CWI #40 - Grievance politics

Hello friends!

I mostly do foreign policy conflicts around here but today I want to shift gears and look at a topic that is really more domestically focused. And that topic is the current strength and valence of what I am going to call throughout this episode grievance politics.

I think grievance politics is worth addressing here because it is such a powerful source of, well, conflict today. The most famous example we have in the current moment of grievance politics is Donald Trump and the rise of the Make America Great Again coalition. But in English speaking countries, Trump's rise tends to eclipse the existence of similar political movements in other countries such as Orban in Hungary and Bolsonaro in Brazil.

As I like to do, I want to start with some history. We'll go through three very, very different manifestations of what are, in my mind, examples of grievance politics at play but outside the context we're familiar with which is as a catalyst for rightwing political movements. And then we'll extract the common lessons from each of these examples before finally thinking about what we've learned implies for the future of grievance politics in the United States.

This topic is going to be a little bit different for me compared to many of the other topics I've talked about and the reason is I feel on much shakier ground here in terms of knowing the facts and the history. So this will be more of an exploration for all of us, let's see how that goes!

Second Isaiah

A central claim I want to put forth in this pod is that grievance politics feels new and recent, but is in fact old and probably hardwired into the human psyche. And to show that, I want to highlight a bunch of unexpected examples of grievance politics across time, cultures and political persuasions before we tackle the form of grievance politics that probably most engages listeners to this podcast which is its contemporary, rightwing form.

So, the first example I want to start with comes to us from the Bible. And, specifically, I want to start with chapters 40-55 in the Book of Isaiah which is a portion of the Old Testament known to Biblical scholars as Deutero-Isaiah or more colloquially, Second Isaiah.

To understand the significance of Second Isaiah, a little history is required. In 597 BCE, the Babylonian empire invaded the Kingdom of Judah, which makes up a southern portion of the modern state of Israel and, at the time, was home to Jerusalem. The Babylonian Emperor, Nebuchadnezzar the II lay siege to Jerusalem and after it fell, exiled most of its upper classes to Babylon.

Recall that this is all taking place nearly 600 years before the birth of Jesus Christ: there are no Christians. The people exiled to Babylon were Jews, and the experience of this exile would heavily influence the evolution of the Jewish religion. As a brief aside, the Jews exiled to Babylon were restored to their original lands about 60 years later by Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. In other words, the ancestors of today's Jews were returned to their lands by the ancestors of today's Iranians. Which is ironic given the antipathy between the governments of those two countries today.

Anyway, so that's the background. Crucially, Second Isaiah is believed by Biblical scholars to have been written during the period of Jewish exile in Babylon and it therefore makes up part of what is called the exilic theology of the Jewish religion.

Opening a pod on grievance politics with a deep dive on grievance politics in the Hebrew Bible… That's a bold start in the current moment, grant me that. Let's see where we land with it all…

The Jewish thinkers advancing the religion during the Babylonian exile had suffered a grievous loss. Uprooted from their homes and transported to a foreign land, they had to reconcile this catastrophe with their belief that their god, called Yahweh at the time, was supposed to look over them. Another brief sidequest, Yahweh likely is part of the root of some modern Jewish names, such as the yahu in Netanyahu. Anyway, back onto the main thread, the Second Isaiah in some ways translated their situation into what we would recognize as a morally benevolent theology.

In Isaiah 49:6 of the New English Translation of the Old Testament, Yahweh says "I will make you a light to the nations, so you can bring my deliverance to the remote regions of the earth." What Second Isaiah is trying to do, attributing this quote to Yahweh, is to find some silver lining in the trauma of the Babylonian exile. After the exile is ended, the Jews and the nation of Israel will be Yahweh's instrument in bringing his justice to the other nations of the earth.

But Second Isaiah ultimately takes a turn. In Isaiah 49:22 and 23, Yahweh says the following:
 

Look I will raise my hand to the nations;

I will raise my signal flag to the peoples.

They will bring your sons in their arms

and carry your daughters on their shoulders.

Kings will be your children’s guardians;

their princesses will nurse your children.

With their faces to the ground they will bow down to you,

and they will lick the dirt on your feet.

This prophecy of Israel's coming dominance is meant to be a salve on the wound created by the experience of exile. Sure, things are bad now, but soon Yahweh will come and not just uplift the Jewish people, but help them subjugate those around them as something like a reward for suffering through this dark period of the exile.

There are a couple of pieces of this I want to pick out as having, at least from my perspective, resonance with the tone of today's grievance politics. The first is that grievance politics generally has, at its heart, some actual grievance. Rarely is it the case that grievances are completely imagined out of whole cloth. In this case, the grievance is quite bad! Many Jews really were exiled to Babylon for nearly a century!

But the second piece I want to pull out here is how grievance tends towards vengeance. Second Isaiah's nourishment comes not just from freedom and restoration of Jewish lands, but from the subjugation of others. The passage I quoted earlier from Isaiah 49:22 and 23 implies that Israel's enemies will be enslaved and says directly that they will lick dirt. This is not just about justice, but punishment too.

Finally is the fixation on elites. That passage talks about kings and princesses and this overlaps neatly with the grievance politics we're familiar with today. Today's rightwing politicians position themselves, rhetorically at least, as being in the same camp as the ordinary working person, aligned against their society's "elites" who are usually some combination of politicians, bureaucrats, celebrities and businesspeople.

You might reasonably ask, how can Biblical passages written over two thousand years ago really relate to the grievance politics of today? I have two points to make on that front. The first is that during this period of history, religion and politics were much more closely intertwined than they are today. Indeed, to some extent, religion and politics were the same thing. Consolidation of kingly power was often wrapped up in promulgating one's own gods at the expense of political rivals. Keep in mind that as late as 1960, JFK had to answer serious concerns that he would be beholden to the Pope in his quest to become the first Catholic president of the United States: religion and politics have only recently become disconnected and even then only amongst center or left of center political persuasions. Religion remains a potent force on the right.

The second point I would make is to clarify that I'm not trying to draw a clear, bright line between Biblical history and contemporary electoral political rhetoric. I am just pointing out that the recognizable metaphors and rhetoric suggests that grievance politics, far from being a recent phenomenon, has just taken on much more potency in recent years than we are used to.

Finally on this section, if it is not clear, none of this is a comment about Judaism particularly. As we will see in the remainder of this pod, lots of groups and peoples throughout history have practiced this form of politics. For this section of the pod I am indebted to the book The Evolution of God by Robert Wright.

Now let's shift gears completely and turn to 20th century China.

The Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution took place between 1966 and 1976 in Communist China. Initiated by Chairman Mao Zedong, the goal of the Cultural Revolution was to purge what Mao saw as lingering capitalist and traditional elements of Chinese society.

The Cultural Revolution is a period of history that I have often found very slippery. And what I mean by slippery is that I have often felt I could not properly imagine in my mind's eye what it must have been like. We'll come to why that is in a second but for those interested in this period and who similarly have trouble feeling like they have some vague comprehension of the lived experience, I highly recommend the novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeline Thien. It includes a significant section focused on the Cultural Revolution and I felt by the end that I had at least some vague impression of what living through the Cultural Revolution must have been like.

So I've properly snookered myself here because I've just spent several minutes explaining how difficult it is to understand a period of history that I'm about to try to explain. Or maybe I haven't? Maybe I've torpedoed expectations to such an extent that no matter what I say about the Cultural Revolution will be more informative than if you knew nothing. I dunno. Lot of navel gazing going on here so let's get on with it.

Let's begin with why the Cultural Revolution happened. The answer to this question is almost certainly not monocausal, but for the sake of this discussion I'm going to focus on the mindset and goals of Mao. By the mid-1960s, the Chinese Communist Party had total political control of China but Mao observed a number of developments that were troubling to his way of looking at the world. The first was that be fervently believed that rural China should be the chief beneficiary of revolution. But he saw that the Party was incubating a growing bureaucratism and technocracy that looked as if it might supplant the local elite of imperial times. Instead of local landed elites ruling over the peasantry, it was increasingly becoming Party officials.

A second concern for Mao was that he seemed to be losing his grip on the intelligentsia. While intellectuals did not criticize Mao directly, for that would have landed them in jail or worse, through metaphor and allusion they nevertheless managed to sustain a steady drumbeat of criticism against Mao for various missteps. Most notably the Great Leap Forward which was an economic modernization program he attempted in the late 50s which backfired and led to millions dying of famine.

Third and finally, Mao saw the direction in which the USSR was heading and wanted to avert that outcome. There, a new ruling class of Soviet officials had taken over and had mostly cast pretenses to egalitarian concerns aside. They ruled over the population through various state means, especially the KGB, the security and intelligence service of Communist Russia.

It is important for me to reiterate that many of the elements Mao was concerned about originated from within the Party itself. The Party that he had spent decades as a rebel leader building up and leading to victory in China's Civil War. As a consequence, a key thrust of the Cultural Revolution and what makes it so difficult to understand for those coming to it for the first time is that a lot of what Mao was aiming to achieve was purging and dismantling parts of his own political movement. Hold onto that thought.

So what did Mao actually do? Throughout this section, I rely heavily on China: A New History by John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman and I will quote from that book now because it has a nice paragraph that sums up what we're dealing with:

Americans trying to understand the Cultural Revolution have to begin by crossing the gap separating the Chinese and American political cultures. Suppose the president in Washington urged high school students all over the United States to put on armbands, accost, upbraid, and harass citizens on the streets and in their homes and finally take over city hall, local business firms, government services, and institutions.

If that sounds weird, well that's what Fairbank and Goldman are trying to communicate: for Westerners to understand the Cultural Revolution they have to really let go of a lot of assumptions they have about how the world works.

The first phase of the Cultural Revolution involved mostly bureaucratic maneuvering at the top of the CCP in late 1965 and early 1966. Mao purged a number of senior leaders and reorganized various departments and committees so they were stacked with his supporters.

Then, through mid to late 1966, Mao mobilized groups of radical youths in what were called the Red Guards. These Red Guards are the high school students from the quote I referred to earlier and their role is probably the hardest thing to understand about the Cultural Revolution. These roving bands of youths moved through the cities breaking into the homes of the well-off and intellectuals, breaking their possessions, humiliating them in various ways, and often killing them.

In theory, the goal of the Red Guards was to attack what were called the "Four Olds" of old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. But I don't think you have to look very hard to see the elements of grievance politics at play. Red Guards were recruited from all over China and brought to the cities. For many Red Guards, growing up in rural areas, the wealth of the city regions must have come as a shock. It seems pretty likely to me that for many Red Guards, the opportunity to tear down the elite and close the gap to their own situation was probably the central motivation of their destruction, not whatever high minded rhetorical arguments Mao was making.

And to my point in Second Isaiah about vengeance, you see that here too. In thousands of cases, Red Guards brought various ideological criminals onto stages for public humiliation in what were euphemistically referred to as struggle sessions. The victim, often a professor or minor civil servant, would be subjected to screaming, beating and often times death as thousands of Red Guards watched on and cheered. In other words, for the Red Guards, it was not enough to merely purge enemies of the state, they had to be denigrated as well. Just as in Second Isaiah, it was not enough for the Israelites to go home, their enemies had to kiss the dirt at their feet.

The Red Guards would soon be unleashed against the elements of the Chinese Communist Party opposed to Mao. In all, 60 percent of party officials were purged in various ways. A pretty thorough cleaning house, you'd have to say. And by turning the focus of the Red Guards onto Party officials, Mao ultimately generated the opposition to their behavior which would see them disbanded in mid-1968.

For the remainder of the Cultural Revolution, the People's Liberation Army would be responsible for seeing through the aims of the Revolution. By 1971 the worst of the destruction was over and from then until 1976 the focus of the Party would shift to rebuilding itself and the state apparatus that had been destroyed.

The total human cost of the Cultural Revolution is generally estimated to be at least a million deaths. Many cultural sites and libraries were destroyed and an entire generation effectively lost its education owing to the disruption and closure of schools and universities.

For me, it is hard to miss the parallels between the messianic quality of Mao to his followers and that of Trump to the MAGA base. And in both cases the link is not religious, at least not in the explicit sense of them claiming a divine mandate. Instead, in both you can see the quality of being able to embody and shape the world view of their respective supporters in a way that inspires fierce, violent loyalty. This is another pattern you see a lot in grievance politics: there needs to be a central figure to rally around and that's a theme that plays out in European movements centered around grievance such as Viktor Orban in Hungary or Marine le Pen in France.

We should all by now be familiar with the fixation on elites. The Cultural Revolution is perhaps the most striking example of this in the examples we're going to talk through. Again and again you can find anecdotes about students subjecting their professors to humiliation in huge, public struggle sessions. The intelligentsia weren't alone in being perceived to be part of the elite. Many Party functionaries suffered as well, often committing suicide rather than subjecting themselves and their families to the humiliations of the Red Guards.

The Cultural Revolution has perhaps the strongest tones of having to tear the system down. And that's a really powerful, recurrent theme in grievance politics. The idea that the "system", ill-defined, is broken and we need an entirely new one. Appeals to the depredations of the "system" are another common feature of grievance campaigns, as is the absence of any clear idea about what comes next. Think about Trump's commitment to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Trump never offered a counterpoint to the ACA, but repealing it fits with the narrative of bringing down the system.

A final element of the Cultural Revolution that I think is worth pulling on is the civilizational stakes of it all. Mao situated his concern in the context of the overall revolution's success and therefore the future prosperity of China. He did not advance a technocratic concern about power flowing back towards urban bureaucrats and propose some kind of policy agenda to curb that power. Instead he put the future of China on the table and used that to generate the rage and destructive capacity of the country's youths.

And you see this again and again today. When the avatars of rightwing grievance politics attack immigration, real and practical issues like housing, language training and integration into the economy are barely addressed. Instead, they attack immigration on grounds of civilization decline or collapse. The immigrants are coming to bring our society down around us, that sort of thing.

Let's turn now to the final example of grievance politics I want to look at before we get down to the issue of how it is manifesting in our politics today.

Jon Stewart

Here's a name you weren't expecting to see! When we think about grievance politics today, we think about it coming from the right. But important elements of grievance politics exist on the left as well and I think this guy has been and remains a purveyor of elements of grievance politics that are worth understanding.

Jon Stewart took over as host of the The Daily Show in 1999 and quickly turned it into a hit. A critical factor in Stewart's rise was the Bush Administration and the various gaffes and missteps of that administration during his tenure as host of The Daily Show. Leaning in hard to sarcasm and satire, Stewart routinely lampooned the Bush Administration and, by association, the millions of Americans who voted for him in 2000 and then again in 2004.

Stewart is also famously credited with bringing about the end of a show on CNN called Crossfire. The show, which had been running since 1982, featured hosts from opposing wings of the political spectrum. In a memorable exchange with hosts Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson in October 2004, Stewart is widely viewed as having humiliated the two so badly that CNN was forced to cancel the show.

I think the first time I saw that clip, I took it at face value. Stewart was smarter than the other two hosts and he made them look like stupid and that was funny. But over time I have come to realize that he didn't just make them look like stupid, they were stupid. And when I look at the clip through that lens, it comes to take on a different complexion.

There's nothing especially funny about taking advantage of someone dumber than you are. There's a reason that people don't run comedy skits of people debating the cognitively impaired. It's not funny. And in moment after moment of the clip, you see that far from Stewart having some godlike command of rhetoric, instead you see that he's just taking advantage of two people ill-equipped to be facing off with him.

I am going off on a bit of a tangent here so let me rein it back in. At several points during the clip, Stewart makes the point that it is not fair to compare the journalistic standards of The Daily Show with Crossfire because the former is a satirical news show and the latter is supposed to be "serious" journalism (that's serious in air quotes for the listeners). But the truth is that Stewart both at the time and since has routinely positioned himself journalistically. Yes, The Daily Show was satire, but Stewart's liberal political bent and the thrust of his political attacks were totally unambiguous to viewers. So while The Daily Show might be a different context, it was and remains disingenuous for Stewart to hide his conduct behind the veil of "well I'm joking".

And you know who else does this frequently? Donald Trump. This is a repeated Donald Trump tactic. He says something utterly outlandish and often repulsive to much of the country and then in the face of backlash, walks it backward by saying he was joking. But his supporters receive the message and are energized by the fact he was willing to utter something they perhaps have wanted to voice, but have not felt the social permission to do so.

To be fair, Stewart and Trump don't use the humor defense to the same ends. Stewart uses humor to try to place himself above the political fray even though that's squarely where he situates himself, which we will get to. Trump uses humor as a way of damage control and to moderate perception of him among those outside his base. Nevertheless, there are common themes here whereby humor, or appeals to humor, are used to shield the less appealing parts of the broader grievance agenda.

And let's turn to that agenda for a moment with Stewart. At one point during the clip he accuses Begala and Carlson of being aligned with "politicians and business interests" and hurting America. In other words, Stewart squarely puts himself on the side of the common person in opposition to nameless, faceless elites. And there is no doubt from his tone that politicians and business interests are if not the enemies, then some form of adversary against which ordinary Americans must unite. Does this theme of attacking elites ring any bells?

Indeed, this is another place where in my mind Stewart and Trump have parallels. Stewart and Trump both attack politicians, but they do it in different ways and from different ends of the political spectrum. In Stewart's case, his primary mode of attack is mockery. He has built the bulk of his career since the late 1990s on mocking not just politicians but the act of politics itself. At one point he states that the "absurdity of the system" provides most of his show's comic material.

Politics is a dirty business, there's no doubt. It involves plenty of compromises and tradeoffs. But it is necessary work because prior to the advent of the kind of politics we know today, bounded by the rules of modern democracy, the alternative dispute resolution mechanism was killing each other or the whims of an unelected monarch. And perhaps I'm overstating things, but not by much.

So by relentlessly mocking the best process we have for organizing the politics of our society, why should Stewart be surprised when voters stop taking politics seriously and start electing chaos candidates? This is really a critique separate from his invocation of grievance politics but I thought it was worth making. John Oliver is another television personality standing on the exact same corner. Both of these individuals have relentlessly denigrated the practice of politics and politicians.

And this isn't to deny that they frequently make valid critiques in each of the individual cases they address. But the sum total of their work is to make politics look like a joke. What reaction do they expect from their audience? And keep in mind, simply on the volume of their content alone, they are often making a mockery of politicians that their viewers have voted for. How do we think that makes someone feel? Seeing someone they voted for made to look like an idiot? Probably they start to feel like an idiot too and resolve not to bother with politics in the future.

Ok so a little tangent there but let's get back onto the main thread. Another frequent tactic we see in grievance politics today is the ad hominem attack. Ad hominem means to attack an individual, rather than their ideas. We know Trump does this all the time. But Stewart does it too. During the clip he asks Tucker Carlson how old he is and Carlson replies that he's 35 and Stewart remarks snidely that he, Carlson, still wears a bowtie.

Remember that Stewart is on the show in theory to decry the fact that it is partisan hackery and not serious journalism… And he's making comments about a person's appearance? Just as an aside, I am certain that was a canned line that Carlson walked right into. Stewart didn't make that up, Carlson wore bowties all the time on the show and Stewart would have been able to look his age up before delivering it.

Ok I think that's enough dissection of this particular clip. As I said, Crossfire was cancelled shortly after and many attribute that to the damage done to the show's reputation by Stewart. I have no idea what became of Begala. But Carlson of course would go on to an extremely lucrative career on Fox News before being fired due to his role in pushing lies about Dominion, the voting machine company that was awarded a mega payout in a defamation lawsuit against the network.

We took a few side roads through all of that, so I want to make sure we pick up the crumbs about grievance politics. Most obvious is the recurrent theme of bringing down the unnamed "elites". Stewart, just as in the other examples we cited, specifically points to a group he perceives to be the elites of society and appeals to solidarity with broader society in bringing those elites to heel.

But the significance of mockery and humiliation is also there. In each of the three examples we've looked at, it is not enough for those with a grievance to achieve their aims of equality, or justice, or restoration of their situation. It is imperative that they emotionally denigrate the other side as well.

I've learned something today

So, we've looked at three pretty different examples of grievance politics at play. What have we learned, what are the consistent themes we can see to apply to today's situation?

The fixation on elite malfeasance is undoubtedly a core element of grievance politics. Here's my theory as to why.

The emergence of elites is a recurrent theme in human societies. You see this across time and place, again and again. Some people like to point to traditional or indigenous peoples as examples of societies free of elite rule and instead oriented around consensus. I have never found a true example of this. Instead what you see when you dig in is that these societies often do have explicit elites like hereditary chiefs who wield enormous informal influence in their supposedly consensus-based decision making process.

This emergence of elites necessarily causes resentment among the non-elite usually for two reasons. The first is simple envy. Being part of an elite class usually comes with all kinds of material benefits that make life more pleasant. More money, better housing, better healthcare and so on. The second reason is that depending on how society is structured, those with elite status may not have any claim to it, or may have some claim that is utterly bogus. Hereditary nobility is the obvious example of this.

And yet, elitism persists because this seems to lead to the most harmonious arrangements in human society. Although the goal is to make elitism work for everyone. The moral philosopher John Rawls, in his book A Theory of Justice, argues that inequality is morally permissible to the extent that it benefits the least advantaged in society. So, for example, it is ok to pay someone of high intelligence a lot of money to develop vaccines, because that inequality creates a societal benefit that saves many lives, including the lives of the poorest in society.

But even in liberal societies, which aspire to Rawls' account of how inequality and associated elitism should work, resentment persists. The first component of resentment I cited above will never go away for some portion of the populace. And frequently, even in societies that pursue meritocracy as a solution to the question of how to pick elites, a new problem arises. And that problem is that elites selected through meritocracy may come to look down on those over whom they rule. And that pours gasoline on the inbuilt resentment created by different circumstances.

You see this in an infamous remark made by Hilary Clinton during her 2016 run for the presidency. During the race she referred to a particular group of Donald Trump supporters as "deplorables". This comment was seized on by Trump and rightwing media as evidence of Clinton's elitism and her private disdain for the white, poor, non-college educated American heartland.

Relatedly, we have the observation that grievance politics is almost invariably grounded in some actual, identifiable harm suffered by the population putting it forward. In the case of Second Isaiah we have the exile, in the Cultural Revolution we have the growing power of Party officials, and Jon Stewart frequently targeted politicians' behaviors that really were bad.

In the case of contemporary grievance politics, I think much of what's at the core of those movements is a sense that meritocracy isn't meritocratic at all. And you really can point to specific situations where this is true! The disparate educational outcomes between students from wealthy and non-wealthy backgrounds is one obvious example. It takes so much more innate talent for a poor student who works hard to catch up with a wealthy student who works hard because the wealthy student has access to better schools, teachers, private tutors and so on.

This is a good jumping off point for the observation that going hand in glove with elite resentment is the conviction that the "system", undefined, must be torn down. Grievance politics rarely translates into a specific set of policy outcomes that animate its supporters. These movements are more revolutionary than evolutionary. The logic goes something like elites sit at the top of a system of supposed meritocracy, they look down on the rest of the populace, and they use the system to maintain their superiority. This becomes a powerful rhetorical combination that makes it easy to rationalize away evidence-based arguments. Inevitably, the "system" can be cited as a reason that data can't be trusted - it's just another tool of elite control.

This orientation of a world view around resentment is what, I think, generates the fixation on humiliation as a punishment for the hated elite class. Resentment is fundamentally emotion. It is hard to translate an emotion into a coherent policy agenda. But resentment can be satiated by inflicting emotional and psychological harm on the object of that resentment which is why the Yahweh of Second Isaiah promises not just that Israel's enemies will become their slaves, but that they will lick the dirt from their feet as well. Much of the Cultural Revolution manifested through activities explicitly aimed at inflicting humiliation and, as we've seen, Jon Stewart's core toolset is ridicule.

This also explains, I think, the relative lack of policy specificity that comes behind calls to tear down the system. Because deep down, adherents to grievance politics aren't so concerned with tearing the system down as they are putting themselves at the top of it.

So to recap the key elements we have here are resentment of elites, a fixation on humiliating them, and a rhetorical claim to bring down the system that is generally not backed up by policy. As I said earlier, this obviously describes rightwing politics in many developed countries.  Much has been written about why grievance took over the rightwing. It is a familiar combination of factors including rising economic insecurity in an age of greater inequality, the progressive drift of cultural attitudes, and increasing racial diversity in many countries.

I thought long and hard about spending some time here going deep on current grievance politics movements, obviously Donald Trump and the MAGA movement would be rich fodder for such an approach. But as I said, so much has been written about this and it blankets the airwaves every day. The world does not need more takes on this front. But what I think is a really challenging question worth thinking about is what comes afterward? As in, where does grievance politics actually take you?

In the case of Second Isaiah, a fascinating aspect of that story is that while the Jews ultimately were restored to their original lands by the Persian Empire, the theological imprint of the exile remained. Without going into unnecessary details, one of the transformations that Judaism underwent during the exile was to go from monolatry, which is the worship of a single god among many, to monotheism which is the belief that only a single god exists. This was one of the most profound developments in the history of world religion as it would ultimately lead to the other Abrahamic religions of Christianity and Islam.

In China, you have a similar case of permanent transformation in philosophy. The Cultural Revolution was the final nail in the coffin of Mao Zedong's legacy. While Mao would continue to reign over China until his death, the enormous damage he inflicted on the country meant that after he died, it was no longer political suicide to pursue policies that conflicted with his teachings. This paved the way for the emergence of Deng Xiaoping who was the architect of China's economic opening to the outside world.

Without Deng, the Chinese economy would never have developed into the behemoth that it is today. So in China's case, where elements of grievance politics consumed the entire political system, the grievance was ultimately spat back out and China put onto a completely different track.

Jon Stewart is a much different example from the other two we looked at and is more difficult to compare. But a thought that often rattles around in my head is that if the politicians of the 2000s were worthy of ridicule, what can we say of the politicians today? Consider Lauren Boebert, a Republican Congresswoman from Colorado. She was ejected from a cinema because she and her guest were fondling one another too much and disturbing other patrons…

If anything it seems like Stewart's legacy is to continue the satirical trendline. He ridiculed politicians and made them look like clowns and what did he get? He got even more ridiculous clowns.

Turning to the immediate future of the United States for a moment, many people see the 2024 election as having existential consequences for the country. Either Trump is elected and puts the country on a path to dictatorship or he is defeated electorally and his mystique bursts leaving the Republican Party to pick up the pieces after what would likely be the end of the MAGA coalition. Probably the reality is somewhere in between these extremes but let's just say these are the two options for the sake of argument.

What I often wonder about when it comes to Trump and dictatorship is how would he make that work? Because the thing is there are lots of people in America who don't have a grievance against the current state of the country and who like the way it is now. Trying to implement a dictatorship and simultaneously forcing disagreeable policies on those people is going to turn the tables: suddenly they will be the ones with a grievance and an axe to grind against the newly installed elites who would, presumably, come from the ranks of MAGA.

In that context, it isn't obvious to me that the election of Trump necessarily means an autocratic future for the United States. I think there could be chaos, certainly. But the experience of China through the Cultural Revolution really speaks to me about the potential resilience of culture as an institution. Despite Mao turning the country upside down, China came out of that experience with a visionary new leader who put the country on the path to dramatic gains in prosperity.

Of course, I am not suggesting a repeat of the Cultural Revolution as a good idea! I think what I am getting at is that grievance as an animating force in politics is powerful, but finite. Eventually, it exhausts itself. And I think the reason that happens is because it is inherently zero sum. It isn't about growing prosperity or power or whatever is at the heart of the grievance, it is about redistribution of the status quo. And ultimately in undertaking that redistribution, new grievances are created.

And so arguably that's a factor in why human history tends towards improving circumstances. Ultimately growing the pie means you can bring more people into your political coalition because what you're promising is both more for everyone, and that nobody needs to miss out.

This seems like an unusually positive note for Conflicts With Interest so why don't we end it there, on a high for a change!

I hope you enjoyed this dalliance with grievance politics and thanks as always for listening.