Verso
Review by Brian Tanguay
Catherine Liu doesn’t write like your typical academic. This is what I noticed first about her latest book, Traumatized, a slender volume that delivers in clarity what it lacks in heft. Liu states her thesis succinctly: trauma culture developed over the last four decades, and “helped move liberal politics away from defending or fighting for the material interests of ordinary, working-class people.” In this brief intellectual history, Liu explains how this consequential change happened and identifies its champions. While the neoliberal economic framework inaugurated by Jimmy Carter and advanced by Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton insinuated its principles, values and language into our lives, conceptions of trauma culture were gaining traction, facilitated by psychologists and psychiatrists, pharmaceutical conglomerates, health insurance companies, academics, social service advocates and mass media outlets. From all sides the public was urged to forget and forego ideas of collective struggle and political change, and instead focus on individual pain and healing.
At times during this period it seemed as if different segments of society were locked in competition to determine who was the more oppressed and abused. Was it children, women, queers, victims of domestic violence or Blacks? Every group had a claim, some more objectively valid than others, but the solutions were invariably individual, obtained through pharmacological intervention, positive thinking, self-help gurus or simply public recognition of one’s suffering. Liu writes, “Who, when in pain, does not want to believe that their pain and their trauma sanctify them and give them a moral power to which others cannot lay claim.”
By the time Ronald Reagan left the scene much of the liberal professional class was dedicated to winning symbolic recognition of suffering at the same time they stopped making demands for economic redistribution. Organized labor was far down the path to impotence by then, no match for Wall Street banks, Big Pharma and the insurance industry. Government austerity brought social mobility to a standstill and rendered the social safety net threadbare. Personal responsibility, entrepreneurship and social Darwinism was the order of the time. As Liu highlights, American politics swerved away from the ideals instituted (against significant opposition) during the New Deal, accepting instead incessant demands for reduced taxes, less regulation of business and industry, and privatization of public spaces and services. After a relatively brief post-war interregnum, capital regained the ascendancy and the political class adopted the delusion of trickle-down economics, ushering in a renewed era of winner-take-all-capitalism, for which the emergence of trauma culture was a godsend; it gave permission to the wealthiest people in the country to absolve themselves of responsibility to communities and those in need.
No single individual did more to entrench and validate trauma culture than Oprah Winfrey. Liu’s critique of Winfrey’s role is sharp and unsparing. Winfrey used her media and star power, largely built on her confessional style, to become a cultural, political and social authority. Liu illustrates how Winfrey’s brand of individual self-help “aligned not only with the frantic entrepreneurialism of the post-Keynesian era, it was above all an expression of the professional-class consolidation of power during a period of intensifying inequality.”
Trauma culture promotes superficial forms of recognition politics as social justice, which is very different from social change. Today’s political class can barely bring itself to pretend concern with the material needs of citizens. Trauma culture, writes Liu, “helped move liberal politics away from defending or fighting for the material interests of ordinary, working-class people.” This powerful book offers a searing critique of our badly broken present.
