Cult of the Victim-Veteran

<p><b>Choice Editors' Picks for April 2024<br>2024 Choice Review Outstanding Academic Title (OAT) Award Winner</b><br><br>The Cult of the Victim-Veteran explores the pool of American post- Vietnam War angst that rightists began plying in the 1980s. Ronald Reagan’s 1984 proclamation of a new Morning in America encoded the war as the moment of the nation’s fall from grace; it was the meme plagiarized by Donald Trump for his Make America Great Again (MAGA) slogan.</p><p>The national funk tapped for right- wing revanchism was psychologized when George H.W. Bush appropriated post- Vietnam syndrome the diagnostic forerunner to post- traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to memorialize the military accomplishments in the Persian Gulf War of 1990–1991—we had kicked the Vietnam Syndrome. America was a victim- nation its trauma emblemized by PTSD-stricken veterans whose war mission had been lost on the home front cast aside even spat on upon return home.</p><p>In this book we see the long historical threads woven for MAGA: the twining of traditional and modern ways of knowing that imbues war trauma with political and cultural properties that complicate its diagnostic use; the post- World War I disclosure that many shellshock patients had never been exposed to exploding shells and the use of wounded- veteran imagery to fan the flames of German fascism; the cultural necessity of reimaging antiwar Vietnam veterans as psychiatric casualties that calls forth a new diagnostic category PTSD; the derivatizing of PTSD for traumatic brain injury Agent Orange and moral injury; and the victim- veteran figure as metaphor for a wounded America for which MAGA is the remedy.</p>