“Woke,” shorthand for what was once known as “political correctness,” helped fuel a grievance-based progressive politics that did immense damage to the American body politic, while filling young minds with a surfeit of historical nonsense. The New York Times 1619 Project, which falsified the story of the United States by reading our entire national history through the lens of America’s original sin, slavery, was wokery’s Platonic form. It poisoned school curricula and underwrote the race-baiting politics that followed the murder of George Floyd.
Unfortunately, just when the politics of grievance seems to be running out of gas on the American left, it has emerged with a vengeance on the American right. Slogans like “we’ve been ripped off” — which distort the record of the most successful peace-keeping security architecture ever created (NATO), and which provide cover for tariffs that could wreck the world’s most successful engine of economic growth — exemplify a new grievance politics that’s the flip side of wokery. And in the form of social media mobs, right-wing grievance politics is alarmingly similar to the cancel culture of the left.
It’s not that grievances aren’t real. Some are, and there is a moral obligation to address and remedy them. But grievance politics inevitably leads to the dissolution of political communities — or, just as insidiously, makes political community difficult, if not impossible, to form.
Why haven’t the Palestinian people been able to form and sustain a self-governing political community capable of making peace? Because as my friend, the late Arabist Fouad Ajami, put it in 2001, “A long, dark winter has descended on the Arabs…[who] abandoned [themselves] to their most malignant hatreds.” And because of that, “Nothing grows in the middle between an authoritarian political order and populations given to perennial flings with dictators.”
Why is China seeking global hegemony rather than fitting its dynamic, creative population into a peaceful, prosperous world order? Part of the answer lies in Xi Jinping’s personal Maoist demons. But those demons play on the grievance that Xi and other Chinese communist leaders call China’s “century of humiliation.” Thus the grievance-based politics of the People’s Republic of China yields a draconian system of technologically sophisticated social control married to international aggression. Meanwhile, across the Taiwan Strait, the first democracy in 5,000 years of Chinese civilization flourishes, in part because its people do not indulge themselves in endless grievance-mongering.
Then there is Russia. Vladimir Putin’s war against the West is most obvious in his brutal invasion of Ukraine. Yet before (and during) that challenge to any decency in world affairs, Putin launched forms of hybrid warfare that ranged from poisoning the global information space with lies to severing communications cables in the Baltic Sea to assassinating political opponents who sought refuge in the West. All of that has been justified in terms of historic Russian grievances that amount to “We don’t get no respect,” coupled with KGB-Man Putin’s bizarre conviction that the collapse of the Soviet Union — one of history’s worst tyrannies — was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century.
Contrast these examples of grievance-based, and often lethal, politics with the Tuskegee Airmen.
I’ve long harbored a deep respect for these first African American military aviators, who overcame centuries of racial stereotyping and prejudice to become successful fighter pilots in World War II. Anyone who has watched the films The Tuskegee Airmen and Red Tails cannot but be appalled by what these heroic men endured in order to serve their country in the U.S. Army Air Force. They triumphed, not through the politics of grievance, but by following the motto “Rise Above” — which did not refer to flying their P-51s above the B-17s they protected from the Luftwaffe, but to rising above the mindless racism that harmed the racists as least as much as it harmed the victims of prejudice.
American public life today would be considerably improved if those addicted to grievance politics, woke and MAGA, adopted the chant of the Tuskegee Airmen in Red Tails: “Nothing’s Difficult/Everything’s a Challenge/Thru Adversity to the Stars.”
The core Catholic social doctrine principle of solidarity teaches us that a self-governing democracy can only be sustained by a widely shared sense of civic friendship and mutual responsibility — the kind that Americans displayed when, across the political spectrum from MAGA to woke, they rushed to the aid of their neighbors when Hurricane Helene devastated western North Carolina. It would be helpful if our public officials would appeal to that spirit, rather than to the grievance demon, in rallying support for their proposed policies.
