Robert Hughes writes in Culture of Complaint about the battle he sees in America today over culture, and he sees this argument as evidence of a broken polity, a division between elements in society and a division that has endangered the commonalities which hold us together as a people. He sees this as being made manifest in the way more and more groups of people take on the role of victims in society and demand special rights as a consequence, and he links this culture of victimization to the debate over multiculturalism, another concept that divides people into discrete groups rather than bringing them together. The discussion offered by Hughes ranges far and wide to show how both right and left in American society have been brought into the battle over multiculturalism and how each side has shaped the argument in a different way.
Hughes notes how people today find ways to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions. They have a variety of potential causes for their behavior, all of which absolve them of guilt and in effect make them victims. He blames television for the development of this cult of victimization to a great degree, in part because television provides the forum where people bare their souls and announce their own victimization in a vulgar ritual on daytime talk shows. This is a form of "vulgar therapeutics" that leads to a sense of victimhood:
Complaint gives you power--even when it's only the power of emotional bribery, of creating previously unnoticed levels of social guilt.
Hughes wisely notes that there are two opposing forces in the culture war, both of them hollow. On the left is political correctness, which a number of commentators have challenged for the conformity it asserts as necessary. It is defined as efforts by certain political groups, primarily those on the left, to enforce a form of speech code so as to regulate speech to ban any term or phrase that might be considered demeani...