The age of grievance, p.7
The Age of Grievance, page 7
James Kimmel Jr., a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine and the founder and codirector of the Yale Collaborative for Motive Control Studies, sees it as a kind of drug. “I’ve been researching the way grievances affect the brain,” he wrote in Politico in 2020, “and it turns out that your brain on grievance looks a lot like your brain on drugs. In fact, brain imaging studies show that harboring a grievance (a perceived wrong or injustice, real or imagined) activates the same neural reward circuitry as narcotics.”
He added that what your brain wants to do with that grievance—how it both extends the high and brings it to its most satisfying conclusion—is retaliate. “To be clear,” he wrote, “the retaliation doesn’t need to be physically violent—an unkind word, or tweet, can also be very gratifying.” So can making sure a political opponent is quashed. Your brain on grievance is a gift to the party and the candidate you support.
While that’s not a new phenomenon, Kimmel told me in a subsequent interview that Trump’s ascent and behavior had a catalytic effect on it. Trump modeled what Kimmel calls “revenge addiction,” and there’s evidence that addiction can spread from one person to another, becoming a “social contagion,” he said. “Imagine the scenario where we elected somebody who’s not only an opioid addict but is enjoying that and encouraging people to become opioid addicts with him, and you get a daily dose of that kind of teaching and leading people toward that behavior from the highest pulpit that the country has. We have no examples in human memory of anybody like that with that kind of power. He’s like a grievance drug kingpin.”
And he was visibly benefiting from his revenge addiction. It was a core part of his identity, arguably the foundation of it, and there he was, at the pinnacle of politics, the spectacularly vengeful leader of the free world. “He has enjoyed some of his success by being viciously retaliatory,” Kimmel told me. Both those who’d voted for him and those who’d voted against him undoubtedly noticed that. Other politicians sure did.
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Trump, obviously, didn’t introduce vengeance to American politics. Well before him, it produced some of our most overblown political scandals and longest-running political melodramas: Just ask Bill and Hillary Clinton, whose careers were defined by their opponents’ unflagging attempts to catch them in wrongdoing and shame them, and by their own self-destructive girding for and defensiveness about that. But we’ve entered a fresh and frightening epoch of vindictiveness in American politics. And in this case, there’s no clean symmetry: The right is more committed to retaliation than the left. Anyone who tries to refute that by pointing to Trump’s two impeachments and his postpresidential legal travails isn’t being honest about the scope and severity of his transgressions. The investigations into him may be punitive, and there’s enormous spite in them, but there’s just as much justice. A leader can’t incite violence, try to steal a presidential election, routinely flout the rule of law, and then call any harsh treatment of him petty political payback.
That’s an accurate description, though, of DeSantis’s attempt to strip Disney of a special tax-exempt status in Florida that reflected all the jobs it created, all the tourists it attracted, all the infrastructure it maintained, all the money it not only brought to but also saved the state. Disney’s sin? Its chief executive officer in the winter of 2022, Bob Chapek, publicly opposed a controversial education measure that DeSantis was championing to much conservative fanfare nationally and that he indeed succeeded in signing into law. Nicknamed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by its detractors, it prohibited schoolteachers from any discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity among young schoolchildren, and it was worded in a sloppy, vague way that left the door open to more sweeping, stringent banishments of those topics.
DeSantis so convinced himself that Disney embodied all of the “woke” ideology that he and his supporters detested—and was so confident of the political points he’d score by torturing the corporation accordingly—that he didn’t fully develop his plan or look far enough down the road. Disney outmaneuvered him, finding a fine-print ploy to retain control over its special district, and it filed a free-speech lawsuit that, in the long run, had an excellent chance of succeeding. DeSantis ended up looking hasty, clueless, and weak, all because he was intent on vengeance and certain of its currency.
His rise was a case study in a new mainstreaming of grievance politics. In the past, long-shot political challengers such as Buchanan had wallowed in and promoted grievances as a way of being a nuisance, drawing attention, and guaranteeing themselves at least some fringe support, but DeSantis was no desperate insurgent: In November 2022, he won reelection to a second term as governor of Florida, the nation’s third most populous state, by more than nineteen percentage points, the largest margin in nearly forty years. In late 2022 and early 2023, the GOP establishment and pundits of all stripes regarded him as the only Republican with a chance of beating Trump for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination. But like Trump, he was all about grievances. He was fixated on revenge.
If Trump was grudge made flesh, DeSantis was grudge made strategy, and his embrace and weaponization of grievance was exponentially more telling because it was infinitely more deliberate. Trump’s route to the White House had been the haphazard zigzag of someone responding viscerally to various stimuli and then sloppily repeating the behaviors that yielded the greatest immediate reward. DeSantis, in contrast, studied the moment, fashioned a plan, and then executed it. More than two decades after George W. Bush made his bid for the presidency with the slogans that he was “a compassionate conservative” and “a uniter, not a divider,” DeSantis essentially said: “I have neither compassion nor mercy for our liberal adversaries. It’s us versus them.”
The Florida governor gambled on the sunset of the political wisdom that voters tend to prefer forward thinking and good cheer over dire prognostications, and that they favor candidates who are more hopeful and optimistic over their rivals. And he proceeded to shape his political identity and construct his agenda around enemies lists and acts of retribution. He pledged to eradicate this, to exile that, to thwart one band of foes and thwack another. There was a paucity of pro, an overabundance of anti.
Disney had plenty of company as a target of his ire. To humiliate and harass liberals for not figuring out how to prevent so many people from illegally crossing the border between Mexico and the United States, DeSantis in September 2022 sent two planeloads of migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, a favorite vacation spot for former president Barack Obama and many other high-flying Democrats. In June 2023 he repeated the stunt, sending another two planeloads of migrants from New Mexico to Sacramento, the capital of California, whose governor, Gavin Newsom, had made anti-DeSantis and anti-Florida commercials and public statements a big part of his national profile. To sate the antipathy that opponents of abortion rights felt toward supporters of them, he suspended and publicly shamed a Tampa-area prosecutor who had made his own commitment to legal, safe abortions clear—and then, the following year, DeSantis signed into law a ban on most abortions after just six weeks of pregnancy. To feed the fury that many Americans, especially those on the political right, felt about the changing, incomplete, and sometimes inaccurate information that they’d received about Covid vaccines, he exhorted Florida’s Supreme Court to convene a grand jury to look into precisely what vaccine makers had said and how they might be held accountable for any errors.
He advocated or enacted measures to rein in teachers on matters beyond LGBTQ+ issues, to ban any consideration of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) factors in decisions about how and where to invest Florida funds, to edit the College Board’s advanced placement exams, to muzzle the media. He traced every fault line in America’s culture wars, then peacocked and planted a marker along it, an effort striking in its comprehensiveness and, even more so, its relentless negativity. He played not to voters’ aspirations but to their anger, an approach epitomized by the signature promise that united his deeds and diatribes: instead of describing Florida as a lush nursery for big dreams, he labeled it a graveyard for bad ideas, saying that the Sunshine State was “where woke goes to die.”
In early 2023, as most of the country’s journalists completed their pivot from the 2022 midterms to the 2024 presidential race, they seemed to realize en masse that what DeSantis and several other Republicans trying to wrest the party mantle from Trump were saying and doing was a sea change—that Trump’s “American carnage”–caliber darkness and divisiveness weren’t proprietary to him or passing phenomena. Within a span of just two days in mid-March 2023, two of the Washington Post’s most prominent and astute political writers published articles focusing on precisely that. Dan Balz marveled that “DeSantis’s message is confrontational, framed as a conflict that demands to be won outright. Talk of national unity, the currency of many successful presidential candidates, is fleeting to nonexistent. He revels in the country’s left-right divisions rather than offering a path out of them.” And Ashley Parker noted that “much of the rhetoric from declared and potential Republican candidates so far is remarkable for its dystopian tone” and for its description of a country with “warring camps of saviors vs. villains.” She recalled that the previous month, in the official Republican response to President Biden’s State of the Union address, Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders said: “The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left; the choice is between normal or crazy.” And Trump, in a speech in early March at the Conservative Political Action Conference, told the audience: “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”
DeSantis seemed determined not to cede that turf to Trump, to “own the libs” in the manner that Trump relished, but to do it with more than trash talk, trashed norms, and name-calling—to do it with punitive strokes. That’s what lured him into that ultimately self-defeating and mortifying dance with Disney, which, as the conservative writer Charles C. W. Cooke noted in National Review, was gratuitous and performative: the corporation’s stance against his cherished education law neither threatened nor ultimately managed to block its implementation. DeSantis got his way. “There is no need for the Republican Party of Florida to salt the earth here,” Cooke wrote. “It has prevailed in every particular.” “So why salt the earth?” asked Charlie Sykes in a commentary of his own in the Bulwark. “Because this is the politics of revenge and punishment.”
Revenge and punishment: Trump, who lavished his political energy on those as on nothing else, threatened to take them to cataclysmic extremes following his arraignment in a federal court in Miami in June 2023 on thirty-seven counts of wrongdoing for mishandling—or, really, frolicking with—all those classified documents. He said that if he won the 2024 election and got another term as president, “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family. I will totally obliterate the Deep State.” From any lips other than Trump’s, that statement—made in a speech to supporters at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club—would have been stunning, and it was chilling regardless, because that vow, that “real prosecutor” reference, and that “obliterate” all added up to a new vision of the Justice Department under a second, restored Trump administration as a clique of presidential sycophants and a vessel for presidential vendettas. Trump separately said that he and his supporters were engaged in “the final battle” against Democrats, for whom he repurposed an archaic political slur. “Either the Communists win and destroy America,” he said, “or we destroy the Communists.” That hyperbole and hyperventilation seemingly inspired Charlie Kirk, the MAGA radio host I previously mentioned, who told his listeners in July 2023 that Biden “should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.” Meanwhile, another right-wing radio host, Stew Peters, publicly suggested that Anthony Fauci and Hunter Biden deserved to be executed.
Revenge and punishment: they explain why and how Republicans turned on other Republicans in early 2021, as various state and county Republican parties formally censured Republican members of the House who backed Trump’s second impeachment and Republican senators who voted for his conviction for his part in the January 6 rioting. This retribution came from a party that had long accused liberals of enforcing a stringent orthodoxy and brooking no dissent, a party that denounces “cancel culture” while readily practicing its own version of it. But then Republicans’ vindictive itch superseded anything so quaint as intellectual or ideological honesty.
Revenge and punishment: they fired J. D. Vance’s imagination as he ran in 2022 for an open seat representing Ohio in the US Senate, pledging to strike back at all those awful East Coast elitists and glossing over his diploma from one of their shrines, Yale Law School, a credential that played a major, validating role in the Appalachia-to-Ivy arc of his bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. James Pogue captured Vance’s resentment-drenched campaign in an article in Vanity Fair, dwelling on Vance’s stated desire to see the leadership class in the United States ripped out and replaced, even if that required the quasi-dictatorial overreach of a would-be autocrat like Trump. Pogue plucked out some priceless remarks Vance made when he did a podcast interview with the head of a conservative men’s rights group. “I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left,” Vance said on the podcast. “We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.” Vance also flashed forward to a possible Trump victory in 2024. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” he said. If that sounded extreme, well, so was the contempt for and subjugation of real Middle American folks like him. “If we’re going to push back against it,” he said, “we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.” Vance went on to win that Senate race, against a deft and potent Democratic opponent, by almost seven percentage points. Barring an unusual turn of events, he will be a US senator at least through 2027.
Revenge and punishment: they prompted Republicans in the Tennessee House of Representatives in early 2023 to take the extraordinary and self-defeating step of expelling two Black Democrats who, after a school shooting in Nashville left three children and four adults (including the assailant) dead, used bullhorns in the House chamber to demand new restrictions on firearms. Those bullhorns violated House rules, but Republicans could simply have voted to censure the Democrats. Or to fine them. Or to serve them with a stern letter of reprimand. Expulsion did the opposite of silencing them, instead turning them into martyrs and political superstars, their names and faces recognizable to many more Americans than would have been aware of them otherwise. It went beyond any previous penalty for rules violations in the House.
Republican governors around the country followed DeSantis’s lead, courting those constituents most consumed by enmity and nurturing their spite. In Texas in late 2021, Governor Greg Abbott signed legislation that effectively encouraged citizens to turn against one another and existed at the misbegotten nexus of vigilantism, bounty hunting, and weapons-grade partisanship. It enabled anyone who knew or suspected that a Texan had helped a pregnant person get an abortion to file a civil lawsuit against that abettor—maybe, in the spirit of the draconian law, I should say accomplice—and potentially collect a reward of at least ten thousand dollars. There was no one-lawsuit limit. It set up the theoretical possibility of abortion snitching as a whole new line of work.
And a whole new kind of surveillance state loomed. In Virginia, Governor Glenn Youngkin established and publicized an email address—basically, a digital tip line—where parents could report any untoward activity or instruction that they became aware of in their children’s schools. It was a cheap shot in ideological cahoots and political tandem with DeSantis’s attention-seeking stunts. While Youngkin’s supposed goal was to guard against the teaching of “critical race theory” or anything that smacked of white guilt, no such parameters were placed on the alarms that parents could raise. Youngkin and his Republican allies were fashioning a tool easily used for pure harassment and partisan recrimination. Maybe that was part of the point. Maybe that tool was meant largely, even primarily, to indulge the antipathy that consumed so many voters.
Meanwhile, in West Virginia, the Republican secretary of state, Mac Warner, emulated Trump’s fearmongering about illegal voting and announced a “See Something, TEXT Something” program that created a phone number to which the state’s residents could send text messages about suspicions that someone was voting illegally or otherwise engaged in voter fraud. When I learned of that, I was disgusted: voter fraud is an invented panic. I was impressed: Warner had nonetheless found a clever way to clamber aboard that bandwagon. But I was above all baffled: How do you spot illegal voting? Do you use binoculars, as with bird-watching? “Look, sweetheart, there’s an American goldfinch—and there’s a Honduran migrant with a stack of fraudulent ballots in his backpack!” When politicians start sating grievances, they stop serving logic.
