How did America become so aggrieved?

I warn my students. At the start of every semester, on the first day of every course, I confess to certain passions and quirks and tell them to be ready: I’m a stickler for correct grammar, spelling and the like, so if they don’t have it in them to care about and patrol for such errors, they probably won’t end up with the grade they’re after.
I want to hear everyone’s voice — I tell them that, too — but I don’t want to hear anybody’s voice so often and so loudly that the other voices don’t have a chance.
And I’m going to repeat one phrase more often than any other: “It’s complicated.” They’ll become familiar with that. They may even become bored with it.
I’ll sometimes say it when we’re discussing the roots and branches of a social ill, the motivations of public (and private) actors, and a whole lot else, and that’s because I’m standing before them not as an ambassador of certainty or a font of unassailable verities but as an emissary of doubt. I want to give them intelligent questions, not final answers. I want to teach them how much they have to learn — and how much they will always have to learn.
I’d been delivering that spiel at Duke for more than two years before I realized that each component of it was about the same quality: humility.
The grammar-and-spelling bit was about surrendering to an established and easily understood way of doing things that eschewed wild individualism in favor of a common mode of communication. It showed respect for tradition, which is a force that binds us, a folding of the self into a greater whole.
The voices bit — well, that’s obvious. It’s a reminder that we share the stages of our communities, our countries, our worlds, with many other actors, and should thus conduct ourselves in a manner that recognizes that.
And “it’s complicated” is a bulwark against arrogance, absolutism, purity, zeal. I’d also been delivering that spiel for more than two years before I realized that humility is the antidote to grievance.
The January 6 insurrectionists were delusional, frenzied, savage. Above all, they were unhumble. They decided that they held the truth, no matter all the evidence to the contrary. They couldn’t accept that their preference for one presidential candidate over another could possibly put them in the minority — or perhaps a few of them just reasoned that if it did, then everybody else was too misguided to matter. They elevated how they viewed the world and what they wanted over tradition, institutional stability, law, order.
Party leaders who consent to end gerrymandering are being humble about what they can and can’t predict about their future dominance and humble in their exercise of power. They’re recognizing that there are issues bigger than the magnitude of their present spoils.
Politicians who reexamine the necessity of college degrees are humbly compensating for our tendencies to extrapolate from our own backgrounds and success stories to what works best in the broad and diverse world beyond us.
And people who attend bridge-building exercises, whether in the halls of Congress or the hills of Appalachia, are humbly making an extra effort to understand strangers with whom they don’t usually meet and humbly accepting that civic repair is worth a personal investment of time and energy.
They’re the antonyms of the insurrectionists.
Humility comes up often in Jonathan Rauch’s superb 2021 book “The Constitution of Knowledge,” a contemplation of truth and exhortation for free speech in the age of grievance.
Rauch, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, defines the term in his book’s title as a global network of “reality-based institutions” — universities, reputable media outlets, courts of law, scientific organizations — that are committed to finding truth through a structured process of conflict and debate.
They are “liberalism’s epistemic operating system: our social rules for turning disagreement into knowledge,” Rauch wrote, noting that the defense of the reality-based world against a rising tide of purposeful disinformation and a sea of trolls is a constant struggle. It demands much of us, including, perhaps most importantly, intellectual humility, or what he calls “fallibilism” — the ethos that any one of us might be wrong, and we must therefore keep ourselves open to contradictory views and evidence.
“Being open to criticism requires humility and forbearance and toleration,” Rauch explained. “Scientists, journalists, lawyers, and intelligence analysts all accept fallibilism and empiricism in principle, even when they behave pigheadedly (as happens with humans).” Scientific findings can be replicated or refuted by new experiments; laws can be challenged through freshly discovered evidence and refined arguments; journalists ideally keep digging toward a deeper and more nuanced comprehension of events. That’s the nature of the Constitution of Knowledge. It’s a shared endeavor, an evolving quasi document, its nature an acknowledgment that no one person holds all the answers or cards, its health and growth dependent on most people accepting that.
Intellectual humility allows us to revisit our assumptions, and the necessity of that is proven by how often we’ve been wrong or wrongheaded. Scientific racism was a rage in progressive circles in the early 1900s; in the 1990s, the global march of democracy looked inevitable to much of the political establishment, a thinking emblemized in Francis Fukuyama’s premature elegy to history. On both fronts, we know better now, and we know better because we weren’t arrogantly stuck in our thinking.
To be grounded in truth is, paradoxically, to remain open to the idea that the understanding of truth may need to shift as we learn more and as some of those lessons lay bare our prejudice and ignorance.
“You must assume your own and everyone else’s fallibility and you must hunt for your own and others’ errors, even if you are confident you are right,” Rauch wrote. “Otherwise, you are not reality-based.” His “you” is a universal one, a caution and a summons to various stakeholders.
Charlie Baker served as governor of Massachusetts from 2015 to 2023, and was consistently ranked one of the most popular governors in the nation, despite being a Republican in a blue state. Something else about him has always piqued my curiosity and drawn my attention, and perhaps it’s entwined with that popularity: He repeatedly stresses the importance of humility in an effective leader. He’s fond of quoting Philippians 2:3; he invoked it as a lodestar for his administration. “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit,” it says. “Rather, in humility value others above yourself.”
That’s great practical advice for anyone in government, where almost everything is teamwork, almost everything is consensus, and almost nothing of real and lasting consequence is accomplished alone. Governing, as opposed to demagoguery, is about earning others’ trust, commitment and cooperation. Exhibiting an interest and a willingness to listen to and to hear them goes a long way toward that. It’s a demonstration of humility.
“Insight and knowledge come from curiosity and humility,” Baker wrote in a 2022 book, “Results,” whose co-author was his chief of staff, Steve Kadish, a Democrat. “Snap judgments — about people or ideas — are fueled by arrogance and conceit. They create blind spots and missed opportunities. Good ideas and interesting ways to accomplish goals in public life exist all over the place if you have the will, the curiosity, and the humility to find them.”
Humility was also something that Bill Haslam, the former two-term governor of Tennessee, extolled. He’s a Republican who ran a predominantly Republican state, so humility wasn’t an attribute that aided a necessary appeal across the partisan divide. But he deemed it essential to making the changes in Tennesseans’ lives that he’d pledged to make — to avoiding any prideful attachment to his first-blush ideas and a schedule of glitzy appearances and cable news interviews that would have detracted from problem-solving. And he indeed amassed a record of substantive accomplishment that was impressive in its heft and its occasional deviations from conservative orthodoxy. He made community college free for Tennesseans. He cut taxes on food while raising them on gasoline. He vetoed culture-war distractions such as a bill to make the Bible the official state book of Tennessee. A few years after leaving office in early 2019, he wrote a reflection on leadership, “Humble Leadership? Yes, and Humility Can Restore Trust,” for The Catalyst, a journal published by the Bush Institute. “Humble leaders who can admit fault are key to uniting a nation,” read an italicized precede to his essay. Haslam’s opening line: “It has been said that those who seek the high road of humility in politics will never run into a traffic jam.” His closing one: “And think how much better served we are by leaders who have the humility to want to get the best answer, not just their own answer.”
Humble politicians don’t insist on one-size-fits-all answers when those aren’t necessary as a matter of basic rights and fundamental justice, and in a society like ours now, when there’s scant trust between partisans and when resentment toward political opponents runs high, both parties should consider devolving power to the state and local levels when possible. Republicans have traditionally supported that in theory and then routinely contradicted themselves, in an unhumble fashion, when that suited them. They should do better at living their stated principles about local control, and Democrats shouldn’t be so quick to assume that local control equals a reckless opportunity to wriggle free from federal safeguards. In some of the blue cities within red or purple states, local control would mean more respect and freedom for aggrieved people whose progressive ideals are squashed at the statehouse (just as it would mean more respect and freedom for the aggrieved rural denizens of blue states).
In my home state of North Carolina, where Republicans have maintained a big majority (and sometimes contrived a supermajority) in both chambers of the state Legislature through gerrymandered districts, they’ve prevented local officials in places such as Durham from enacting the sorts of gun safety and environmental measures that an overwhelming majority of the city’s hundreds of thousands of citizens want. To what end? The preemption of local laws by broad state edicts has been on the rise in recent years, and it’s a trend that intensifies grievances.
In late April 2018, then-President Donald Trump traveled to Michigan for a rally, where his remarks were a mash of favorite themes. He bragged about what a fabulous job he was doing. He bellyached about all the injustices he endured. And he bashed the news media. Oh, how he loved to bash the news media.
“Very dishonest,” he said. “They don’t have sources. The sources don’t exist.”
While he was painting this unflattering portrait of us, what image were we projecting? That night, at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, journalists swanned into a ballroom as thick with self-regard as any Academy Awards ceremony. They hobnobbed with the Hollywood stars whom they’d invited — and in some cases competed over — to be guests at their tables. And they listened to the comedian Michelle Wolf do what she was hired to do: savage Trump and his aides in vicious and occasionally vulgar terms that predictably caused the media’s enemies to trumpet that we journalists are no more dignified than the president whose indecency we lament.
“Every caricature thrust upon the national press — that we are culturally elitist, professionally incestuous, socioeconomically detached and ideologically biased — is confirmed by this train wreck of an event,” the journalist Tim Alberta wrote in Politico. He got it right. We keep behaving in a manner that hastens the public’s erosion of confidence in us. We keep playing into the grievance era’s taxonomy of insiders versus outsiders. And we thus keep undermining our credibility when we try to speak truth to grievance, on those occasions when we do try.
We responded to Trump’s excessive (and usually dishonest) focus on our vices by focusing excessively on our virtues. The New York Times began its “The Truth Is” ad campaign: “The truth is hard,” “the truth is hidden,” and so on. On the top of the front page of its printed paper and the home page of its website, The Washington Post placed the legend “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” All that self-congratulation prompted the longtime media critic Jack Shafer to write, in Politico, that while he wouldn’t “dispute that journalists are crucial to a free society,” he nonetheless felt that “the chords that aggrieved journalists strike make them sound as entitled as tenured professors.”
That works against us and against a healthy society, because the Post is right on the merits: Democracy does die in darkness. Trustworthy journalists doing trustworthy work bring a crucial light, providing a check on government and redress for people whose voices are unheard. So how do we make ourselves and our work more trustworthy? We go further in leavening our self-interest with public interest. When we’re not writing or speaking in a venue or under a rubric that signals the subjective opinion in our words, we take greater care not to let our political orientations and biases drive our coverage, not to Trojan-horse subjectivity into supposedly objective accounts. We resist the forging of personal brands that are contingent on predetermined and inflexible viewpoints, which make us ripe for dismissal. And as an industry, we try, within the inevitable constraints of profitability, to create more spaces that earnestly welcome and showcase a diversity of perspectives and allow truth to emerge in the manner that Rauch rightly venerates, from a contest of arguments designed to yield something deliberate and dependable.
Across many causes, many advocates traffic in an absolutism that’s born of grievance and spawns yet more of it. The hubristic and wholly unrealistic reach of the Green New Deal did as much to drive apart people on opposite sides of the debate over how aggressively we should fight climate change as it did to guarantee the best and wisest action in the present or near future. If a cause’s advocates are interested in durable progress, and if they respect the importance of an entire society’s stability, they should be reasonably humble about what’s essential, what’s utopian, what’s doable and what demonstrates as much respect for others as they’re demanding for themselves. They should be clear-eyed about whether and when a righteous bid for dignity becomes a self-righteous magnet for hostility.
They should consider the message delivered by Loretta Ross, a longtime racial justice and human rights advocate, through a class that she taught at Smith College, a popular TED Talk, media interviews and an essay that she wrote for the Times in 2019. Troubled by the frequent targeting and pillorying of people on social media, she urged the practice of calling in rather than calling out those who’ve upset you. “Call-outs make people feel fearful of being targeted,” she wrote in her Times essay. “People avoid meaningful conversations when hypervigilant perfectionists point out apparent mistakes, feeding the cannibalistic maw of the cancel culture.” Instead, she advised, engage them. If you believe they need enlightenment, try that route, “without the self-indulgence of drama,” she wrote. She was preaching humility.
She was also recognizing other people’s right to disagree — to live differently, to talk differently. That doesn’t mean a surrender or even compromise of principles; a person can hold on to those while practicing tolerance, which has fallen out of fashion, supplanted by grievance. But tolerance shares DNA with respect. It recognizes that other people have rights and worth even when we disagree vehemently with them.
We carry wounds, and some of us carry wounds much more numerous and much graver than others. We confront obstacles, and some are unfairly big, unjustly unyielding and especially senseless. We must tend to those wounds. We must push hard at those obstacles. But we mustn’t treat every wound, every obstacle, as some cosmic outrage or mortal danger. We mustn’t lose sight of the struggle, imperfection and randomness of life. We mustn’t overstate our vulnerability and exaggerate our due.
That’s part of what Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff are saying when they lament the “safetyism” of contemporary education: the increasingly absurd demand that students be insulated from unkind words, troubling ideas and all other manner of unpleasantness.
That insulation is more than a roadblock to a robust, real education. It gives excessive power to those words and ideas and that unpleasantness, creates the unreal expectation that they can be kept at bay, and sets up young Americans to feel aggrieved — victimized — when that doesn’t happen. “The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically,” they wrote in the article in The Atlantic that preceded and grew into their bestseller, “The Coddling of the American Mind.”
Lisa Damour, a prominent clinical psychologist who works with teenagers, has also sounded the alarm about pathologizing normal, everyday hardship. “Much of the time, the presence of distress, the experience of distress, is evidence of mental health,” Damour told my Times colleague Ezra Klein in a May 2023 interview for his podcast. “What I mean by that is there are lots of circumstances in daily life where we fully expect to see distress.” Treating perfectly rational emotions as psychological emergencies and unfair burdens can set a dangerous precedent, and Damour emphasized the importance of not getting carried away with our natural and understandable instinct to protect young people from grief and pain. “There’s something kind of extraordinary about how much maturation arrives as a function of them actually grappling with a very painful feeling,” she told Klein. “They become more broad-minded. They become more philosophical. And there’s actually, for me, almost a universal marker of when this is happening, which is that they become actually very annoyed with their age mates for having concerns that feel, to them, very petty or minor.”
While grievance blows our concerns out of proportion, humility puts them in perspective. While grievance reduces the people with whom we disagree to caricature, humility acknowledges what Eboo Patel, the founder and president of Interfaith America, wrote in his 2022 book, “We Need to Build”: “People are endlessly complex and fascinating.
“You can never tell simply from someone’s group identity how they will experience the world, or know from their experience what conclusions they will draw.”
I watched only the first season of the Apple TV+ series “Ted Lasso”; after that, life — and other Apple TV+, Netflix and HBO Max shows — got in the way. But like many other Americans, I adored it. I adored Ted, a man whose wife has moved on, whose heart is broken, whose new home of Britain is a bit of a mystery to him, whose new job as a soccer coach there is a setup for failure, and whose humble response is to try his hopeful best to turn all of that around. The show’s out-of-the-gate conceit is that a protagonist inhabiting the stereotype of the blissful fool is wiser than the rest of us and has more to teach than to learn.
“Ted Lasso” began streaming in 2020, when, my Times colleague Margaret Renkl astutely observed, we were all “mired in an America we no longer recognized, a nation so dangerously polarized that many people would think nothing of cutting off their closest family members if they didn’t vote the ‘right’ way.” And the show struck a nerve, Renkl added, because there was “something about Ted Lasso’s sunny optimism and faith in silliness as a social lubricant, something about his openness and his unshakable kindness, that lifted Americans’ pandemic-worn hearts.” Renkl recalled a particular scene in which Ted tells a player who is stewing over a defeat which animal is the happiest in the world: “A goldfish. It’s got a 10-second memory.”
By all reports, “Ted Lasso” grew darker as it and he aged. Maybe some subconscious premonition turned me away from the show before it could bring me down. Ted himself had a memory much longer than 10 seconds, as his pining for his wife proved; the finned paragon that he held up for that player is absurd, even dangerous.
But the idea that we’re too often held hostage by our grudges, too frequently fixated on what in our lives isn’t exactly as we’d like it to be? There’s indeed something there. And an amalgam of kindness, openness and silliness might be an effective solvent for grievance. We could try a dab of that.
Or we could unhumbly cling to the conviction that we’re singularly unappreciated and cruelly situated against hostile forces in a disintegrating world that compels us to wrest what we can while we can, before it disintegrates even further. That’s the road we’ve been on for a perilous while now. It’s not too late to turn around.
Frank Bruni has written for The New York Times since 1995 and is Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University. This essay is excerpted from “The Age of Grievance,” published by Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Copyright @2024 by Frank Bruni.
This story appears in the Novmber 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.