The Cult of True Victimhood - From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror (Paperback)

"Alyson M. Cole provides a remarkably original analysis of a profound transformation in the cultural values informing public discourse in the United States. By tracing the underlying logic of the 'anti-victim campaign' over several decades, she illuminates dimensions of privatization that operate well beyond explicit neoliberal arguments to roll back the state. Most importantly, Cole deftly demonstrates how this new version of individualism effectively curtails the possibility for social justice."--Mary Hawkesworth, Rutgers University, Editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
"In the 1960s, 'victim' signified political awakening and a call to arms, a mandate to confront structures of inequalities that divided people along lines of race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability. After several decades of rightwing attack and liberal backsliding, 'victim' has been turned into an epithet and a badge of shame. With vibrant and incisive prose, Alyson M. Cole traces and dissects the discourses that have relentlessly stripped away the ideological underpinnings of feminism, anti-racism, and the emancipatory politics spawned by the movements of the 1960s. The Cult of True Victimhood is a wake-up call that the Left is losing the ideological war that it began."--Stephen Steinberg, author of The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America and Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy