Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity. - Charlie Sykes

"More than a century before Mills and Nisbet, Alexis de Tocqueville had remarked upon the uneasiness of the citizens of the young republic, who "are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their hands", an attitude that "throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart".

The result of this attitude was the peculiar paradox of the American character. While residents of the Old World, in far less advantageous circumstances, tended not to dwell on their misfortunes, Tocqueville found that Americans "are forever boding over advantages they do not possess . . . It is strange to see with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue their own welfare, and to watch the vague dread that constantly torments them lest they should not have chosen the shortest path which may lead to it"."

How did a movement that was defined by its belief in individual liberty and respect for the Constitution, free markets, personal responsibility, traditional values, and civility find itself embracing a stew of nativism, populism, and nationalism?

"[V]ictimism is an ideology of the ego. But perhaps ideology is too strong a term; victimism can be seen as a generalized cultural impulse to deny personal responsibility and to obsess on the grievances of the insatiable self. It might even be called a habit of mind, but one with substantial institutional support; a reflex so ingrained that its premises are no longer apparent, nor its radical view of human nature even subject to debate. One need only spend time debating "multiculturalism" on university campuses to realize the truth of Jonathan Swift's remark that it's impossible to reason someone out of something he did not reason himself into in the first place."