Grievance narrows the imagination.
Leon Wieseltier is the Isaiah Berlin senior fellow in culture and policy at the Brookings Institution.
"Yet we seem to be living in a country of personal injuries. In our political season this takes the form of a politics of grievance. The prestige of anger in our politics has grown disproportionately to anger’s justifications and exceeded them, so that voting appears to have become more an explosion of feeling than an expression of thought. (It is the voters, after all, to whom demagogues owe their ascendancy. The wisdom of crowds!) Valid grievances have turned poisonous and welcomed intolerance and untruth into their orbit. Outrage, a fine political emotion, has degenerated into resentment and hatred. A shocking number of Americans seem more conspiratorial than deliberative. The responsibilities of policy are overwhelmed in our debates by the wounds of collective memory, recent and ancient. All this does not signify the end of democracy, and democracy is not to be blamed for it. Democracy requires of us that we live by our nerves. But it also requires of us that we keep our heads; and if reason and respect are democratic qualities, then there is a decidedly undemocratic spirit loose in the land. We are punishing our politics with our pain, when the solutions for our pain may be found only in our politics."
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