“Measuring misfortune is no strategy for living.”
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2, A Good Word Spoiled
Not all grievances are created equal. I want to say that again. I want to be clear. And not all expressions of grievance raise identical concerns. Some don’t raise any at all. There are wildly disproportionate outbursts, mildly disproportionate outbursts, and ones scaled defensibly and even commendably to their trigger. There is January 6, 2021, and there is everything else. Attempts by leaders on the right to minimize what happened that day and lump it together with protests on the left are as ludicrous as they are dangerous.
What’s more, the fruits of the grievances on the left don’t match the fruits of the grievances on the right, and for all the talk about how illiberal both camps have become, it’s the right that currently poses the much greater threat to the country, both in terms of its disregard for democratic institutions—for democracy itself—and the behavior it provokes, sanctions, and sometimes even glorifies. The foiled plot to kidnap and possibly assassinate a prominent elected official, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, was hatched by right-wing terrorists. It’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, an enormously popular right-wing lawmaker, who’s infamous for statements such as one in a speech at a gala for the New York Young Republican Club in December 2022, when she made light of January 6 by saying, “I will tell you something. If Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.”
It’s Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, who lashed out at the federal bureaucracy and indulged the darkest fantasies about the dimensions and depravity of the “deep state” by saying that if elected president, he’d “start slitting throats on Day One.” It’s Kari Lake, the failed Republican candidate for governor of Arizona in 2022, who seemed to be emulating Greene (what a thought) when she reacted to Trump’s federal indictment for treating classified documents like a personal stamp collection in June 2023 by saying: “If you want to get to President Trump, you are going to have to go through me, and you are going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me. And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA.”
It’s Trump himself whose response to the far-ranging, grave legal predicament that he brought upon himself went beyond any sort of rebellion and resistance that a Democrat of comparable stature in modern times had called for. He waged an unfettered verbal assault on the American government and issued an unqualified vow to demolish certain American institutions. As the indictments rolled in, as the civil trials in which he was a defendant commenced, and as his fury pinballed from one courtroom and judge to another, his language grew ever darker, ever more dangerous. He labeled the Department of Justice, the FBI, and other byways of the federal bureaucracy in general and the Biden administration in particular “a sick nest of people that needs to be cleaned out immediately,” “fanatics,” “fascists,” and “sinister forces” who were engaged in “vicious persecution.” No, no, make that “demented persecution.” He called Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, a “monster” and, on the first day of his civil trial on the fraud charges that she’d brought against him, publicly stated that people “ought to go after this attorney general.” That chilling directive belonged to a lengthening sequence of violent musings, including his insinuation that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Trump’s presidency, should be executed for treason and his recommendation, during a speech to California Republicans, that shoplifters be shot as they left stores. His remarks increasingly amounted to sputtering thesauruses of thuggery with which he seemed to be pledging bloody payback. As Andrew Coyne, a columnist for the Globe and Mail of Toronto, wrote: “This is not the reaction of a normal person. It is not even the reaction of a mob boss. It is the reaction of a Batman villain.”
And that was before Trump used the occasion of a Veterans Day speech in New Hampshire in November 2023 to say that if he won the presidency anew in 2024, he would “root out” what he referred to as “radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Challenged about the echoes of Nazism and fascism in that pledge, a Trump campaign spokesman defended it, exulting that the “sad, miserable existence” of its critics “will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.” The tenor of that vow matched the totalitarian fantasies of Trump, his advisers, and his allies, who envisioned and made plans for a federal workforce meticulously stocked with Trump loyalists and an army of federal prosecutors intensely focused on Trump’s enemies.
What’s more, there’s no left-wing analogue to Fox News, no media enterprise of commensurate reach that consciously pursued a commercial strategy of lying to its viewers, as Fox did about one of the most consequential matters of all: who won a presidential election in the most powerful country on earth. That’s what led to the settlement with Dominion, a maker of voting machines and the butt of hour upon hour of Fox programming that aired baseless claims—claims that Fox’s hosts and executives knew to be laughable: that those machines were rigged to switch votes from Trump to Biden.
But it’s also true that on both sides of the political divide, there’s a quickness to grievance, a tendency among many people to identify themselves and interpret events in terms of past, current, and looming hurts. There’s a psychological and emotional impulse—a way of approaching and assessing the world—that transcends partisan affiliation. It’s not so much bipartisan as it is pan-partisan or supra-partisan, and it’s getting worse. It exiles nuance. It rejects the kind of triage that a checks-and-balances government, which can deal with only so much so quickly, must do, even as it lengthens the odds of that government being able to do anything at all. It places personal over public interest. It turbocharges conflict.
That was one of the saddest revelations of the coronavirus pandemic, which posed a threat so universal and dire that it should have put the usual animosities on ice. At the start, I naively thought—or, more accurately, hoped—that it would. As we confronted a previously unthinkable shutdown of life as we knew it and fumbled our way through remote work, contactless grocery shopping, virtual family get-togethers, and the whole surreal rest of it, I wondered whether the suspension of normalcy would include an abnormal (but welcome!) discovery of the kind of solidarity that the country had experienced for a brief period after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when President George W. Bush suddenly had an approval rating north of 85 percent. (The intensely pitched debates about national security versus civil liberties and about the wisdom of invading Iraq came later.)
But much had changed in the nearly two decades between the shattering of the World Trade Center and the shuttering of all of New York City, and by 2020, national solidarity was a political yeti. Battle lines were quickly drawn. Rival camps promptly emerged: people who wanted to err on the side of epidemiological caution and those who felt that individual preference took precedence over any government edict, no matter how well intentioned, especially given how fledgling and fluid our understanding of the pandemic was; people who gave experts the benefit of the doubt and those who rebelled against what they saw as facile groupthink; people who instinctively admired Dr. Anthony Fauci and people who reflexively abhorred him; masking evangelists, some of whom muttered the wish that the virus would winnow the ranks of the reckless, and masking apostates, for whom all the shutting down and covering up was rank liberal opportunism…
Bruni, Frank. The Age of Grievance (pp. 13-17). Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
So, I was randomly working away online yesterday when an Amazon book recommendation pinged into my inbox. Being long familiar with and a NY Times reader fan of Frank Bruni, I clicked.
About ten pages into the "look inside" preview. I'd seen enough. Notwithstanding that I already still have a good half-dozen fine books in play, this was/is too good to pass up. Download with 1 Click.
Do yourselves a serious favor. Read this book. In light of our most recent events, it could not be more timely. Beyond that, his writing style has me repeatedly, painfully laughing out loud. Dude, yer killin' me.
Peeps, didja all know that, if you are routinely successful at reining in your High Dudgeon Outrage Reflex, you are guilty of snooty Woke Liberal Grievance Able-ism.
ERRATUM
Anxiously awaitng.
And, I would be fine with this.
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