"We are all victims now": Understanding the spread of victimhood identities through ressentiment and self-victimisation

The spread of victimhood identities in the context of grievance-based identity politics threatens liberal democracies externally and from within. Examples include 1) dominant group self-victimisation (Sharafutdinova, 2020; Reicher & Ulusahin, 2020; Medvedev 2020); 2) continuous victimhood narratives that persist from the past with different perpetrators (Szabo, 2020; Szabo & Lipinski, 2021); and 3) the new victimhood culture on the progressive left (Campbell & Manning, 2018). These cases come out as anomalous in extant research of collective victimhood that focuses on actual victims of oppression or intergroup violence (Vollhardt, 2020; Alexander et al., 2004). We propose to understand the proliferation of victimhood identities through the theoretical lens of ressentiment. We hypothesise that the present social, economic, and ideological conditions in contemporary neoliberal societies feed ressentiment which makes the espousal of victimhood identities appealing. Ressentiment is relevant for two reasons: first, it is driven by negative emotions involving a self-reproaching victim position which in ressentiment is transformed into a morally superior victim identity which, secondly, provides justification for the other‐directed moral emotions, as well as a foundation for collective victimhood that is validated and reinforced with peer others (Salmela & Capelos, 2021). Finally, we outline a two-track theory of ressentiment that distinguishes between two avenues, individual and collective. This new theory highlights personal and collective self-esteem and the need for social and intergroup recognition as concerns underlying the emotions that drive individual and collective ressentiment, respectively.