Political upheaval produces strange bedfellows. In periods of crisis, liberals and conservatives, who might be bitter foes in normal times, find they have a shared set of predispositions against radicals. During the 1960s, many liberals and even socialists found themselves making common cause with conservatives in fending off the New Left. Cold War liberals like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz turned to the right, and even stalwart social democrats like Irving Howe expended most of their energy criticizing the alleged excesses of the anti-war, Black Power and feminist movements.

The ideological earthquake of the Trump era, when both the white nationalist right and the socialist left are enjoying a prominence in national politics they haven’t seen in decades, is producing a similar fluidity of political alliances. The eagerness of reputedly liberal publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post to showcase Never Trump voices, and the recent vogue of writers’ extolling classical liberalism or Enlightenment values, is symptomatic of a wider tendency of elite institutions and thinkers to seek a new centrism bringing together the center-right and center-left against supposedly destabilizing forces in politics.

As new ad hoc alliances form between conservatives and liberals, one area of shared disgust is victim politics, especially as practiced by campus agitators. Jonathan Chait, for instance, is a liberal technocrat, nostalgic for the certitude of Cold War liberalism and adept at writing forcefully wonkish briefs for Democratic Party policies on health care and economic policy. Michael Brendan Dougherty is a Catholic traditionalist with paleo-conservative leanings, but appalled by the personal degeneracy of President Donald Trump. Yet this unlikely odd couple both bemoan the putatively dire impact of left-wing victim politics.

“On the left, victimhood is a prime source of authority, and discourse revolves around establishing one’s intersectional credentials and detailing stories of mistreatment that reinforce them,” Chait wrote last month in New York magazine. “Within the ecosystem of the left, demonstrating that you have suffered harassment or microaggressions is a big win.” Chait’s main worry was that these leftist narratives of victimhood would hinder female Democratic politicians, who would be regarded as weak by voters.

In a recent cover story in National Review, Dougherty makes a much more far-reaching claim that a victim mentality fostered by the radical left creates utopian longings that threaten to upend the political system. Acknowledging that victim politics has been around for a long time, and is also sometimes practiced by the right (as with the Trump administration’s trumpeting of the victims of immigrant crime), Dougherty still finds something uniquely dangerous about contemporary identity politics as found among college students.