While conceding that many people have legitimate beefs, the New York Times opinion writer Frank Bruni portrays the contemporary United States in “The Age of Grievance” as consumed by a corrosive resentment on both ends of the political spectrum, driving its poles further apart and rewarding hyperbole, bitterness, acrimony and self-pity.
Me, I instinctively blame the left for our grievance-saturated culture. Identity politics expressly pits groups against one another, and “intersectionality” constructs a strict hierarchy of who can lay more claim to having been wronged. Bruni, however, emphatically awards the grievance booby prize to the right. The fact that both author and reviewer feel compelled to cast this soul sickness as a competition and to immediately take sides in the blame game simply helps illustrate the problem Bruni attempts to parse.
His book is at its best when it is most evenhanded, expressing a curse-on-both-your-houses despair. There’s plenty of culpability to go around, and the poisoning of national politics with mutual loathing and grudge-bearing needn’t be a contest. Regarding every party, sex, race, sexual orientation or class: “They feel cheated. They feel disrespected. They’re peeved unless they’re outright furious.” The aggrieved on all sides “have lost — or lost interest in — the ability to see beyond their slights to a common good in which they don’t get all that they want. Grown-ups are supposed to be able to compromise like that. But ours is an era of mass immaturity.”
Bruni observes that “what the left feels and what the right feels are identical: oppressed. There’s a perverse mirror-image tidiness to it, a nasty reciprocity, even a strange symbiosis.” He castigates both parties’ rabble-rousing politicians for achieving nothing but more noise: “They trade motion for commotion. … They’re agents of stasis in revolutionary drag.” He even allows that ever more incensed Republicans may have taken their cue from the success of outsize indignation on the left.
Nevertheless, since Bruni has made his political views public for years, his assuming the role of neutral arbiter — maybe a better word is “referee” — seems like an artifice. “The Age of Grievance” is appealingly moderate in tone, positively beseeching, in fact, but also unabashedly partisan. The book is pitched at the so-called classical liberal, who believes the progressive left sometimes goes too far, but that the real danger to the country’s well-being comes from the Trumpian right.
Bruni begins, then, with distorted (a.k.a. false) reports on Fox News about pallets of baby formula being rerouted to illegal immigrants; absurd accusations by the then Senate candidate J.D. Vance that President Biden’s porous southern border was a deliberate plot to import fentanyl and thereby murder the Republican opposition; and Jan. 6. Although Trump is the premier exemplar of the Peter Principle, he has portrayed himself as the ultimate victim: “He was grudge made flesh, grievance become president.” The opening chapter deplores the rancor of Josh Hawley and Tucker Carlson, but pokes at the self-pity of Hollywood and Meghan Markle only as an afterthought.
Still, Bruni hardly gives the left a free pass. He skewers the obsession with microaggressions “that missed the humor and the tell of that neologism’s prefix,” the prissy moral sanitizing of language and the hypersensitivities surrounding race. Regarding this country’s alleged indifference to the Russian incarceration of Brittney Griner, he cites the huffy headline in HuffPost, “America Hates Black Female Athletes,” even though the Biden administration traded a convicted Russian arms dealer for the basketball player’s release.
“If we can’t relate to people who aren’t just like us,” Bruni pleads to identitarians, “if empathy is an illusion and attempts to muster it are insults, if we’re a hodgepodge of rival grievances rather than a team of unified aspirations, how can we prosper and how can we endure?”
Yet while Jan. 6 appears throughout, a chapter on political violence conspicuously omits the more protracted festival of grievance later that year: the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd. The demonstrations persisted for months, and though the vast majority were peaceful, in more than 200 locations they caused extensive property damage, and led to injuries and deaths. Bruni’s selectivity displays a bizarre neglect of his natural material.
His spotlight on grievance, “which lies at the confluence of pessimism and narcissism,” usefully reminds us all, to coin a phrase, to check our privilege. While the influx may peeve the right, in a country so desirable that foreigners are pouring over our borders, just what are we all so cheesed off about?
Bruni has always been a soothing voice of reasonableness, and it’s a pity that the folks on the extremes who most need coaxing back to the common purpose are the least likely to read his book, while his audience will be those who already agree with him. Sadly, as is so often the case in books about what ails us, the weakest, least satisfying section prescribes the cure: humility.
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