The Cult of the Victim-Veteran: MAGA Fantasies in Lost-war America [Hardcover]

The Cult of the Victim Veteran explores the pool of American post-Vietnam War angst that rightists began plying in the 1980s. Ronald Reagans 1984 proclamation of a new Morning in America encoded the war as the moment of the nations fall from grace; it was the meme plagiarized by Donald Trump for his Make America Great Again slogan.

Jerry Lembcke is the author of eight books including The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (NYU Press, 1998) and Hanoi Jane: War, Sex, and Fantasies of Betrayal (UMass Press, 2010). He is presently Associate Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.

This eye-opening book takes us through a history of war- and postwar spectacle from World War I to the present forever war(s) and exposes intriguing parallels and interrelations in the representation of trauma and its political utilization. Jerry Lembcke shows that it was most often the media and popular culture, rather than the sciences themselves, who introduced and promoted (pseudo)scientific explanations of trauma  which, turned into postwar spectacle, would serve to legitimize new wars, not to end or prevent them.
- Paul Benedikt Glatz, independent scholar (Berlin, Germany), author of Vietnam's Prodigal Heroes (Lexington, 2021)

The book presents an original argument about public memory and the Vietnam War. It points to the existence of fantasies that have emerged from that war, which conceive of U.S. military veterans as victims of their own government and that obfuscate veterans extensive involvement in anti-war activism. Lembcke spells out the political implicationsshowing how these fantasies have fuelled a revanchist call to Make America Great Again and to avenge the lost war in Vietnam through repeated military interventions whose failure perpetuatelsu