call applied political theory (with none of the status-demoting qualities of the term “applied” meant here). That is, Cole treats non-canonical popular texts by Dinesh D'Souza, Shelby Steele, Betty Friedan, Alan Dershowitz, and William Ryan (to name only a few) and addresses herself to current events and political struggles of the recent past to draw out vivid descriptive observations. The style draws on giants of political thought like Michel Foucault and Karl Marx without explicit discussion. The result is an engaging and highly readable text (at least to anyone who remembers these debates of the 1990s and still cares about what happened to them). Her normative conclusion is that anti-victimism diminishes our politics, which for Cole must grapple with histories of group-based injustice.

The first substantive chapter, “Shaming the Victim: The Anti-Victimist Campaign,” is a fascinating account of the conservative case against victims. Cole shows how victims (of discrimination, abuse, and poverty) were symbolically transformed into impostors, purportedly leveraging incommensurate gains from their victimization and enjoying special privileges. Victims then actually victimize others, such as when feminist faculty victimize white male students. Therapeutic culture has enabled victimist flourishing, conservative critics have argued, and the cure must be to rebuild character. Cole argues here that anti-victimism “should be understood as both an extension of neo-liberalism as well as an attempt to come to terms with its consequences” (p. 46). This chapter would be an excellent stand-alone assignment in courses in women's studies as well as political science, as it is the chapter that most succinctly captures most of the book's insights in a neatly arranged narrative. Although Cole's targets throughout are conservatives who have contorted complex social problems into mere “victim-mongering,” the tone is engaged and respectful, and the representation of their views is thorough. Chapter 3, “Victims on a Pedestal,” takes up the internecine struggles of feminism over victimhood. Cole begins with the criticisms by Katie Roiphe and others that feminists had been reduced to sniveling victims, and shows that actually these anti-victim feminists (termed “AVFers”) distort a long-standing and complex inner dialogue within feminism about victimhood and agency that had already acknowledged that it is undesirable to be a sniveling victim and that women themselves can victimize. Chapter 4, “Blue Lester: Two Faces of Victimhood,” is a study of Professor Julius Lester, a black man and former 1960s radical who converted to Judaism. Lester's admittedly eccentric personal journey exemplifies one strand of anti-victimism: its positing of victim status as a choice. The fifth chapter, on “therapeutics of blame,” unfolds “the curious career of the phrase ‘blaming the victim’” (p. 109). This chapter is chock full of interesting tales beyond the story of William Ryan's 1971 book Blaming the Victim, such as how the victims' rights movement got to evade the “victimism” label, how “survivor” language stigmatizes victims, and how the rape victim got to be, along with the Holocaust survivor, the archetypal victim. The sixth and final substantive chapter, “9-1-1: The Nation as Victim,” does what so many writers on political and cultural issues in the early part of this century seem pressed to do: apply their theoretical observations to the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. We revisit the conservative critics who condemn the “blame American first-ers” and prescribe cowboy masculinity to rebuild the penetrated, feminized nation. This final chapter applies many of the same insights developed so incisively earlier in the book, but comes off as more predictably partisan or, in the case of a section supplying Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ as a stand-in for the soldiers' bodies we did not get to see coming home to Delaware, a bit of a reach.

The Cult of True Victimhood is a refreshing contribution to several scholarly conversations, particularly those among scholars on the left trying to figure out how to talk about inequality under neoliberalism (in feminism, poverty studies, race and ethnic studies, political theory, sociology, and disability studies, for example). Cole is a fellow traveler in frustration, but she offers insights about how critics were able to frame grievances as victimism that scholars from any of these fields should absorb. The lengthy examination of conservative texts is a rare treat in a scholarly world in which we often pretend the other camp does not exist. As a meditation on the limiting conditions of neoliberalism, Cole's book stands with works in law and society and sociology that also grapple with therapeutic culture and the self-esteem movement as political frames for individualism. The book is at its strongest while unraveling the genealogy of victims and critics in the 1990s culture wars, but it is also utterly convincing as a broader story about American hostility toward structural conceptions of inequality.