My 2024 pamphlet Grievance: In Fragments, explicates the long history of grievance as a distinctly white, (historically, but no longer exclusively) male, phenomenon. This is an argument I stand by because grievance is in fact one of this country’s founding principles. In late-October 2026, however, it seems to me necessary to attach the argument around “grievance,” as a condition, to the constituency that has in our moment appropriated “grievance.” The aggrieved have claimed grievance for themselves, almost as an inalienable right.
Grievance. The aggrieved. They speak of the same condition because they derive from the same etymological root. To have a legitimate grievance is to have been wronged; it is to have been made the victim of an injustice. In our moment, however, they signal very different conditions because those who consider themselves aggrieved are composed of such an expansive constituency. Politically revealing in its expansiveness, moreover.
The “aggrieved” of our moment is, like all historical blocs, an amalgam of various cross-class alliances (however unlikely these alliances are, in purely economic terms), alliances that move across ethnic and sometimes even traditional racial fault lines (less likely, but still operative), alliances where, say, gender and racial interests converge (disputing the logic of political common sense).
To be found in the ranks of this historical bloc are a number of what would appear to be, on the face of it, strange bedfellows. They aggregate around what they perceive to be their shared condition. They consolidate around what they name as their shared vulnerabilities. By their reckoning, they are the victims of preferential (federal) treatment given to women, racial minorities (most especially African-Americans and Latinos, although a panoply of Asian-American constituencies are not above reproach) and, of course, they are directly threatened by “hordes” of immigrants – legal or not – who are willing to perform the menial labor that sustains the US economy. A singular convergence, then, among, inter alia, (i) those who lack advanced levels of formal education, their lack of technical expertise (even as they navigate the world with their Smartphones) and access to training in the new technologies—these non-college educated white males form the electoral basis of the aggrieved; (ii) those who number among the millionaire and billionaire classes, with degrees (often advanced degrees) from the very elite US institutions that they so routinely disparage (Harvard BAs; Yale Law) but present themselves as class rebels determined to shake up the status quo, even if only with the intent of cementing their economic interests; (iii) various constituencies of white women, many of them college-educated, determined to maintain the heteronormative order so as to secure the present and the future for their offspring; (iv) an array of immigrant communities, some of them recent arrivals, ostensibly the victims of discrimination in their native lands, others of longstanding residence (boasting generations of US citizenship).
Even though they might not recognize themselves as in alliance with each other, they reinforce this account of having been made victims. They have been made victims in their own land, despite no discernible evidence that their rights have been abrogated, that their capacity for social advancement has been curtailed.
This early-November 2026 conjuncture, however, reveals a brutal political irony. Having pledged themselves, as one and all fully paid-up members of Aggrieved Inc., to the Ur-figure of Aggrievement (if such a neologism might be permitted), they now find themselves in economic straits more dire than in a generation (high energy costs, high costs of food, high interest rates).
“It’s the economy, stupid.”
“All of which leaves us to wonder: toward whom will the aggrieved turn their ire now? ”
Of course, not every constituency within this bloc-that-hardly-recognizes-itself-as-a-bloc is equally vulnerable to the economic volatility of our moment. As is always true, some suffer more than others. All of which leaves us to wonder: toward whom will the aggrieved turn their ire now? Now that those who mobilized them as “Aggrieved” are the cause of their vulnerabilities, the economic most of all.
As if Karl Marx is—no matter that ours is a high-tech, post-industrial moment—having a long laugh at their expense: in the first instance, in the final, determining, instance, it is always the economy.
In a word, the aggrieved have been hoisted by their own electoral petard.
They are left ideologically bereft because they are the cause of their own economic suffering. They voted as committed members of Aggrieved Inc. and now they find themselves, perhaps for the first time in two generations, with no one left to blame. Except themselves.
They cannot lay the responsibility for their economic troubles at the feet of the Other.
As gas prices rise, if not daily then certainly every time a new conflagration occurs in the Strait of Hormuz or a Houthi missile strikes the airport in Riyadh, as the price of basic foodstuff increases, the aggrieved are reminded of a new political truth: it is futile to rage against the Other when those who—once again, as is always the case in American politics—activated their aggrievement show themselves indifferent to their suffering. Suffering, economic hardship, the prospect of once again falling down the social pecking order, authored, enacted (with no concern for their economic well-being), and overseen by those who exploited these American constituencies’ sense of being aggrieved. And how desperately they cling to their aggrievement.
“Grievance,” as I write in the 2024 pamphlet, “is more American than apple pie.”
And so is the cynical capacity of those who understand the mobilizing force that is certain Americans’ unjustified sense of having been wronged.
Aggrievement is, then, nothing other than these American constituencies’ appetite for consuming ideologically rancid apple pie. Served, a la mode, with ice-cream that has long since passed its expiry date.