[music]

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. In our spring membership drive trying to reach our goal of 10,000 donors. Thank you for being one if you can. During this drive on this show, we're featuring new books. Some really interesting titles are out recently, some more political, some more personal. We're going to do one of each today, some by famous people, some by authors who are less well known but who we think you'll enjoy listening to or learning from, or interacting with. We're having at least one author on the show each day of the drive, sometimes two. Today it is two. Later in the show, we'll have Dr. Meg Jay. Do you know her, her latest appearance on the show? She specializes in writing about people in their 20s. If you're in your 20s or you have kids or grandkids in their 20s, this is an especially challenging time to be in your 20s. A whole different era now than when we had Dr. Jay on for her earlier book about people in their 20s before the pandemic, actually way before the pandemic. That was 2012.

Meg Jay later in our Brian Lehrer Show spring bookshelf series, we'll take calls for her too. We'll kick it off however here. Frank Bruni has a new book. You may know him as a New York Times opinion columnist or remember his book about President George W. Bush called Ambling into History. Frank has done it all at The Times. He worked in the New York Metro department, worked in the DC Bureau. He was bureau chief in Rome for a while. Some of you may remember when Frank Bruni was the New York Times restaurant critic. All over the map, literally, figuratively, and gastronomically. These days he writes a weekly newsletter for The Times and periodic op-ed essays, and he's a professor of public policy at Duke University. In Frank's new book, he's more of a culture critic. It's called The Age of Grievance. We'll also ask about his recent piece for The Times called Chris Christie and Bill Barr Have Some Explaining to Do. That's even more relevant now that Biden and Trump have agreed to debate on television next month.

Frank, thanks for coming on today. Congratulations on the new book. Welcome back to WNYC.

Frank Bruni: Thank you. It's great to be here.

Brian Lehrer: The Age of Grievance, want to frame your basic thesis?

Frank Bruni: My basic thesis is that we are living in a moment right now in our culture and especially in our politics where people are too quick to take offense. They're too quick to look for signs or evidence that they've been wronged, that they mingle important complaints with illegitimate or overwrought ones, and that this is really getting in our way as we try to address the most important problems in the country and as we try to restore a civic culture that's healthy. In the book, I try to figure out how we got here. I spend a lot of time talking about what I think it's costing us because I think it's costing us a lot. Then, I contemplate how we might pivot to a better place.

Brian Lehrer: What do you mean costing us?

Frank Bruni: Well, our Congress doesn't function in a coherent or timely fashion in part because of the grievances that are pinging in all directions. It's costing us that. It's inhibiting if not absolutely preventing our ability to talk with people who may have differences of opinion from us. That has not only impeded us politically, but it's created a coarseness in our culture that shows up in all sorts of ways. We're living in a scarily angry age. I remember when we talked only of road rage. Now we have air rage, we have retail rage, we have restaurant rage. None of this is good for us as a democracy, and I don't think any of this is good for us individually in terms of our mental health and our contentment.

Brian Lehrer: I do want listeners to know that you acknowledge that grievance isn't always bad. One line in the book that I liked is that you write that grievance has been a precursor to justice and a precursor to enlightenment. As you know, Frank, this country was founded on legitimate grievances against the King of England and that moral grievances have driven some of the most important points of progress in our country's history, equal rights, especially of various kinds. Where for you is the line that defines today's age of grievance as a bad thing rather than a legitimate public response to many objectionable conditions?

Frank Bruni: We do have legitimate causes being pursued and legitimate complaints being made, but let's just look at the word grievance itself because I think it tells the story. You correctly noted that we talked of as grievances many of the things that existed in terms of the founding of this country in the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment. It mentions that citizens should be able to have redress of their grievances. Nowadays, and I think you'll agree with this, when you see the word grievance in a publication, when you hear it in commentary, more often than not, much more often than not, it's used with negative connotations and in a pejorative context. What that tells us and where we are that's dangerous is that we're mingling complaints that aren't urgent, that are overblown with the stuff that really matters. We talked a moment ago about what this is all costing us. Part of what it costs us is when the grievance is important, let's call that a cause, it often is obscured or mingled together with much, much more frivolous stuff.

People can't hear the important stuff in the way they need to. They can't hear the signal for the noise, to lean on that cliche. I think you see things like I read in the book about some of the hot water that Jill Biden has gotten into when she has spoken sloppily in front of a Latino audience, and she was there as an ally. When she spoke sloppily about women's collegiate basketball and people felt that she was being racially insulting, when really she was just misunderstanding the etiquette of the sport. Those are complaints or grievances lodged by grievance entrepreneurs, as I call them in the book, that end up actually getting in the way of the important stuff rather than advancing it.

Brian Lehrer: I saw the review of your book in The Times, which was by a writer who I guess is more conservative than you are, Lionel Shriver, who wrote that he instinctively blames the left for our grievance-saturated culture while you emphatically award the grievance booby prize to the right, is the way he put it. Do you accept this description of where the balance lies for you?

Frank Bruni: No, it's much too reductive. By the way, Lionel's actually a woman, it's she. [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: Oh, sorry about that.

Frank Bruni: No, that's okay. The only reason I said that is because the he almost sounds like you're talking about me. Actually, one of the things I try to do in the book, and it was very tough and it's very tough to talk about it because this is a nuanced thing, and we're not really good at nuance in our culture right now, I try to say very clearly that this habit of taking offense too quickly, of wanting to define yourself by how you've been wronged and who's wronged to you and what you're owed, that exists across the political spectrum, across the ideological spectrum. Lionel Shriver does admit that I say that in the book, but what I also want to say, because I don't want to be accused of facile both sidesism or making false equivalences is at this moment in time, the scarier, more consequential, and more dangerous manifestations of grievance run amok are on the right and not the left. I say that, and Lionel Schreiber's right to say that I say that, because I think you see the preponderance of organized political violence, the paramilitary groups, the plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, January 6th, you see that on the right.

You see a profound and pervasive election denialism on the right that doesn't have an analog or equivalent mirror on the left. I don't think you can both sides this, and I do think that there is an asymmetry, but I also believe that everyone on all points of the political spectrum needs to pause and ask themselves if they're engaging in politics in a constructive way or in a way that itches to take offense and is actually narcissistic.

Brian Lehrer: Your concluding chapter is about an antidote to the age of grievance, in a word, humility. You have categories. Political leaders need humility. Journalists need humility. Activists need humility. How can humility interact with constructive change and progress that comes from the more positive grievances that you acknowledge?

Frank Bruni: Well, I think you make more constructive change and you're more likely to achieve progress if you pursue it in a somewhat humble fashion. What I mean by that is if when you're talking to the people who disagree with you, you're humble enough to acknowledge that they're entitled to their different viewpoints. You're humble enough to acknowledge that, well, you believe fervently that you have the answers, you may not be entirely right, and that there are often shades of gray in a situation. When you're humble enough to ask for something that's truly doable and that would represent meaningful steps in the right direction and not some kind of impossible north star the failure of which to reach is something you're going to use to shame your opponents. I think a lot about the success of the marriage equality movement and how it went more quickly and surpassed the expectations of a lot of the people who were at the forefront of that, a lot of the advocates at the forefront of that.

One of the reasons I think it was so successful is because some of the loudest and most influential voices had humility to them. They didn't say to opponents, "You are horrible, irredeemable bigots, and you should be ashamed of yourself." They said, "Listen to us and understand that we're not trying to explode your tradition. We're actually honoring it by trying to join it. We're not the opposite of you, we're not unlike you, we're not asking you to change everything about you to be like us. We're trying to show you how much we all have in common." There was a humility within that that I think explains much of the movement success.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have some humility demographically about being maybe a financially pretty comfortable, I don't know your finances, but I'm just guessing, maybe a financially fairly comfortable white male having a grievance about grievance? Some people might say the tone police when we see that 60 years after the Civil Rights Act got passed, for example, there's still so much racial inequality in particular in America when we look at who's in poverty, who's dying in maternal mortality, and the many measures that could lead people to feel really frustrated and aggrieved. Sometimes the word these days is exhausted, from fighting so hard for so long for equality plus for other marginalized groups when maybe you don't have as much of the same personal experience of marginalization.

Frank Bruni: Oh, of course, I have to have humility about that, and I work toward that. I hope I'm achieving it, but I would say humbly and truthfully, I don't know, I probably need to work even harder at it. Your points are excellent ones, and one of the things that's important to me and one of the reasons I wrote the book is when you are talking about stuff like disparate maternal mortality rates, when you're talking about diminished social mobility, which is a big and hugely troubling reality in this country. I want us to be able to have conversations about that that people really hear, and I want us to be able to do that by eliminating all of the noise that is not as important and that obscures that more important stuff. I also want to say one thing, though, we're all complicated, so you correctly noted, and it's important to note that I'm a white man, that I am someone who has a degree of economic affluence, and all those things.

I'm also a gay man who was born in 1964 and grew up at a time when I and most people like me were pretty justly terrified about what our experience in the world would be.

In that sense, I do have some familiarity, not enough, but I have some familiarity with the threat and the feeling and the worry of marginalization. I'm someone who had a stroke five years ago, lost vision in his right eye, and lives with a 20% chance of going blind and doesn't read as well as he used to, and makes typos when he writes that he never made before. I am in a very minor way, disabled. I worry about us tucking everyone into categories and saying, you can't know certain things the way another person can because you're an X category because a lot of us are complicated in ways that are not obvious to the naked eye.

Brian Lehrer: Frank Bruni, his new book is The Age of Grievance. Off the book, Frank, and on your Times newsletter piece for a couple minutes before we end, piece is called Chris Christie and Bill Barr have some explaining to do. This is about denouncing Trump, but not supporting Biden?

Frank Bruni: Absolutely. If you look at what they have said about Trump, Bill Barr has basically said this person-- He's basically acknowledged that Trump was trying to steal an election. He said at one point, I believe the words are, they're in my piece, he doesn't belong anywhere near the Oval Office. Now Bill Barr is saying that he will vote for Donald Trump. Now, Chris Christie has not said he will vote for Donald Trump, but he spent months and months trying to get the Republican presidential nomination and portraying Trump in the truest and starkest and worst terms, which were the right terms, and pretty much mocking his Republican opponents in that contest for not talking the truth about Trump. Now Christie's saying he can't bring himself to vote for either Biden or Trump, and the way he says that renders those two figures equivalent. If he believes as strongly as he says he does that Trump should not be our president, it's a binary choice.

To sit the election out is to do Trump a favor. To vote for Biden, even if Biden wouldn't be your first choice, is the mature way to recognize that that's how you keep Trump away from the Oval Office. That's why Christie and Barr both have some explaining to do, and they're not alone. Mitch McConnell is with them. The governor of New Hampshire is with them.

Brian Lehrer: Finally, we now know Biden and Trump will debate next month on CNN. Any thoughts about how that can be most useful for the American people, maybe even in the context of your book, but I've seen speculation already that it could be CNN's most watch program ever, or any advice for your guy since you're acknowledging here that you have a dog in that fight?

Frank Bruni: I absolutely have a dog in that fight. I think Joe Biden needs to be reelected. I think Donald Trump is a danger to this country and has no business being president for another term. I think Joe Biden needs to go in there and not let himself be baited. I think he needs to show the American people that among the many fundamental contrasts here, you have one candidate, Joe Biden, who genuinely loves this country, you have another, Donald Trump, who only genuinely loves himself.

You have one candidate, Joe Biden, who may not be in peak physical form at his age but who is basically a reasonable and steady human being, and you have another who recently went into a long digression on the stump about what a great person the fictional character and serial killer Hannibal Lecter is. I think Joe Biden needs to be calm. He needs to be steady. He needs not to be baited or provoked and show the American people that exact contrast.

Brian Lehrer: Frank Bruni, long with the New York Times, now also with Duke University, and the author of the new book, The Age of Grievance. Frank, thank you for sharing that and your thoughts on your latest newsletter with us.

Frank Bruni: Thank you so much.

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.