A Nation of Victims. - book reviews

National Review, Jan 18, 1993 by Charles R. Kesler

A Nation of Victims, by Charles J. Sykes (St. Martin's, 276 pp., $22.95)

"WHINE on, harvest moon," as George Bush used to say in happier days, deriding Michael Dukakis during the 1988 campaign. Bush's put-down was whimsical--whether it expressed the lingering preppie mirth in his soul, or a strange sort of goofiness, was hard to say--but it poked fun at the liberal lamentations that had been issuing from the Democrats since the 1960s.

During his Presidency and his reckless re-election campaign, however, it was often Bush who seemed to be whining, almost absent-mindedly. It was as though he knew the conservative words, but couldn't get the liberal tune out of his mind. This was a shame, because at his best Bush reminds us not of "a kinder, gentler America" but of our sterner, nobler selves: the America that fought and won World War II. But what he called for during his Administration was a more "compassionate" America, and with Bill Clinton's election, he got it. When Clinton's effulgent compassion began to shine, Bush's thousand points of light disappeared like the night stars.

The difference between genuine charity and the appeasement of interest groups was somehow lost in the recent campaign. How fortunate, then, that we have Charles Sykes's new book, which strives to reassert that distinction and to probe what he terms "the crisis of the American character." The author of two provocative volumes on the decay of American higher education (ProfScam and The Hollow Men), Sykes is well prepared to describe America's ongoing transformation into "a nation of victims," a nation conceived in resentment and dedicated to the proposition that "I am a victim. ... I am not responsible; it's not my fault."

Now, any book on the burgeoning victimization industry runs a big risk, because the only thing worse than whining is--whining about whining. Sykes avoids this pitfall by frequent injections of good humor and common sense. He has an eye for the absurd, as in the University of Missouri School of Journalism handbook that proscribes words and phrases that tend to stereotype, like gyp ("offensive to Gypsies"), burly ("too often associated with large black men, implying ignorance"), and qualified minority ("because it implies some are not"). He knows better than to gild the lily, and lets examples speak for themselves: the lawyer who defends his client's tardiness at work by attributing it to "chronic lateness syndrome," or the Chicago man who threatens to sue McDonald's for violating federal equal-protection laws because his sixty-inch waist and prodigious butt would not fit into a restaurant seat.

But Sykes is not content to assemble anecdotes, and the major strength of his book is his intelligent review of the causes behind the crisis of American character. He begins his main account at mid century, invoking the trenchant (but now rather neglected) works of Robert Nisbet and David Riesman to describe a country newly affluent yet anxious. To cope with this diffuse, pervasive anxiety, Americans sought reassurance from worldly-wise professionals-thus begetting "the therapeutic culture," comprising psychotherapists, miscellaneous counselors, and the social scientists whose prescriptions would be followed in the Great Society. To his credit, Sykes does not leave it at this. He throws backward glances at the late-nineteenth-century epidemic of "neurasthenia," the first "collective attack of nerves" America suffered. And he even rummages around in the history of modern political philosophy to find the theoretical roots of our contemporary anxiety.

It is these sections that disappoint. Though Sykes is good at raising important questions, his answers are often slack. Is it democracy itself that breeds anxiety and restlessness? Tocqueville thought so, but his argument is never clearly stated or considered in Sykes's book. Or is it, instead, Rousseau and Romanticism that gave rise to the cult of victimhood? Hard to say: Rousseau only gets about two pages. Moreover, the relative influence of the many other thinkers mentioned in A Nation of Victims--e.g., Marx, Freud, Theodor Adorno, Charles Reich is never clarified.

On a more practical level, Sykes has little to say about how American politics has contributed to the problem, e.g., whether welfare-state entitlements tend inevitably to reward and therefore encourage pretenders to victimhood. He well shows that by shifting the responsibility for most human problems to society, one invites irresponsibility, the abdication of individual self-government in favor of government as Big Mother. But by directing his major criticisms at culture and not (also) politics, he is guilty of a certain political irresponsibility, too.

Sykes's version of the "decay" in our national character would be more persuasive if he had first established what that character is at its best; but he provides no discussion of the archetypes of American character (Washington, Lincoln, Tom Sawyer, etc.). Accordingly, the book lacks the historical punch of Richard Brookhiser's The Way of the WASP, an elegant treatment of similar themes.