The twists and turns of American politics are unpredictable, but the tone is a troubling given. It’s one of grievance. More and more Americans are convinced that they’re losing because somebody else is winning. More and more tally their slights, measure their misfortune, and assign particular people responsibility for it. The blame game has become the country’s most popular sport and victimhood its most fashionable garb.
Grievance needn’t be bad. The United States is a nation born of grievance, and across the nearly two hundred and fifty years of our existence as a country, grievance has been the engine of morally urgent change. But what happens when all sorts of grievances—the greater ones, the lesser ones, the authentic, the invented—are jumbled together? When people take their grievances to lengths that they didn’t before? A violent mob storms the US Capitol, rejecting the results of a presidential election. Conspiracy theories flourish. College students chase away speakers, and college administrators dismiss instructors for dissenting from progressive orthodoxy. And there’s a potentially devastating erosion of the civility, common ground, and compromise necessary for our democracy to survive.
“Brilliant...Bruni writes with humor, insight, and precision.” —Wall Street Journal
Let Me Tell You How I’ve Been Wronged
A Good Word Spoiled I
A Good Word Spoiled II
Grievance Now versus Grievance Then
The Lost Shimmer of the City on the Hill
I Love Me, I Hate You, and We Are So Many Rungs Apart
Chaos, Clicks, and Catastrophe I
Chaos, Clicks, and Catastrophe II
The Oppression Olympics
The Price Is Not Right
Don’t Be a Stranger
The Antidote
Update since the book was written
What have we learned and what can we do?
The Age of Grievance, Frank Bruni, 2024