Revenge

It’s a (the?) theme unifying our politics, underlying its divisions.

I’m thinking about progressive (white) friends in the NGO sector who are probably about to lose their livelihood, which until now was pretty comfortable, both materially and morally—they were safe themselves (they thought), and devoted to the “marginalized.” Whom they will now join.

It’s not personally deserved. It’s revenge on their whole class of relatively elite and affluent (but far from wealthy) Americans for their openly expressed contempt for the working class. “Deplorables.” “Morons.” “Bigots.” Well-educated people with expansive vocabularies still use these blunt, dumb words.

In the same way, the reverse discrimination of “wokeness,” intersectionality, #metoo, and DEI has been straight-up revenge: for Jim Crow, for misogyny, for homo- and transphobia. It has gone beyond ending quite brutal discrimination to inflicting discrimination on the majority as punishment and reparation. “Oh, you’re suddenly noticing discrimination is unfair? You can dish it out, but you can’t take it?” (It’s a strange twist that much of this punishment is administered by dominant-group people, seeming self-flagellating penitentes trying to surf and stay atop the wave of “other” rage.)

The flood of “global South” immigrants into Europe and the U.S. can be seen as the vengeful backwash of colonialism. “We” invaded their lands, took their stuff, and prospered off it; now they’re invading ours to take it back. Do we deserve it? Should we kowtow to it, as left-wing governments are doing? Or turn the table over again, as right-wing white nationalist parties are doing? Is there a third way?

Revenge isn’t constructive—Rome is burning while we’re busy whirling in a ball like the combatants in a cartoon cat fight—but it’s human, understandable, and to some degree inevitable. Saints are those rare few who get off the wheel of payback, recognizing that past crimes can never be recompensed; we can only try to start afresh. We revere them, assassinate them, and ignore their example.

Revenge is downhill, it is the strong attractor, the reflex, the path of least resistance.