Self-victimization as hegemonic defense? Marco Roth on the tea party movement:

The robust case for dominating other people sounds awful to most American ears today. So the contemporary idea of ethnocracy relies instead on an opposite rhetoric of victimization. The simple-minded mantra we’re taught in grade school goes like this: blacks good because oppressed, whites bad because oppressors. So if whites suddenly became oppressed, even while remaining the majority, they would magically become good again. Many Americans are now being taught to think this way.

This quote’s been taken from Marco Roth’s essay on identity politics in the age of the tea party. His provocative piece has been published in n+1 magazine back in October 2010 — follow this link. It’s somewhat tempting to read the tea party movement as a white culturalist reflex to what Hua Hsu called »the end of White America« though I wonder whether this analysis might suffer from Beck/Palin-bias?

The scheme of self-victimization as hegemonic defense is not all new: Felix Krämer’s thoughts on 1970s’ narratives of a »crises of (white) masculinity« come to mind (the link target is in German).