Grievance Nation: How Our Obsession with Victimhood Warps Our Culture

NYT writer Frank Bruni shares 5 big ideas from The Age of Grievance

Are you nursing any grudges? Have you somehow been victimized by people around you, or by society at large? If so, you’re participating in the great American tradition of grievance, a state of mind that has somehow moved close to the center of our culture. That's the argument journalist Frank Bruni makes in his new book The Age of Grievance. Frank has written for The New York Times for more than 25 years, and is the author of four New York Times bestsellers. He also teaches in the school of public policy at Duke University. Here he is to share 5 of his big ideas.

1. We’re fixated on how we’ve been wronged.

A critical mass of people in the United States—and in other Western democracies—now size up their places in society in a much more negative and divisive way than previous generations did. They methodically tally their slights—some real, some imagined. They’re in thrall to their own persecution and intent on identifying the agents of it. The blame game is America’s most popular sport. Victimhood is its favorite garb. That, as much as anything else, explains the ascendance and currency of Donald Trump, who has fashioned himself as a martyr determined to strike back at his tormentors on behalf of his similarly oppressed supporters. He’s grievance made flesh. He’s grudge-become-president.

The rioters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, had convinced themselves that they were being cheated out of something. Advocacy groups lavish more attention on how they’ve been deprived and what they’re owed than on their visions for the future. Recrimination eclipses aspiration.

You find this mindset among not only the underprivileged but also the privileged: Even senators and Supreme Court justices sing a song of “Woe Is Me.” You find it across the entire political spectrum. It’s pan-partisan: supra-partisan. It infuses our cultural and political debates with an ill will that prevents us from forging compromises and finding common ground. Everything is grievance, and grievance often functions as the enemy of progress.