Against the Politics of Grievance - First Things

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 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 …