If the right likes to call out left-wing theatrical exaggerations, it has also learned from them and in the past weeks has emulated them.
The right often accuses the left of exaggerating victimhood, turning a blind eye to reality, and distorting language to do so. The left, it’s often said, harbors “snowflakes” and the like who are beset by a victim complex. Lately, however, this frame of mind knows no party or political affiliation. Especially since the Capitol riot, assorted conservative figures have embodied a fragility of the right.
A conflict certainly exists between the rhetoric often used about society on the hard left and reality on the ground. Many on the left seem convinced that university campuses—some of the most studiously anti-racist locations on the entire planet—are hotbeds of pitiless racism. The idea that America’s trajectory since the early 17th century has been founded on, flowed from, and been defined by oppression of Black people, and today implacably “functions to” reinforce system inequality, strikes many as a useful conversation starter, but is almost curiously simplistic as actual sociohistorical analysis.