The Age Of Grievance

When was the last time you felt more aggrieved than persuaded—more eager to point a finger than to solve a problem? In The Age of Grievance, Frank Bruni argues that modern American life has been captured by a powerful, bipartisan temptation: framing disappointments as injuries and politics as a contest of victims. He contends that grievance—once the moral spark for reform—has metastasized into a lifestyle and a business model, distorting our media, corroding our institutions, and turning neighbors into enemies. It fuels the dopamine of constant outrage while starving the civic muscles required for compromise, curiosity, and repair.

Bruni doesn’t claim grievance is inherently bad. America was born of it, and the First Amendment protects petitions for redress. But in a nation awash with performative slights and algorithmically amplified fury, authentic wrongs are flattened into a never-ending “oppression Olympics.” The result is a culture adept at blame and brittle about responsibility—one in which we swap motion for commotion and mistake catharsis for change. (Compare David French’s Divided We Fall and Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized for converging diagnoses.)

What Bruni Argues

Bruni’s core claim is twofold. First, grievance has become the organizing emotion of our politics, supercharged by media incentives (from Fox News to Twitter/X) and by structural trends (rising inequality, social isolation, and institutional distrust). Second, this grievance regime is dangerous: it rewards demagoguery, normalizes political violence, and makes pluralistic self-government feel impossible. The very habits that could save us—intellectual humility, institutional rebuilding, and cross-cutting civic ties—are precisely what grievance discourages.

Why This Matters Now

This book lands in an era of doomscrolling, “rage clicks,” and rising threats against public officials. Bruni shows how Donald Trump perfected a politics of aggrieved omnipotence (“I alone can fix it”)—a paradox he calls “grudge made flesh.” But he also looks left, chronicling moments when virtue curdles into performative fragility: Jane Campion’s tone-deaf awards speech, Will Smith’s self-justifying Oscars outburst, ill-conceived language policing (like redefining “lesbian” as “non-man”), and campus meltdowns that punish curiosity as heresy. You see how easily the language of justice becomes a cudgel and how quickly “calling out” turns to public excommunication. (For a parallel critique from the academy, see John McWhorter’s Woke Racism.)

How We Got Here

Bruni traces grievance’s recent acceleration to three intertwined engines. First, media economics reward extremity. Dominion’s defamation settlement exposed how election fantasies kept Fox viewers outraged; meanwhile, social platforms supercharge content that evokes “anger” and “wow.” (Max Fisher’s The Chaos Machine details how these algorithms rewrite our brains.) Second, a fog of national pessimism has settled in—about inequality, social mobility, and American exceptionalism. Drawing on Pew, Gallup, and Raj Chetty’s work, Bruni shows how belief in better tomorrows has waned as people feel sorted, surveilled, and priced apart in everyday life (airport security tiers, Disney’s Lightning Lanes, even Ironman’s “Executive Challenge”). Third, grievance is adhesive: it escalates; it spreads organizationally and emotionally; and it privileges purity tests over persuasion. That’s how we get school-board bomb threats, performative congressional brawls, and “weaponization” panels that chase specters while real oversight withers.

What You’ll Learn in This Summary

You’ll see the anatomy of grievance and how it operates on both right and left—with specific stories: Fox’s baby-formula panic, J. D. Vance’s fentanyl conspiracy framing, the Covington Catholic rush to judgment, and university cases (Hamline’s Prophet Muhammad painting and Johns Hopkins’s “non-man” kerfuffle) where institutional overreaction backfired. You’ll map the deeper forces—platform incentives, elite-driven inequality, and declining civic infrastructure—that make grievance so sticky. And you’ll encounter the tipping point from grievance to violence: January 6, threats against judges, domestic-terror incidents linked to Great Replacement rhetoric, and the mainstreaming of “retribution” talk.

This matters to you because grievance is viral. It shapes the feeds you scroll, the words your kids learn, the lines you stand in, the bosses you work for, and the senators who set the rules of your life. If you’ve ever wondered why public debate feels like a shouting match with moving goalposts, Bruni’s answer is sobering: too many of us are chasing the short, sweet hit of righteousness instead of the slow work of repair. This summary offers a map out—less a kumbaya than a rigorous toolkit for resisting the seductions of resentment and choosing the harder path of rebuilding together.

Bruni dissects grievance as a portable identity—something you can wear anywhere and monetize everywhere. At its core, grievance offers a seductive swap: you trade responsibility for righteousness. It reframes setbacks as assaults and isolates success as proof of someone else’s theft. That posture travels effortlessly across politics, culture, media, and celebrity—and it’s contagious because it feels great in the moment and costs you little upfront.

Anatomy of a Modern Grievance

First, identify a villain. Second, simplify the facts. Third, inflate the stakes. Consider Fox’s 2022 baby-formula “scandal.” Sean Hannity flashed pallets that supposedly proved the Biden administration prioritized “illegals” over “hardworking American families.” It turned out to be powdered milk for older children, not scarce infant formula—but the narrative sold: They’re robbing you to feed them. Around the same time, J. D. Vance floated the idea that Biden’s border policies were a plot to poison MAGA voters with fentanyl. The claim ignored the data (fentanyl deaths rose under Trump too, and the steepest increases were among Black men who vote largely Democratic), but it hit the emotional keys: We’re being hunted.

Donald Trump industrialized this tactic. He positioned himself as both “martyr and messiah,” a billionaire victim battling omnipotent enemies—the FBI, the press, “the deep state.” As Bruni puts it, he became “grudge made flesh.” His message to supporters was simple: your enemies are my enemies; your resentments are my crown. (For a conservative autopsy of this move from responsibility to resentment, see Charles Sykes’s A Nation of Victims.)

The Left’s Mirror Moments

Bruni refuses a one-sided indictment. He catalogs high-profile progressive spasms where legitimate causes were undermined by self-pity or status-seeking. The “revenge tour” of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle turned justified critiques of racism into an everything-is-a-slight narrative that sat awkwardly beside Montecito mansions and mega-deals. Will Smith’s Oscars slap came with a lecture about what he’d been “forced to endure,” transforming a privileged outburst into a sermon on suffering. At the Critics Choice Awards, Jane Campion tried to one-up the Williams sisters’ barriers with her own—My grievance tops yours!—and Twitter did the rest.

Campus culture reveals the costs of overreach. At Hamline University, an adjunct lost her job after showing a revered 14th‑century painting of the Prophet Muhammad—despite warnings and the work’s art-historical value. At Johns Hopkins, a glossary redefined “lesbian” as “a non-man attracted to non-men,” bizarrely erasing womanhood under the banner of inclusion. Such episodes don’t prove justice is a sham; they show how unmoored sensitivity can estrange allies and cheapen real harms. (Wendy Kaminer’s I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional warned in the 1990s how therapeutic culture can displace civic culture.)

Why It Spreads

Grievance scales because it’s easy, social, and profitable. Socially, it offers instant belonging: your pain finds a tribe. Psychologically, it hits the brain’s reward loops. Yale psychiatrist James Kimmel Jr. likens it to a drug—rumination and retaliation light up the same circuitry as narcotics, and a harsh tweet can function like a micro-dose of revenge. Commercially, it sells. Outrage keeps audiences from flipping channels or closing apps, and demagogues know that mobilizing fear is cheaper than building coalitions. “You don’t just need support,” Ezra Klein notes. “You need anger.”

Your takeaway: whenever you feel the instant hit of righteous injury, ask three questions. 1) What’s the most charitable explanation I’m not considering? 2) Which incentive—attention, clicks, applause—might be shaping the story I’m consuming (or telling)? 3) What would it look like to trade a performance of pain for a search for leverage? In Bruni’s world, that pivot marks the line between grievance as a pose and grievance as a spur to better politics.

The grievance economy needs infrastructure. Bruni shows how legacy media and social platforms built superhighways for outrage, then monetized the traffic. Once upon a time, broadcast news had limited airtime, editorial gatekeepers, and fairness norms. Today, anyone with a smartphone can publish; platforms hand-curate our feeds for “engagement”; and cable networks program to tribes. The result isn’t just more content—it’s content optimized to keep you mad.

From Gatekeepers to Virality

Traditional news once bundled varied topics and voices, creating a shared fact base (imperfect, yes, but broadly accessible). With the collapse of advertising and the rise of digital analytics, the business model flipped. Opinion content surged because readers click it more; incentive structures began to reward distinctive brands with fixed viewpoints. Bruni even recounts getting bumped from an MSNBC panel after he refused to condemn Mitt Romney’s decades-old teenage bullying—his nuance didn’t match the segment’s moral script.

Social platforms accelerated this. Facebook gave priority to reactions like “angry” and “wow,” not because they’re healthy but because they’re sticky. Frances Haugen’s disclosures made that plain. Max Fisher notes that, as content volume doubles and attention stays fixed, algorithms show you the most outraged fraction of your network—your feed radicalizes even if you don’t. And YouTube’s recommendation engine long tugged viewers from mainstream news to conspiratorial rabbit holes. (See Fisher’s The Chaos Machine.)

Does Social Media Cause Polarization?

Bruni engages the debate. Some scholars, like Jonathan Haidt, argue we crossed a discontinuity between 2010 and 2014 as smartphones plus virality dissolved social trust. Others, like Duke’s Chris Bail, find fewer true “echo chambers” than the public imagines—maybe only 3–5% of users are fully sealed in. But even Bail concedes design choices can shift incentives, and he’s tested features that reward cross-partisan appeal rather than dunking. The nuanced verdict: social media isn’t the cause, but it’s a powerful amplifier that nudges us toward theatrical certainty and away from deliberation.

Case Study: Covington Catholic

Remember the viral clip of a MAGA-hatted teen facing an Indigenous activist at the Lincoln Memorial? Within hours, a “punchable face” tweet set the tone; outlets raced to moralize from seconds-long footage. Later, longer videos complicated the narrative: the Black Hebrew Israelites’ taunts, the crowd dynamics, the ambiguity of the teen’s expression. Lawsuits followed; newsrooms walked back early framing. Bruni’s point isn’t that nothing wrong happened—it’s that velocity triumphed over verification, and the episode became a referendum on identity rather than an inquiry into facts. In grievance culture, we prefer Rorschach tests to reporting.

What News Became

Bruni is candid about our complicity as consumers. We doomscroll; we seek headlines that confirm our priors; we prefer the five-alarm fire to the zoning-board fix. As Amanda Ripley writes (and Bruni quotes), constant catastrophe coverage leaves us feeling “marinated in despair,” which either numbs us or keeps us perpetually activated. None of that solves potholes or passes budgets. If you want to starve the outrage engine, your first lever is attention. Diversify your diet. Reward formats that slow down. Share stories that show cross-partisan action, not just cross-partisan animosity. (Practical add-on: subscribe to outlets that invest in reporting; they’re the ones least likely to monetize your anger.)

Grievance thrives in a story of loss: if the future feels smaller, someone must be stealing it. Bruni argues that a thick fog of American pessimism—about mobility, fairness, and our shared project—makes outrage stickier. Pair that mood with visible, everyday stratification, and you get what Tom Nichols calls an “envy engine.” You don’t just hear about inequality; you queue behind it, board after it, and watch it cut the line.

The Fog Over the City on a Hill

Even when the data show progress (vaccines engineered in record time, global extreme poverty down, fewer great-power wars), many Americans feel stuck. Gallup and Pew find stubborn majorities saying children will be worse off. David Leonhardt calls the period a “Great American Stagnation.” In 2021, 68% of Americans told Pew their kids would do worse—a mood worsened by the pandemic but rooted earlier, as Chetty’s research showed mobility halving since mid‑century. Suicide rates rose; life expectancy stalled then fell, with Case and Deaton’s “deaths of despair” concentrated among working‑class whites.

Culturally, we’re awash in dystopias and zombies—The Walking Dead’s decade-long dominance, Squid Game’s grotesque parable of debt and spectacle. Bruni reads this not as frivolous entertainment but as feedback: our fictions mirror a belief that the game is rigged and fellow citizens are threats, not teammates. (Andrew Potter’s On Decline captures this mood of terminal backsliding.)

Ladders Pulled Up

Meanwhile, objective inequality gapes. The CBO shows family wealth tripled since 1989, but the top 10% now hold 72% of it; the bottom half hold just 2%. Incomes for the top 1% doubled while the bottom 90% ticked up ~24% (Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, by America). Racial wealth gaps persist (median white household net worth ~$188k vs. ~$24k for Black households). Peter Turchin adds “elite overproduction”: we mint far more credentialed aspirants than elite slots, amplifying intra-elite competition and status ressentiment. That pressure is flammable in a social media environment built to measure and parade status.

Micro‑Tiering Everywhere

Bruni’s concrete examples are disarming because you likely live them. The Joneses breeze through Clear while the Johnsons crawl through TSA. First class boards with overhead space; Group 9 gate-checks. At Disney, Lightning Lane turns time into a premium—affordable for some, invisible to others. Hotels, gyms, even Ironman triathlons have “XC” tiers with stocked mini-fridges and concierge bike mechanics for $5,700–$15,000 fees. Uber will sell you status in a car; Substacks will sell “insider” tiers. The lesson isn’t that perks are evil; it’s that daily life has become a constant reminder of where you rank.

Your move in such a culture? Name the fog without living inside it. Yes, stagnation is real for many, and inequality corrodes. But Bruni urges you to resist the easy leap from “hard” to “rigged” to “enemy.” That mental slide fuels grievance while shrinking your imagination for reform. It’s the difference between asking “Who stole my spot?” and “How do we widen the entry—and make the line fairer?”

Bruni’s darkest chapters track grievance’s runway to force. Language escalates; fantasies of payback become plans; and politics treats violence as imaginable—even cleansing. You see it in chants of “retribution,” in lawmakers joking about “slitting throats,” and in online fantasies about “bodies stacking up.” You also see it in quieter ways: normalized threats to election workers, doxxing of local officials, and armed presences at protests.

From Words to Weapons

January 6th is the hinge. Trump’s “will be wild” tweet invited a carnival of grievance to the Capitol; the aftermath invited a new normal—threat levels so high that Mitt Romney paid $5,000 a day for private security and colleagues warned one another to vote with personal safety in mind. Polls since then show 30–37% of Americans can imagine political violence as justified under certain conditions. Meanwhile, mass shootings linked to extremist ideologies (from Pittsburgh to El Paso to Buffalo) reveal how “replacement” narratives migrate from cable to manifestos.

Ethnic And Christian Nationalism

Bruni borrows political scientist Barbara Walter’s term “ethnic entrepreneurs” to describe figures who organize power around identity fears. Tucker Carlson’s years of “replacement” allusions—“more obedient voters from the third world”—are a case study. So is the rise of Christian-nationalist rhetoric: “don the full armor of God,” ad campaigns that cast politicians as divine fighters, and touring roadshows selling a fusion of scripture, conspiracy, and sidearm. These movements don’t only radicalize loners; they pressure mainstream officials to escalate language and delegitimize institutions.

Fragile Pluralism—and the “Oppression Olympics”

America’s multiracial democracy is historically novel (Yascha Mounk calls it “the great experiment”). It can hold real differences and still cohere, but only if we resist zero-sum thinking about identity. Bruni catalogues a counterproductive strain he dubs the “oppression Olympics,” where movements compete to be most harmed. After October 7, 2023, some campus responses rushed to moral arithmetic instead of mourning; later, congressional testimonies twisted themselves around hypotheticals rather than plainly rejecting genocidal language. On the left, language policing can slide into farce; on the right, takedown fantasies become governing agendas. Both shrink the space for shared rules.

For you, the line to watch is this: when a leader promises to “obliterate” enemies, vows “retribution,” or builds policy from public-shaming stunts (flying migrants to Martha’s Vineyard; stripping corporate tax districts for dissent), they are practicing grievance governance. It satisfies a base; it corrodes the republic.

Bruni’s antidote is not a sermon; it’s a toolkit that pairs civic humility with structural reforms. The goal isn’t to abolish disagreement but to convert high conflict (identity wars that escalate) into good conflict (issue fights that educate and resolve). That shift starts with how our institutions run, how our neighborhoods connect, how our platforms are built, and how you show up in daily life.

Lower the Temperature in Congress

A rare bright spot: the bipartisan Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. Taking cues from Amanda Ripley’s High Conflict, members sat in circles, interspersed parties, held listening sessions, and issued 200+ recommendations to reduce performative hearings and encourage dialogue. Paired with electoral reforms—independent redistricting, open or “jungle” primaries, and ranked-choice voting—you can elect more problem-solvers and fewer pyromaniacs. (Larry Hogan’s Maryland work against gerrymanders and his 77% approval in a blue state illustrate demand for calmer competence.)

Rebuild Social Infrastructure

Eric Klinenberg calls libraries, parks, and community centers “palaces for the people.” They bring unlike people together without sorting by income. Post‑pandemic city planning can convert empty office districts into “playground cities” (Edward Glaeser & Carlo Ratti) with mixed-use spaces that encourage mingling. Broader national service (Buttigieg’s drumbeat) could create cross-class teams with tangible missions, rebuilding habit and affection across lines. These aren’t kumbaya gestures; they’re antidotes to the “distance” that nourishes grievance.

Widen Opportunity, Not Just Rhetoric

Tie dignity to work and skill. Governor Josh Shapiro’s order removing 4‑year degree requirements from most Pennsylvania state jobs is one template. Grow apprenticeships and on‑the‑job training; stop treating college as the only passport (Anne Case & Angus Deaton warn how the BA divide maps social despair). Companies should reinvest in workers, reverse “disposable labor” norms, and promote from experience, not pedigree. Reform DEI toward measurable inclusion (hiring, retention, mobility), not coercive workshops that data show often backfire (Frank Dobbin & Alexandra Kalev).

Relearn Civics and Media Literacy

Richard Haass argues democracy needs obligations, not just rights: vote, accept losses, value evidence. Pair that with media literacy that teaches platform incentives, rumor forensics, and AI skepticism. Jonathan Rauch’s “fallibilism” (The Constitution of Knowledge) should be core curriculum: you might be wrong; truth emerges from structured contestation; institutions exist to check our individual certainty.

Practice Personal Humility

Bruni ends in the only place reform can stick: you. Choose “calling in” over “calling out” (Loretta Ross): start with questions, leave room for learning, calibrate proportion to harm. In arguments, try Rauch’s three rules: acknowledge uncertainty, seek counterevidence, respect institutions that referee disagreement. In movement work, remember Evan Wolfson’s marriage‑equality lesson: persuasion beats humiliation; aim to join, not scorch. And when you feel grievance surging, borrow Bruni’s classroom mantra: “It’s complicated.” That single sentence is a civic act.