The core elements of Rousseau’s revolutionary victimology—the spirited moral stance of protest and resistance, self-exoneration through commitment and compassion, and the heaping of all guilt onto the evil reactionary oppressors—serve to construct and sustain a gratifying self-image more powerfully than actually governing ever could. The revolutionaries, the conscious and committed, are the virtuous redeemers not only of themselves and the oppressed, but of human nature as such and History itself. Best of all, being on “the right side of History” (that is, protesting against the past because it has victimized us all in distorting our natural goodness, and the oppressed even more) only really requires us to feel correctly, and maybe to express our support for victims; action is optional.
If, however, providential History will not oblige us by delivering the redemptive order, and thus both kinds of victims remain forever among us (the universal victims of civilization and the particular victims of inequitable civil order), then Rousseau’s victimology serves mainly to de-legitimate all actual regimes and to legitimate a revolutionary regime officially devoted to eliminating the specified types of victimhood. This revolutionary regime does not have to attain the projected harmonization of man; its relentless official devotion to the elimination of victimhood will sustain its aura of legitimacy. Its devotees gain a kind of anticipatory citizen-legitimacy as political actors through their commitment to the future egalitarian regime, the only truly legitimate regime; they are thus authorized to denounce as supporters of an illegitimate regime all who are not so committed. […]
Since, however, there is ultimately something undignified about the therapeutic-liberationist whining of the pampered and privileged, they cannot resist making common cause with those struggling violently against political and economic oppression, who are even more admirable if they are throwing off colonialism. Hence the irresistible allure (or pressure) of “allyship” with identity groups asserting themselves, even when they make the privileged liberal nervous. Hence also the appeal of Hamas, which raises to a higher level the self-satisfaction liberationists already take from common cause with disadvantaged racial minorities and analogously “marginalized” groups.
Importantly, this is not isolated on the Left. He goes on:
Whereas Rousseauan-therapeutic and Lockean-liberal factions previously worked out their conflicts inside the national frameworks of liberal order, their offspring—identity politicians and the equally illiberal working class Lockean patriots—seem to offer signs of the end of liberalism. Considering themselves victims, the one of the “system” and the other of the “deep state,” each constitutes itself as “the people” on the basis of that victimhood and claims a source of legitimacy of its own, diminishing the legitimacy of the state, which rests upon the sovereignty of “the people” as a unified pool of those protected by the state from victimization.
And, lest the centrist or those otherwise still committed to liberalism (yours truly) should be feel safely left out, he adds:
Those fully committed to the liberal order—libertarians, neoliberals, and neoconservatives—will object that liberalism has a different legitimating principle, namely representative government. They tend to believe that, if we can restore representative institutions and reform the economy to hum along providing prosperity to most Americans, we can put the victimological genie back into the bottle. I believe this is an illusion; but that is material for another essay.