Michael Blitz: Declaring victory before victory

Victory used to be something that happened before anyone announced it. Increasingly, the order has been reversed.

In sports, the concept remains reassuringly clear. The game ends. Officials post the score. The winner (How ’bout those Knicks?) celebrates. The loser explains. Fans may dispute a referee’s call, but nobody expects a news conference to change the outcome.

Beyond sports, however, victory has become remarkably elastic.

Political leaders launch wars with grand objectives and sweeping promises. Months or years later, after spending enormous amounts of blood, treasure and political capital and often achieving far less than they promised, those same leaders still claim victory. They point to a ceasefire, a withdrawal, a temporary calm or a return to the conditions that existed before the conflict began and call it success. In some cases, the conditions that prompted the war remain unchanged. The victory speech, however, arrives right on schedule.

The pattern extends beyond warfare.

Governments champion policies that disproportionately benefit the affluent, and market those policies as victories for working families. Advocates promote programs that fail to meet their stated objectives, and then redefine success around some narrower achievement. Military officials destroy a handful of targets while leaving a much larger criminal enterprise intact, and then describe the operation as a victory over the enterprise.

Politicians lose elections and declare victory anyway. Some candidates refuse to acknowledge defeat, cast the winners as impostors and recast themselves as the rightful victors.

Different arenas, same strategy: When reality fails to cooperate, just redefine success.

Somewhere along the way, victory drifted away from accomplishment and attached itself to assertion. Public figures learned that they no longer needed to achieve victory before claiming it. They only needed to persuade enough people that victory had occurred. The announcement became the accomplishment.

For most of human history, victory and defeat described opposing conditions. One side won because another side lost. The concepts depended on each other.

Today, the candidate who wins claims victory, as does the candidate who loses. The nation that prevails claims victory, and the nation that withdraws claims victory because it has endured. The official who succeeds claims victory, and the official who fails does so, too, because the effort itself was noble.

We have not expanded the meaning of victory. We have abolished its opposite.

The legendary football coach Vince Lombardi famously declared, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” Today that means something entirely different: When I win, I win. When I lose, I win. When I fail, I win. When I withdraw, I win. When I refuse to compete, I win. When my actions harm others, I still win.

Victory no longer describes an outcome. It has become an entitlement.

George Orwell saw the danger nearly 80 years ago. In “1984,” citizens drink Victory gin, smoke Victory cigarettes, and hear incessant reports of triumph while enduring scarcity, deprivation, surveillance and endless war. The irony extends beyond the products themselves. Orwell’s Party has detached the word “victory” from any recognizable condition. It no longer describes success, achievement or conquest. It simply means whatever the Party needs it to mean at any given moment.

The regime has not expanded the meaning of victory. It has dissolved meaning itself.

That insight reaches far beyond Orwell’s fictional world. Today’s most consequential victories often occur not on battlefields, in legislatures or even at ballot boxes. They occur in the narrow space between an event and the carefully crafted narrative that follows it.

The contest no longer centers on what happened. It centers on who gets to define what happened. We once assumed that victories produce compelling stories. These days, the stories themselves — whether true, false, wild, even idiotic — produce the victories, or at least the appearance of them.

Maybe that explains the enduring appeal of sports. The scoreboard remains stubbornly indifferent to rhetoric. No coach can transform a loss into a win through messaging alone. No athlete can claim a championship into existence. Reality gets the final vote.

Much of public life now operates according to a different principle. There, assertion masquerades as accomplishment. Narratives compete with outcomes. Leaders claim victory before they achieve it, or after they fail to achieve it, or even when the opposite has occurred.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: If everyone is victorious, who, exactly, is winning?

Michael Blitz is professor emeritus and former chair of interdisciplinary studies at City University of New York.