fact of the matter is things aren’t good or getting better for many Americans: the rich are getting richer at the expense of the poor; labor
opportunities are declining, intergenerational economic mobility has effectively ceased, and the fourth industrial revolution and artificial intelligence (AI) further threatens to replace even more workers; the average wage peaked more than 50 years ago, and real wages have been on the decline since 1979; our neighborhoods and schools are re-segregating; education is becoming more expensive, and hence access to elite schools and a quality education is increasingly becoming out of reach for most Americans; our general health is declining; the middle class is disappearing; out climate is undergoing massive change, not just in terms of a general increase in temperature but in terms of threatened species of plants and animals; languages and cultures are disappearing at increasing rates; there is a marked increase in all-cause mortality among middle-aged white men, suggesting increasing despair; and the safety net has not only been significantly dismantled, but remains under increasing threat to total removal with proposals of a privatized universal basic income (UBI) that falls well below subsistence levels.
Similar grievances are catalogued in Frank Bruni’s newest work, The Age of Grievance.15 They are also discussed by David Brooks, a colleague of Frank Bruni’s at The New York Times, within multiple articles and books written across the past decade – most notably, in “Seeing Each Other Deeply.”16 And they are explained on a personal level by Derek Black in his memoir The Klansman’s Son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism: A Memoir.17 Lessons learned from the three sources reveal the underpinnings of the problem – and, quite possibly, a pathway to solutions.
For example, Bruni argues we are a culture and country born through grievance – as it was our grievances against the King of England that led to our formation and the legal system built around bringing grievances forward for remedy that continues to form the framework through which we act. He even sets forth a valid argument documenting how a different kind of grievance started to take hold with Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, which Trump and others then exploited. But more than anything, Bruni argues what really created the crisis was that each side played off the other – creating in effect a “grievance multiplier” which escalates the fury.
Brooks doesn’t put the blame so much on diminished expectations, but on the false promises pushed forward through the ideology known as American meritocracy – which, in many respects, underpins the notion of
experiencing diminished expectations. In 2019 Brooks laid out what he believes are the multiple lies of the meritocracy:
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for that not being true.
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