Frank Bruni

From bestselling author and longtime New York Times columnist Frank Bruni comes a lucid, powerful examination of the ways in which grievance has come to define our current culture and politics, on both the right and left. 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. It has done enormous good. 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. Fox News knowingly peddles lies in the service of profit. College students chase away speakers, and college administrators dismiss instructors for dissenting from progressive orthodoxy. Benign words are branded hurtful; benign gestures are deemed hostile. And there’s a potentially devastating erosion of the civility, common ground, and compromise necessary for our democracy to survive. How did we get here? What does it say about us, and where does it leave us? The Age of Grievance examines these critical questions and charts a path forward.

The Age of Grievance

Laura Mei

Civilization, what we call civilization, advances through the process of us figuring out how to resolve increasingly larger and more complicated collective-action problems — the various problems that kept us for centuries or millennia in something close to subsistence level living. But we have seemingly hit the limits of our ability on that front and we're in the early stages of a retreat into more localistic identity politics or tribalistic forms of social organization that are, in many ways, more fearful of others and less tolerant and less trustful. People have been led to believe that they are owed something and it's very difficult to accept that they might not be.

The Age of Grievance quotes

Join the club