Rebirth of a Nation

...He thinks others should do the same...

...And while we are not all cut out for heroism, we know it when we see it, and nowadays, it is wearing red, white, and blue...

...What on earth could John Ashcroft do to accommodate the "rights" of the victims, i.e...

...down yellow ribbons as proof of unvictimization...

...And in fact, in the first day or two, one did see a few yellow ribbons, usually in a collage with a photograph of someone missing, held desperately by a loved one still in shock...

...Poll evidence suggests that most Americans think what we are doing is obviously necessary...

...There are at least some signs that this spirit of self-defense has new resonance well beyond the scope of the war on terrorism...

...Will he invite them to the Meadowlands to watch the execution on the JumboTron...

...The last two decades of the twentieth century saw the apparent triumph of classical liberalism...

...After disaster comes a desire to reassemble the shards of a broken community, withstand the loss, strike back at the enemy...

...The dead were not just victims, they were casualties, to be mourned not just in their particularity (though the New York Times has done a remarkable job with its vignettes) but also abstractly, as any given American in a war in which the enemy's target is all Americans...

...But then, without comment, the yellow ribbons were gone...

...On the right, one could cite similar denunciations of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who had described September 11 as divine retribution visited on a sinful country...

...Domestic political dispute then comes down to a quarrel over whether government is an instrument of self-actualization or an obstacle to self-actualization...

...The danger in making generalizations about victim-hood is insensitivity...

...The future of capitalism was one of "infinite possibilities" and "inestimable treasure...

...When Beamer and the others rose up, they were responding not only to a harm they themselves were suffering, but also to an act of war, which is to say, an injury to the society of which they were members...

...The flag on a hard hat today, or a police officer's or firefighter's uniform, is more likely to be taken as a mark of heroism...

...The viewing room in the death house of the Indiana federal prison was, of course, too small to accommodate more than a handful of victims, whom government officials had determined to number in the thousands...

...They lost their lives, but the mission they conceived and executed by themselves, without instruction, was a success...

...If people now feel they know what to do to fight back in a way that they didn't before September 11, it's also true that at the national level, there was no doubt about the response...

...Victims come in groups, and typically these groups are minorities as against a majority that is responsible in some collective sense for the victims' unjust treatment...

...The victim's opposite number is the self-satisfied individual, master of his own life and times...

...What is wrongly described as class-based political behavior—in this case, oppression—is actually the sum of thoroughgoingly individualist concerns...

...But while happiness is private and individual, right is a public matter...

...Sometimes a nation has to come together and fight...

...We have gathered a substantial amount of international support for our actions, but among our allies, sentiment that we are doing the right thing understandably trails our own...

...It wasn't that nearly 3,000 individuals died in the twin towers...

...The attack stirs, in other words, patriotism—love of one's people, pride in their endurance, and a desire to keep them from being hurt anymore...

...Some of our allies have grown very accustomed to the security we provide them...

...But I think that when most people think about him, they find not someone to pity but someone to admire, someone who has set an example that, in the event they ever find themselves in a similar position, they would aspire to emulate...

...The yellow ribbon is the symbol of the victim—of the aggrieved individual, someone powerless at the hands of the powContributing editor Tod Lindberg is editor of Policy Review and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University...

...The high-water mark of victimism may have been the solicitude Attorney General John Ashcroft displayed last summer toward the survivors and the families of the dead with regard to the execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh...

...Rush Limbaugh is arguably America's leading unvictim...

...That sense has not let up...

...The red, white, and blue were a product of a sudden sense of solidarity, the felt need to express the view that an attack on one is an attack on all...

...a woman who has been raped is a rape victim and is going to regard herself as such...

...Although I have ridden bicycles, I have never felt myself to be a victim of "motorism," as one professor quoted by Sykes claimed to be...

...After a long absence, Americans returned to the public square they had left for their private gardens, and to make sure everyone knew, they draped it in red, white, and blue...

...In viewing victims' rights as the primary end of the justice system, Ashcroft (certainly without reflection) placed the U.S...

...Was Todd Beamer a victim...

...Unvictims may have certain political views in common, but at bottom, these are convictions in favor of a politics of individuality...

...Sykes, in A Nation of Victims, has an answer to this, juxtaposing the newer "victimism" with an older "American character" whose ethic is personal responsibility...

...And I have been at more than one black-tie Washington event in which a roomful of people including current and former senior government officials have stood up to cheer a conservative who has just finished describing victimization at the hands of the Left...

...The usual solution is to define heroism down: hence, the figure of the heroic entrepreneur...

...But it is not even necessary that he fancied himself a revolutionary in order to see that murder is a crime against society and its laws, not merely against a particular individual...

...When a victim claims a right to fair treatment, those who have already been treated fairly (or better)—those with greater power—are called upon not only to treat the victim fairly but also to acknowledge the victim's status as someone who has been treated unfairly...

...It is also striking that Americans seemed to be as one on the question of what to do, and this from the very moment they knew what was hitting them...

...Heroism is famously problematic in democratic societies, where egalitarian impulses as well as the bourgeois fear of violent death drastically circumscribe the desire to, for example, pursue glorious victory on the battlefield and conquer the world...

...What was really missing all along, as became clear with the appearance of red, white, and blue ribbons, was the nation...

...Of course—but not in any sense that can be said to diminish the fact that he was a hero...

...But it is also indicative of a frame of mind that simply no longer exists in this country, namely, that perhaps a better response would be to do nothing, or to negotiate, or to appease, or to try to address those "root causes"—that these approaches, in the long run, would save more lives...

...Those days are over...

...But that does not make the actions wholly private...

...The stories since of passengers who have more or less spontaneously risen up and subdued the likes of would-be "shoe bomber" Richard Reid and other persons behaving bizarrely on airplanes suggest that this is something to which many people have now given considerable thought...

...The harshness of this judgment is mitigated in the unvictim's mind by the possibility, available to all, of reversing ill fortune immediately by taking personal responsibility, and also perhaps by the unvictim's memories of his own personal failures as things he was able to overcome...

...The victim is the supreme authority on his own grievance...

...The difference between a country full of yellow ribbons and a country full of red, white, and blue ribbons—and buttons, bumper stickers, lapel pins, scarves, neckties, billboards, and flags of all size and description—neatly captures the passing of one era and the birth of another, as well as the character of each...

...To judge by opinion polls and overwhelming anecdotal evidence, virtually everyone at once understood the importance of the American nation...

...I]t should not be hard to understand that the American flag sprouted in the days after September 11, for many of us, as a badge of belonging...

...The private focus of the latter presupposes self-preservation, without acknowledging the presupposition...

...This status is permanent, quite apart from the remedy of fair treatment, even if the latter is forthcoming...

...There was no question of shrugging and moving on, or of acting only in a symbolic way...

...The worry is out there...

...In any case, Americans never seriously considered anything of the kind...

...In Jeff Bezos, Time was celebrating a billionaire entrepreneur whose company hadn't yet made any money...

...All the ribbons now are red, white, and blue...

...In the end, a couple hundred availed themselves of Ashcroft's generosity, gathering at a site in Oklahoma City to watch...

...One of the questions is framed roughly as follows: Do you think supporting the United States makes your country more vulnerable to attack...

...These are cases in which people have taken action on their own...

...Writing in the January/February Mother Jones, Todd Gitlin, the New York University professor and veteran leftist activist and social critic, decried "a kind of left-wing fundamentalism, a negative faith in America the ugly...

...Ashcroft repeatedly maintained that he personally drew great strength from his encounters with the victims...

...It was almost universally felt...

...Yet clearly he did...

...But it does stand in marked contrast, for example, to the hypercautious response, including from SWAT team members, at Columbine High School in response to a shooting spree by two students there...

...erful...

...Talk of the "root causes" of terrorism, never popular, receded into the mists once people saw the videotape of Osama bin Laden having a good laugh over the whole thing...

...Notwithstanding our sometime preoccupation with our partisanship and division, it is time to quit looking at the differences between the two tendencies and start looking at what they have in common...

...Yet viewing McVeigh's end was something Ashcroft actually called a "right" the victims enjoyed (though of course, not an obligation...

...Should it be surprising that suffering close-up is felt more urgently, more deeply, than suffering at a distance...

...His stated purpose was to do so...

...Heroism, in a society such as ours, is risking your life to save a stranger's...

...This is what Bill Clinton means when he says African Americans are the conscience of the United States...

...In accordance with past practice, the aftermath of the attack on the twin towers could surely have been an occasion for yellow ribbons: thousands lost and feared dead, the uncertainty of the families of the missing, the conclusion growing inevitable that even the bodies might never be recovered...

...In the pre-September 11 world in which both the victim and the unvictim flourished, so did the yellow ribbon as a symbol of victimization, as well as the urge to tear In the pre-September 11 world in which both the victim and the unvictim flourished, so did the yellow ribbon as a symbol of victimization as well as the urge to tear down yellow ribbons...

...American solidarity wasn't born that day...

...He is personal responsibility in flesh and blood, in that he believes himself to be something very close to the sole agent of his own achievement...

...Interestingly, no one is saying that supporting the United States will make your country less vulnerable to attack...

...In the United States, some measure of success is available to everyone who just buckles down, in the unvictim's credo...

...Once again, this is a product of a sense of danger not just to Americans as individuals, but to the nation as a whole...

...Society was set aside...

...At his extreme, he sees himself as "a Master of the Universe," in Tom Wolfe's unforgettable phrase from The Bonfire of the Vanities...

...The private concerns of people, whether satisfied or unsatisfied, were at the forefront of daily life...

...But it did give rise to certain distortions of perspective, themselves the product of the focal point of all the accomplishment, the individual...

...He is the "unvictim...

...When faced with a setback, the unvictim dusts himself off and looks forward, not backward...

...The Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80 called forth a nationwide flowering of yellow ribbons...

...As others have noted, the counterattack in the terror war began not over Afghanistan on October 7, but on September 11 in the skies over Pennsylvania, when a 32-year-old businessman named Todd Beamer entered the history books with the battle cry, "Let's roll...

...This is not to say that one has a choice...

...It was instantly clear to Americans that the time had come to fight, and the war could be a long one...

...The pursuit of private gain, once thought to have socially useful consequences, was now a subject of celebration in itself, never mind the consequences...

...The heroic aspect of the act is the assertion by deed that one does not value one's own life more highly than that of any other...

...This status thus confers a permanent claim to speak with righteousness on the subject in question...

...These decades saw a tremendous flourishing of human freedom, and while the gains were neither universal nor uniform across the globe, they were unmistakable where they occurred...

...As for a high-water mark for unvictimism, perhaps the selection of Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, as Time's 1999 "person of the year" will do...

...By the middle of the 1980s, in The Spirit of Enterprise, he was describing entrepreneurs in heroic terms, single-minded in their pursuit of visions that would enrich not only themselves, but all the rest of us...

...Now, this was all to the good...

...We may be fighting for, among other things, the right to pursue happiness...

...The terrorist attack was not simply an act affecting individual victims, but an attack on the United States...

...the activity goes by the name of consciousness-raising...

...In general, a hero is someone who has proved by his deeds his superiority to others, and this is obviously problematic for us...

...There is obviously a certain correspondence between "victimism" and the principal concerns of the Democratic party, as well as between "unvictimism" and the concerns of the Republican party...

...Gilder described billionaires as heroes because of the wealth they created for others...

...But it's here, I think, that we meet another character of recent times, inversely related to but less recognized than the victim...

...In each case it is the apotheosis of the individual, of private concern...

...These radically private views did not survive September 11...

...In 1992, my Hoover Institution colleague Charles J. Sykes published an incisive book called A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character...

...But I do think the vision of a genuinely democratic sort of hero became clear September 11 and after...

...That someone else should feel himself to have suffered this injustice does not enable him to arouse, against my wishes, such a feeling in me (although he is welcome to try...

...The passengers, on cell phones, had figured out what the hijackers intended, and they were determined to prevent it...

...This is the ultimate expression of egal-itarianism, the conviction that human beings who may be very different in their particularity (rich or poor, black or white, native or foreign-born) share a common humani-ty—in the American context, as a people, a nation...

...Above all, he has never allowed himself to think of himself as a victim, as powerless before powerful forces...

...Collectively, this class is acting to maintain its power over others and its position of privilege...

...At the time, these ideas met with substantial resistance, to put it mildly—from the criminal prosecution of junk-bond impresario Michael Milken to the widespread use of the sobriquet "Decade of Greed...

...It's worth noting that the appeal of victimhood transcends political divisions in the United States...

...The United States of September 10 was a place peopled amply with both types...

...But neither tendency is wholly confined within either party, nor is it the case that the two cannot commingle, or at least exist as contradictory impulses, within individuals...

...It was that they died in an attack on the United States...

...What changed by 2000 was that consequential resistance had simply ceased...

...This was arguably both the culmination of the giddy enthusiasm about the "new economy" and the apotheosis of the entrepreneur...

...If others fail to "take responsibility," they make the least of their situation, however bad it may be, when they could make more...

...If we have been a nation of victims, we have also been a nation of unvictims...

...Some would say that the unvictim is a member of an oppressor class...

...Thus, one may be told that until one has gone through what the victim has gone through, one cannot really know what it's like to be victimized in this way—until one is black, a rape victim, gay, disabled, a war veteran, a cancer survivor, a family member of someone who died in a massacre, and so on, one cannot know what it is like, and so one ought to defer, if not shut up...

...it was revealed...

...Once again, this group of people is not a collective, conscious or unconscious, in the sense of acting collectively...

...Whatever handicap one suffers as a result of victimization, because the handicap is unjust, it cannot be said to diminish one...

...The red, white, and blue ribbons are the symbol of something different: a nation...

...And if airline passengers were once passive during hijackings on the grounds that this course afforded them the best chance of surviving the ordeal, those days are over...

...He even went so far as to arrange for closed-circuit television transmission of McVeigh's demise by lethal injection...

...This kind of heroism has been with us since the nation's beginnings, but it is perhaps easier to see given the volume of it to which we have lately been exposed...

...The element common on left and right was the emphatic rejection of those unwilling to see Americans as a people, a nation, whose divisions on politics and other matters take place only within a broader unity...

...Self-defense (if, indeed, that was the motive of their actions) is not the same as the self-actualization of victims and unvictims...

...Self-defense is always socially sanctioned because what gives rise to it is always a wrong against society in addition to a wrong against a particular person...

...But it's the rape of the individual that makes the victim, not the relationship between this rape and other rapes...

...Obviously, the fact that suffering is individual, even if more than one person suffers, is all the more important to cases in which a sense of oneself as a victim is, so to speak, more optional...

...This argument, based once again on an assumption of false consciousness on the part of those it describes, similarly attempts to derive a group identity from what are distinctly individual feelings...

...Surely he would rather have been somewhere else that day, and I can't imagine anyone rationally wishing to trade places with him...

...The conclusion that victims' claims ultimately amount to an assertion of superior status tells us nothing about whether they should be taken seriously as victims or in what way...

...The old collectivist aspirations of communism and socialism, as well as the political control over society they entailed, gave way to a new respect for the individual and for the system in which individuals seem to prosper collectively, namely, democratic capitalism...

...How could they...

...They were acting not just to save their own lives, but the lives of other Americans...

...There was a time when an American flag on a hard hat—think of the 1970 Peter Boyle movie Joe— was a cultural symbol of racism and oppression, the benighted exclusion of others from a common identity as a people...

...These are the police and firefighters rushing to the scene, the hard hats searching for signs of life in treacherous debris, the passengers bringing the plane down now rather than clinging in hope and terror to a few more minutes of life at the cost of the lives of others...

...Because this quality, finally, is the purest expression of the ties that bind this nation and its people—the sphere of a common public enterprise, not just an agglomeration of individual interests in pursuit of self-actualization...

...And at one time or another since then—can this really all have been wrought by Tony Orlando and Dawn singing "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree"?—the yellow ribbon has been pressed into service as a symbol of hope amid adversity, an expression of longing for the return of those who are not home...

...Others with something to say on the subject of the grievance in question must defer to the victim, whose unique experience as victim lends him an unimpeachable righteousness, which he does not hesitate to assert...

...Meanwhile, the lesson for the devotees of unvictimism is that no one is ever sole author of his success, that life is never merely private, that self-sufficiency is an illusion made possible only by forgetting that individuals live in societies that shape them—and that the security they enjoy as a result of the nation they live in is not a given, but subject to challenge by enemies...

...This is not especially unusual in the United States...

...Republicans on Capitol Hill have been tireless champions of "victim's rights" where the victimization is due to crime...

...The paradox of victimization is that claiming this status is actually an assertion of superiority...

...Constitution and laws at the service of the private wishes of victims...

...There has been, of course, some American dissent, from pockets of the far left and far right, but it is noteworthy mainly for its marginality—and for the speed with which other voices with substantial credibility in the political spheres in question have stepped up to dissent from the dissent...

...Indeed, it's probably fair to say that any would-be hijackers in the future had better have martyrdom in mind, since passengers will assume they do and will do everything they can to overpower them, if necessary crashing the plane in the belief that they are protecting the White House, the Eiffel Tower, or Westminster...

...And, of course, this quality stands as a corrective to the perspective of both victim and unvictim...

...the survivors and the family members of the dead, in the event an al Qaeda member receives a death sentence for complicity in the attack...

...And it will be up to the victims themselves to decide whether and when and to what degree the underlying power relations that gave rise to their victimization have really changed...

...As for those whom the unvictim deems failures, he does indeed hold them personally responsible for failure...

...He noted, "In a culture of soundbites and slogans substituted for rational argument, the claim that one is a victim has become one of the few universally recognized currencies of intellectual exchange...

...This may be the product of a realistic sense among our allies as to what they have to contribute to defeating terrorism, namely, not much beyond domestic law enforcement and intelligence...

...The unvictim sees his success as the product of his hard work, his persistence (especially in adversity), and his determination...

...Non-suicidal hijackers have little credibility with passengers and crew these days...

...he finds the latter to be in a state of "decay," the result being a profusion of bogus "rights" claims...

...Yet the group character of expression of a sense of victimization is misleading...

...it was as if McVeigh killed 168 people without doing the United States itself an injury...

...In it, he argued that "perhaps the most extraordinary phenomenon of our time has been the eagerness with which more and more groups and individuals—members of the middle class, auto company executives and pampered academics included—have defined themselves as victims of one sort or another...

...Addressing those who profess it, he asked, "What's offensive about affirming that you belong to a people, that your fate is bound up with theirs...

...But this is not necessarily so...

...Twenty years earlier, George Gilder claimed in Wealth and Poverty to have found a self-sustaining moral basis for capitalism that would ensure its perpetuation despite its supposed contradictions...

...Women outnumber men, but it is no rebuttal to the claim that women are the victims of men to cite the greater number of women...

...Personal responsibility," in this view, is just code for perpetuating the system from which the unvictims gain advantage...

...Regarding oneself as a victim is a fundamental expression of self...

...Which is to say, Americans with a sense of themselves as a people, countrymen, united by something that is precisely not private...

...The essential element is an imbalance of power, as perceived by the victim...

...There but for the grace of God go I": This is a sentiment centered not on the satisfactions of being oneself but on the plight of others...

...They are the authors of their success only collectively, and only at the expense of those whom they collectively oppress...

...When a disgruntled ex-student returned to the Appalachian School of Law in January and opened fire, killing a student, a professor, and the school's dean, other students there, some armed, quickly tackled him and subdued him...