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By Bob Rakoff
Nothing could be more American than the politics of grievance. Just think of the Declaration of Independence! A laundry list of grievances against the British king and his minions. Enough grievances to start a war.
More recently we have Donald Trump, who built a presidential campaign and administration on little more than the harnessing of grievances against foreigners, people of color, liberals, coastal elites, women . . . you know the drill. His rhetoric combines the evocation of a lost Golden Age with a commitment to avenge the disrespect he, and his followers, have suffered. Vicious attacks against his enemies are central to his appeal. Trump revived and legitimated the politics of grievance, and our politics will never be the same.
And this election season, the politics of grievance is coloring the discourse among candidates for the Amherst Town Council. Candidates for the Council, especially for the hotly contested at-large seats, are offering two competing narratives of what’s at stake in the election.
On the one hand, the two incumbents are defending their efforts over the past three years and describing in some detail the projects and policies that they hope to continue working on, building for the future. Their language is practical, technical, all about the details of capital budgets, zoning changes, planning processes. This is a typical strategy for incumbents.
Some challengers, on the other hand, speak the language of grievance. They speak of being disrespected, forgotten, dismissed, in large part because of racism. While they state their opposition to the projects and policies of the current Council – especially the library expansion – their focus is less on specific policies than on their lived experience of disrespect and marginalization. This is an important message for all voters to hear.
For some of the challengers, however, this central focus seems to demand and justify harsh language and personal attacks. A strong current of revenge has crept into the challengers’ campaign discourse, amplified by the reliance on social media in this virtual campaign. As with Trump, it’s easy to attack and demean your opponents on Twitter or Facebook since you never have to meet them face-to-face. In this atmosphere, it’s no surprise that someone has been circulating anonymous flyers attacking the incumbents as being “in the pocket of developers” and that old allies have been publicly shunned.
This is a sorry turn in Amherst politics. The powerful language of grievance has become abusive. When personal grudges dominate campaign discourse, we all suffer. It hurts to be attacked personally and publicly. Nobody witnessing such attacks wants to be the next target. The fear of retaliation isolates the target of attacks and intimidates others from responding. And it’s very bad for democratic participation: the more it happens, the less inclined new people are to engage in civic matters at all. “Why don’t more people serve on boards, run for office or just let their voice be heard?” This is a big reason. Why would people risk being subjected to this kind of vicious treatment? I know that I have stayed out of local government for over 25 years now because the culture of nastiness and pettiness makes it not worth the effort.
Look, I know politics can be rough. And I know that there are sharp divisions in town. But local governance depends on collaborating with folks you disagree with, finding compromises when possible, moving on to new issues whether you’ve won or lost. The more we let a politics of vengeance shape our public life, the closer we will get to the day when Trump comes to town.
THE AMHERST CURRENT 
Thanks for your sharp analysis, Bob. Grievance politics, on the right and left, gets so ugly (and in disturbingly similar ways) because it is primarily driven by what the philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche called “ressentiment.” What starts as indignant, moralistic condemnation too often devolves into free-floating vengeful resentment against any and all perceived perpetrators (Stanford Enc. of Phil.). Whether it be MAGA types on the national stage or some self-proclaimed “social justice” advocates here in our small town, when ressentiment becomes the motivating factor, nothing good ever happens.
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I think this post is also throwing gas on the fire and is simply more airing of grievances. Please go and talk to the people who you feel are attacking to hear their point of view- maybe you could change things instead of complaining.
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I wasn’t MIA for the years that Mr. Weiss is talking about, but it does seem as though nuanced views of things have been banished from our politics. By the end, I’m quite sure that we didn’t have the kind of discourse and civility that both I and Mr. Weiss wanted for Town Meeting. I thought it had evolved beyond repair, and I pointed to the kind of cliques within the membership that Email and the internet inevitably seems to spawn. Mr. Weiss, on the other hand, argued hard that we were throwing the baby out with the bathwater in getting rid of it, even as he and I lost the argument about the elementary school plan (and Mr. Weiss worked hard on that issue). Now I do believe that Mr. Rakoff’s column points implicitly to something that we sacrificed with the end of Town Meeting, although the cause and effect remains a bit murky: a genuine public square in which townspeople could be together, look at each other, find new leaders for higher office, and maybe, just maybe, look up from our phones long enough to mediate differences. That public space doesn’t exist any more, and now we coincidentally seem to be in a downward spiral into perpetual grievance, without any place to speak to each other, figure out what we disagree about, and attempt to narrow the areas of difference. And….I’m convinced that we have political, and allegedly journalistic actors in town who thrive on conflict, who wouldn’t know what to do without it, who do not want to engage the full spectrum of opinion in town, who do not want to describe fairly and accurately each other’s competing visions for the town. Did I want to see the end of Town Meeting? Yes, I did, but I always took Mr. Weiss’s warnings about its end seriously. Now, we seem to be stuck: unable to pivot into any issues not susceptible to the usual tribal divide. I would suggest one, about which no one seems to be particularly comfortable these days: is our Town Manager truly accountable to the people of the Town? I have severe doubts that we have any effective oversight over the day-to-day workings of town government. Perhaps we could…..some day…..get together on that.
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Thumbs up to your reply Mr. Morse.
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Thanks to Mr. Rakoff for his amusing missive of his grievances toward the challengers. Clearly, he was MIA all the years that grievances against Town Meeting were the politics of the day, for years, I might add.
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Bob, thank you for shedding light on grievance politics and illustrating it with the trend in Amherst politics. I have only been here for less than 10 years but I noticed this immediately re: town politics, albeit via the town meeting model.
Couple this with the “no one tells US what to do in Amherst, including elected officials” history, and you have the low civic participation you mentioned.
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