Frank Bruni

- How the blame game became America's most popular sport, this week on "Firing Line."

- [Activists] Disclose!

Divest!

We will not stop!

We will not rest!

- [Margaret] From college campus to social media to messaging from politicians on both sides of the aisle.

- We will liberate our country from these tyrants and villains once and for all.

- The 21st century Jim Crow assault is real.

It's unrelenting.

- [Margaret] American grievances have reached a fever pitch.

- I think we're in trouble, and I think this is a very pivotal moment.

I think this is a very pivotal election.

- [Margaret] "New York Times" columnist and bestselling author, Frank Bruni, is out with a new book, "The Age of Grievance," tracing how victimhood became so popular.

But amid campus crackdowns, questions about free speech.

- From the river to the sea!

- [Margaret] And gridlock from partisan politics, is there any way out?

- We cannot go on being this spiteful.

- [Margaret] What does Frank Bruni say now?

- [Announcer] "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, the Fairweather Foundation, The Tepper Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, the Asness Family Foundation, The Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, the McKenna Family Foundation, Charles R. Schwab, The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, and by the following.

[energetic music] Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc. And by Pfizer, Inc. - Frank Bruni, welcome to "Firing Line."

- Great to be here.

- [Margaret] You're out with your latest book, "The Age of Grievance."

Begin by defining grievance for me.

- Well, it's interesting.

I think if you go back 50 years, grievance is not a word with negative connotations, but if you look at almost every time it pops up these days, it means something different.

It means a complaint that may not be entirely warranted, that's overblown, that is expressed in an overwrought fashion, that is part and parcel with people kind of entering the political arena by identifying how they've been wronged, what they feel they're owed, who has wronged them, and what sort of revenge they'd like to take against that person.

That, to me, when you see the word grievance today, is what comes to mind.

And sadly, I think it describes a majority of Americans and the way they approach their politics.

- Grievance appears in the Declaration of Independence.

You write that we are a nation born of grievance.

What is different about the grievance today than even 50 years ago that you just pointed out?

- So, I mean, if you're just looking at the dictionary definition of grievance, it's not a bad thing.

I mean, it means an injustice, something that needs to be addressed, something that needs redress, et cetera.

But I think today, everything is jumbled together, the absolutely legitimate and urgent injustices and the petty insults that people instead market as injustices that need immediate attention.

I think we live in a culture, for example, of grievance merchants, people whose entire public lives or media lives are predicated on representing some group that supposedly has it worse than every other group.

- Let me ask you about something that's happening this week in the headlines.

- Yeah.

- We are seeing widespread anti-Israel protests at college campuses across the country.

And I wonder if this is in some way connected to grievance politics that you write about.

- I think the way it's playing out is connected, right?

So it's a complicated issue, and obviously there are questions to be asked that need to be asked about the Israel-Hamas war, about the way Israel has prosecuted it, about, you know, whether it's gone too far and whether it's gone too long in Gaza and all of that.

So these student protestors, it's not like they're having a conversation that's not real.

But when you look at the way this has played out, you have to ask yourself if it's a reflection of our culture right now in which conviction is best expressed through confrontation that sends the signal that victory goes to whoever shouts the loudest and uses the most unnuanced, hyperbolic language.

And I think you see those values, for lack of a better word, in what's playing out on college campuses.

- You teach on a college campus.

- I teach at Duke University.

- You're a professor at Duke University.

As a college professor, what's your assessment of how this issue has become so animating with this generation of college students?

- You know, a lot of college students in this generation, there's a sort of paradigm they use or a lens they use to kind of evaluate the world.

And it's one in which people who have less money, people who have less power, sometimes people who have darker skin must inherently be being wronged, and are therefore most likely to be in the right.

- So they're predisposed to take the side of what they deem the little guy based on those paradigms.

- They are, and I think you saw that play out after October 7th.

Listen, I mean, there's obviously a righteous case to be made for Palestinians deserving our attention, our empathy, our activism, et cetera.

But if you looked at what happened right after October 7th, you saw a lot of young people, a lot of young people on the progressive left, "social justice warriors," they're sometimes called, you saw them not even take a moment to really acknowledge what had happened in Israel and how horrific that was.

They just kind of immediately applied this paradigm and began advocating not just for Palestinians, but in a perverse way, at times, for Hamas.

- Mm-hmm.

You mentioned social justice warriors.

We have seen language, "From the river to the sea," become just the go-to tagline of these progressive protestors.

And you know, that language, if taken to its literal meaning would mean the annihilation of the State of Israel.

You write about the progressive left's hypersensitivity around language.

Why do these speech codes no longer apply in the case of the minority of Jews?

- Are you saying there's a double standard there, Margaret Hoover?

- I'm just asking if you have any insight into why there is a double standard on the progressive left around this, and is it just blatant antisemitism or is there more to it?

- I think in the cases of some people, it's antisemitism.

In other cases, it's pure ignorance, and it's an inability to see a flaw in yourself that you see in other people.

It's a double standard, for sure.

- But does that invalidate speech codes?

I mean, does that somehow throw a wrench in the arguments behind the sort of speech police- - Of course.

- That the progressive left has agitated for the last five years?

- You know, I mean, of course the progressive left should take a second look at their speech codes or...

It's not all of them, but yeah, I mean, this notion that certain words...

I mean, I'll give you a really good example.

If you look at most of these, whether it's the Sierra Club's language glossary, whether you look at the Stanford University, they had to retract, I think was called a hurtful or Harmful Language Initiative.

On almost all of these lists is, "Never say blind study.

Never say blind faith" because you're insulting blind people or people with vision impairment.

- Which gives you personal grievance.

- I'm blind in my right eye as a result of a freak stroke.

I live with the 20% risk of going blind entirely.

I live with that sword dangling over my head.

I take no offense and do not feel marginalized or belittled by the phrase blind faith or by the phrase blind study because I know a metaphor when I hear one.

- You write about the wedge between the left and the right and how it's grown large because the two sides have oppositional definitions of what freedom means.

- Right.

- Can you explain that?

- Well, I think on the right, freedom has typically meant, and of course there's a lot of inconsistency now, as little government regulation as possible, as little intrusion into the private corners of one's life.

On the left, freedom means the government should make sure that I'm not a victim of any of the many kinds of discrimination.

Both of those definitions of freedom, by the way, have enormous merit and a potent argument for them.

But when you have dueling definitions of freedom, it is very difficult for both sides to say, "Okay, well let's meet in the middle.

Let's see how we can forge some sort of compromise here."

- You used diversity, equity, and inclusion, the DEI initiatives, as an example of how these dueling definitions play out in reality.

Opponents and proponents of DEI use freedom as a justification for their positions.

- Well, if you are a promoter of DEI, you believe, and with a lot of history on your side, that unless there is a sort of mandate, and unless people are kind of really, unless their feet are really held to the fire, we're just gonna kind of always snap back to some default state where it's just white people or just men or whatever.

If you are anti-DEI, you see a kind of new oppressive orthodoxy that is replacing one kind of discrimination with another.

Though again, those are difficult perspectives to adjudicate and reconcile.

- So how do we?

- We do it by recognizing that the people who believe differently from us are not ipso facto evil or wrong.

They are people who believe differently from us.

You know, we kind of recognize that the whole point of a pluralistic democracy is not to get everything exactly as you want.

It is not to always get your way, but to recognize a civic and collective good that matters as much as my individual wants and whims.

- I wanted to talk about grievance on the left and then go to the right.

- Yeah.

- On the left, you talk about how it can take the shape of what we call wokeism.

Critical race theory, DEI programs, concepts like microaggressions.

Broadly speaking, do you think the left's embrace of these concepts have generated a backlash for the Democratic Party, and how?

- Well, [laughs] I'll answer your question about a backlash with two words, a proper noun, actually, Donald Trump, I think when we examine all the reasons he had the success he did in 2016, a big share of that success was people saying, "I'm tired of having my language patrolled.

I don't wanna worry about being canceled.

I feel like there is this oppressive orthodoxy coming from the progressive left."

And people responded positively to this man who just smashed through those rules who said, "I'm having none of it."

Who kind of modeled the rebellion against that, that they found cathartic and appealing.

And I think that is the greatest example of backlash.

- In your book, you talk about how 40% of Gen Z believe that the founders of the United States were villains.

What is that grievance?

- Well, they're referring to the fact that, you know, you have Founding Fathers who were slaveholders.

They certainly lived in an era and lived in a way that when we look at it through a modern lens, we would call racist, we would call misogynist.

We would certainly call it homophobic and all of that.

And so they're responding to that.

And so in that sense, it's not a completely correct perspective, but it was a different era, right?

And I think what's so troubling about that is if we are gonna move forward as a country, if we're gonna hold together as a country, we need a kind of mix of shame about the things we've done wrong and pride in all the things we've done right.

I don't think you can have that dark a view of your country's history and of your country and have it be constructive.

One of the most successful social movements in my lifetime and one of the ones that's most personally meaningful to me, and you know the history as well as I do, but the campaign for marriage equality, same-sex marriage, whatever phrase you want to put on it, was successful beyond anyone's imaginings and at a pace beyond anyone's imaginings.

I think one of the reasons that happened is because it was waged in a way that didn't vilify and alienate people who were potentially persuadable.

If you look back at the language of all of that, it wasn't, "I think your institution of marriage is corrupt and horrible."

It was, "I respect that institution, and would you please let me in?"

Like, "My values are less different from your values than you imagine."

It was a message and it was a request that said not, "This is how awful you are and how awful everything has been," but, "I think you can be better, and my request of you is one of respect."

I think there's a lesson in that for all of us going forward, regardless of the cause.

- In 2022, WNBA player Brittney Griner was detained in Moscow for bringing illegal drugs, cannabis oil into the country.

You write that progressives at the time called out, quote, "American indifference to Brittney Griner because she's a woman, Black, and a lesbian."

So, why was this grievance overwrought?

- Listen, it was horrific what happened to her and what was happening to her in Russia.

It was unacceptable, and we needed to pay great attention to getting her out of Russia because that was just, you know, there's no argument there.

So many of today's grievance entrepreneurs, is what I would call them, they decided, "Okay, so my cause is racism.

My cause is homophobia.

My cause is sexism.

I'm gonna see in Brittney Griner's fate and the fact that she hasn't been brought home yet, I'm gonna see ignorance of her and aloofness to her because she's a woman, because she's Black, and because she's a lesbian."

However, Brittney Griner was getting more attention than any political prisoner I can remember- - Paul Whelan.

- in the last decade, maybe in my lifetime.

Paul Whelan, another political prisoner in Russia who's still there and been languishing for a while, nobody knew his name until the discussion about Brittney Griner happened.

The problem with this, if you start claiming racism, homophobia, sexism where it doesn't exist, and it did not exist in Brittney Griner's fate because she wasn't being ignored, then when you start saying "racism, sexism, and homophobia" in circumstances where it's really true and where we really need to attend to it, you've cried wolf, and people who are itching to tune you out anyway have now tuned you out.

- In the book, you're critical of anti-racism, the concept of anti-racism, a set of beliefs that has become popular on the left over the last several years.

How did the concept of anti-racism become pernicious, in your view?

- Well, pernicious is a big word, and I'm not sure I'd use that.

I think it became, in some instances, counterproductive.

But this goes back to the story I was telling about the successful campaign for marriage equality.

Anti-racism tells people who aren't Black how awful they are and how awful they've been, and it asks them to make almost kind of hour-by-hour, minute-by-by minute atonement.

And I'm not sure that is going to be a winning sale.

If the goal here, which is not only a worthy goal, but an absolutely urgent and necessary one, if the goal here is to have a less racist society, I think telling many white people that the mere fact of their existence as white people means they're a white supremacist means, you know, I mean, that is just... First, it's also such a broad generalization.

- There's, one of your colleagues at "The New York Times," Nikole Hannah-Jones, developed an initiative entitled The 1619 Project.

And the name referred to the year in which slaves came to colonies in America.

And it insisted that 1619 ought to be the birth year of the United States.

Elements of the project have been criticized by historians.

Your colleague, Bret Stephens, has also criticized aspects of the project, but in your opinion, are aspects of the project related to the themes of grievance or something else?

- I don't know, I mean, that project, I think, has made an enormous contribution.

I really do.

But I often wonder if The 1619 Project had appeared under the banner of the opinion pages at the "Times," right?

It was an argument.

It was an essay that said, "Let's look at the world in this way, and what do we see?"

It was playing with ideas in a way- - Well, let's talk about its contribution.

- that I thought was very, very meaningful - Well, tell me what you think the contribution was.

- I think The 1619 Project asked us in a very appropriate and meaningful way to consider how much of the country had been built on slave labor, to consider how prominent a part of the American story slavery was in ways we already recognized and in ways we didn't.

- Yeah.

- Those were interesting and important ideas that I think were underexposed before that project.

- Nikole Hannah-Jones's essay, the criticism, at least, from Bret Stephens, was that journalism is to write the first draft of history, not to opine on it, right?

If it had been an opinion editorial, I think you're right.

I think it would have had deeper resonance and less sort of controversy.

- Yeah, and I mean, maybe it didn't have an opinion tag 'cause not all of it is opinion.

There's a lot of just straightforward history in it.

And some of the history- - Some of it has been disputed.

- that she presented is disputed and historians have said, which is an interesting glimpse into the fact that we talk about history as if it is a static and settled thing.

And the truth is, the history that we're taught at a given moment in time is very much molded by the perspective that has won out and held sway, you know, in the recent decades before that history book was written.

- Until it's reviewed and rewritten.

- I mean, history doesn't change in the sense that the events of the past don't change, but the way we regard them, what we know and don't know of them and the way we present them, that changes constantly.

- On the right, grievance culture looks a little different.

You write about the industrial grievance complex, a play on the industrial military complex, which is something that Dwight Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address.

On some level, I feel like grievance has always been part of the conservative right, at least since the '90s.

How is the grievance industrial complex and the right's grievance distinct?

- One of the things that I find so fascinating is if you go back to the late '80s, the early '90s, you find all of these people saying, "The political correct warriors on the left, all of the kind of multicultural studies people, they're obsessed with the concept of oppression.

They see the entire world in terms of how oppressed different minority groups are, how marginalized, whatever.

And that's kind of the only way they can talk about anything, and it's overwrought and it's indiscriminate."

They saw the claim, "I am a victim," as sort of the ultimate sign of weakness and as the kind of ultimate dead-end conversation.

However, that is exactly how Donald Trump's MAGA minions talk today.

- You write that the fruits of the grievances on the right pose a much greater threat to the country at the current moment.

Why?

- Well, for one reason, organized political violence, right?

I mean, we've seen political violence across the ideological spectrum, but when we're talking about paramilitary groups, when we're talking about who hatched a plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer- - The Democratic governor of Michigan.

- We're talking about the right.

So I think organized political violence over recent years, over the past decades has been disproportionately on the right.

And also, you have a pervasiveness and intensity of election denialism on the right that isn't mirrored on the left.

- So conspiracy theories are part of grievance?

- Oh, conspiracy theories are grievance run amok.

I mean, grievance taken to its most cartoonish conclusion is the belief that vaccines contain microchips, which, go look at the surveys.

A shocking percentage of people on the right believe that vaccines are a plot by Bill Gates to put microchips in our bodies.

- William F. Buckley Jr. in 1993 hosted a debate about political correctness.

Take a look at the argument that none other than Judge Robert Bork made about political correctness.

- Political correctness, I think, is something that's widespread in the society, and it's part of a mood of radical egalitarianism which has taken hold.

We are now a nation that everybody's claiming victimhood and the right to feel hurt by all kinds of things.

And it's that kind of thing, which the speech codes try to prevent, which does, I think, suppress speech.

- How is the political correctness from the '90s connected to the current climate of grievance?

- So Bork used the phrase "radical egalitarianism," right?

I think that's what we would call wokeism today.

These sorts of dynamics are not new to our current moment.

But I think if you look at the debate about political correctness then versus where we are now, I think this is a much more intense iteration of it.

- Is it more intense because of social media?

- Yes, yes.

In an easy word, yes.

Each of us gets to curate our own information, our own reality, in a way we didn't before.

So the attempt to find common ground and compromise has never been more difficult because we're not reading from the same script anymore.

- You say what we really have is a crisis in humility.

How is humility the antidote to grievance?

- Okay, so grievance is, "I'm right, you're wrong."

Grievance is, "What I want matters more than what you want," or, "You're standing in the way of what I want."

Grievance is built on narcissism, and it's built on a lack of nuance.

Humility says, "You have as much of a place in this public square as I do.

This is what I believe, this is what I've concluded.

I'm not entirely certain because I'm not the smartest person in the world."

That's humility.

And if we all operated in humbler fashions, we would be able to have the kinds of conversations that have been replaced these days by shouting matches.

- You talk about that we need humility from politicians, from journalists, from activists.

I thought your self-critique of journalism was particularly apt.

How have journalists undermined their credibility in this age of Trump?

- Well, for starters, [laughs] I think Trump has a lot more to answer for than those of us who covered him critically.

So, if there's a person here who has more transgressions to acknowledge, and if there's a person here who is more wanting of morality and virtue, it is Trump, not the journalists, not any of the journalists who cover him.

So I just want to be really clear about that.

But I think we have sometimes taken a condescending, mocking, you know, bitter tone toward Trump and even more so toward the people who have found him appealing.

That simply drives them away from us.

That makes us seem not like people who are trying to earnestly examine public life, but like political warriors who are trying to put them in their place, and I think that undermines our effectiveness and the most important parts of the messages that we are communicating.

- You know, you write in the book about how people are tuning out of the news because it has been so negative.

And yet the churn of anger, it is also so prevalent in news reports, is also, as you write in the book, treated much like a drug when you analyze how the brain takes in these messages.

And so what happens when you have a massive part of the electorate stepping back because they're jaded from negative news and then another aspect of the electorate riled up because they're angered and enraged and engaged by the rage machine that is in the news?

- What happens is you have inadequate voter participation because of all those people who dropped out.

And then you have extremist candidates prevailing because of the anger that animates the voters who have not dropped out.

You get extremism and you get estrangement.

- Is that a recipe for a grievance election?

- Might be.

I'll tell you what it's not a recipe for.

It's not a recipe for a healthy democracy.

Listen, I wrote this book because I think we're in trouble, and I think this is a very pivotal moment.

I think this is a very pivotal election.

And pivotal not just in the sense of who wins, but pivotal in terms of how it plays out, how these candidates talk to us, how we talk to one another.

We cannot go on being this spiteful, and I want us to be less spiteful and more thoughtful.

- Frank Bruni, thank you for joining me.

- It's my pleasure.

Thank you.

[energetic music] - [Announcer] "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, the Fairweather Foundation, The Tepper Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, the Asness Family Foundation, The Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, the McKenna Family Foundation, Charles R. Schwab, The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, and by the following.

[energetic music continues] Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc. And by Pfizer, Inc. [energetic music continues] [energetic music fades] [bright instrumental music] [warm instrumental music] - [Announcer] You're watching PBS.