OCTOBER 10, 2025 | OPINION | By Olivia Link
For a long time, the American right has accused the left of building political support based on identity and victimhood. As the story goes, Democrats use race and gender as substitutes for concrete policy goals and transform these social categories into competitions to see who can be the most oppressed. This narrative posits that liberals are in an eternal battle to claim more and more trivial, disadvantaged identities for political and moral leverage over their opponents. These hyper-sectarian oppression olympics are a cornerstone of progressive politics, argue their opponents.
Identity politics are fundamentally about a sense of exclusion based on an identity that one considers significant. For many years, this has meant a politics centered around race, gender and sexuality for Democrats. The right, however, has something different in mind. In calling on the language of the ‘radical left crackdown’ on what conservatives see as traditional American culture—Christian values, patriarchal gender norms and the like—the right has claimed a new sense of exclusion, that of the alienated conservative, the true believer punished for trying to live the way he knows is correct. This right-wing persecution narrative has a powerful foothold in contemporary conservative discourse; in other words, victimhood is no longer solely the realm of liberals.
Conservative media outlets such as Fox News have been telling a story that has grown more and more mainstream in recent years: some shadowy, liberal establishment seeks to stamp out any vestiges of traditional American values, as well as the conservative voices that advocate for them. A 2025 poll from the Pew Research Center showed that 55% of people categorized as Republican or Republican-leaning believe that white people face some discrimination, with 22% stating that whites faced “a lot” of discrimination. Similarly, 57% believed that our society discriminated against Evangelical Christians. In comparison, 15% of the same group said that Black people faced “a lot” of discrimination.
Many Republicans, including our President, argue that conservative speech is under attack, with repression in the name of political correctness being the primary culprit; Trump’s invocation of the “fake news media” has been a constant since his first term in office. Furthermore, the American economic success that many Republicans—both legitimately and illegitimately—identify with is subject to endless encroachment by an ever-growing welfare state that rewards laziness. Another contributing factor to right-wing fear is the notion that equal rights are a zero-sum game, meaning that a gain for minoritized groups is predicated on a loss for the majority. Under this view, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and other attempts at equity pose a blatant risk to conservatives who enjoy privileged identities.
What conservative victimhood necessitates is the formation and consolidation of politics as identity. Unlike liberals, who focus on racial, gender or class identity, for conservatives, political viewpoint is the identity. In a world where technology is siloing people into increasingly niche echo chambers of political thought, our politics have become who we are. The two are no longer separate or distinct, and an attack on one is irrefutably an attack on the other.
This conflation of ideology and identity is part of the reason why civil discourse is so hard to come by. If your views on a certain issue are inextricable from your sense of self, you are much less likely to be able to have a respectful conversation with someone who disagrees with you. For instance, what may previously have been nothing more than a debate on the role of religion in public education is transformed into and perceived as a threat to one’s ability to practice. Indeed, the religious right has been successful in employing the language of existentialism; each Democratic incursion spells a step closer to end times, and to be a moral political actor is to be a defender of the faith against an unending, satanic barrage of liberalism.
Conservative victimhood and the existentialism it engenders were perfectly exemplified by the language of Charlie Kirk’s memorial rally. Rather than a mere political pundit, Kirk became a martyr to the righteous and just cause of American conservatism. Therefore, the discourse surrounding his killer was not one of individual action but of ontological threat—that is, the threat of the ever-growing malignant tumor of liberalism, what the president himself calls the “radical-left lunatics.” Though ostensibly a memorial service, the event instead bore all the hallmarks of a political rally. The deafening cheers of the crowd, coupled with performances from Christian artists, added to an atmosphere of celebration and communal joy.
It is the existence and growth of this communal joy that should worry people on the left. It has become obvious that the left no longer has a monopoly on, or even a decent grasp of, the ability to build solidarity around political issues. Where it was once a pioneer in community organizing and making the personal political, the left has fallen by the wayside as alienation and disappointment in the Democratic party grow. The right, in turn, has made politics central to identity, thus establishing itself as the party of unity. What MAGA offers many lonely Americans is a sense of belonging to a movement, one with a clear vision and divine support. And, unfortunately for those of us worried about democratic backsliding, nothing mobilizes people like being a part of a righteous community.