This is a riff on an Aeon article by Paul Katsafanas.
In Clint Eastwood’s 1976 Civil War-era western Outlaw Josie Wales, the Redleg Terrill character declares that after he’d caught up with Wales, he’d head down to Texas, where there would be even more “sesesh” for him to kill. His war of vengeance would see no end as long as he lived.
Some people seem driven more by what they oppose, reject, and hate than by what they promote, affirm, and revere. Their political commitments, personal identities, and emotional lives appear to be structured more by opposition, resentment, and hos-tility than by a positive set of ideals or aspirations. Former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson has no shortage of enemies. On his shows, he has condemned gender-neutral pronouns, immigrants, the removal of Confederate statues, mainstream media, the FBI and CIA, globalism, paper straws, big tech, foreign aid, school curricula, fem-inism, gingerbread people, modern art—all, according to Carlson, an existential threat or a sign of cultural decay. Even when conservatives controlled the White House and the US Senate, he presented himself as under siege. Victories never brought relief, only more enemies, more outrage, more reasons to stay aggrieved.
In April 2025, Donald Trump took the stage to mark the 100th day of his second term as president. You might have expected a moment of triumph, having reclaimed the presidency, consolidated power within the Republican Party, and issued a vast range of executive orders. But the mood wasn’t celebratory; it was combative. Trump spent most of his time attacking his predecessor, Joe Biden, repeating claims about the 2020 election, denouncing the press, and warning of threats posed by immigrants, radical “Left” lunatics, and corrupt elites. The tone was familiar: angry, aggrieved, un-relenting. Even in victory, his focus was on enemies and retribution.
This dynamic isn’t unique to the United States.
Leaders like Narendra Modi in India, Viktor Orban in Hungary and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil built movements that thrive on perpetual grievance. Even after consolidating power, they continue to cast their nations as under siege—from immigrants, intel-lectuals, journalists, or cultural elites. The rhetoric remains combative; the mood aggrieved. They find another grievance when one is no more. After defeating one enemy, they seek more.
Some people don’t pivot from grievance to resolution. Victory doesn’t bring peace, grace, or reconciliation. Instead, these people continue their opposition because their energy, their meaning, even their identity, seem to depend on having an endless list of enemies to fight. Certain individuals, groups, and movements seem geared toward per-petual opposition, and they’re not all just politicians: some lead religious and civil-rights organizations like political/radical Islam or the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Today’s Nazis, socialists, “anti-fascists,” and communists preach grievance politics; Hitler, Marx, and Engles certainly did.
What explains this perpetual need for enemies?
Some people and organizations adopt this stance tactically: they recognize that oppo-sition and condemnation can attract a large following, so they produce outrage or encourage grievance as a way of generating attention. Maybe it’s all an act: what they really want, what they really care about, is maximizing the number of followers, building brands, getting donations, clicks and likes, or getting elected. But even if some adopt this stance, their followers appear genuinely gripped by anger and con-demnation.
Many have noticed this pattern of endless denunciation and grievance.
A recent study stated the obvious: “grievance politics revolves around the fueling, funneling, and flaming of negative emotions such as fear or anger.” What makes this opposition attractive? Some movements face a vast set of obstacles and opponents. The protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and ’70s had an obvious goal: ending US involvement in Vietnam. It lasted for more than a decade and unfolded across multiple fronts, which ranged from marches to acts of civil disobedience to teach-ins to draft resistance. Participants faced jail time, government surveillance, public backlash, and even violence. The targets of opposition shifted from the John-son administration to Richard Nixon to Gerald Ford. The tactics strengthened from letter-writing campaigns to draft-card burnings, mass marches, lobbying by wounded veterans, and testimony from grieving families. For decades, anti-apartheid activists fought to dismantle a specific political system in South Africa. Activists tethered great sacrifice and long-term opposition to a definite goal. Both aimed at concrete goals; the opposition was a necessary means to an end. The focus remained on the goals, rather than on sustaining conflicts for their own sake. Once activists achieved their goals, the movements dissolved, the purpose of their antagonism fulfilled. The Vietnam War protests and the anti-apartheid movements both involved forms of oppo-sition and grievance, but their antagonism was in the service of positive goals. Movements led by Carlson, Trump, and their ilk seem to depend on opposition itself for energy, coherence, and sense of identity. Grievance animates their followers; hostility to enemies becomes central to how they think, feel, and see themselves.
Without enemies, the movements unravel.
Hostility, anger, and opposition don’t make a movement problematic. They can be signs of moral concern, legitimate reactions to the fact that something precious is being threatened. In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. claimed that “the supreme task is to organize and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force.” But there’s a difference between opposition that aims to realize a shared good and oppo-sition pursued for its own sake.
Some movements use opposition to a constructive end. Others make opposition itself the point.
Some movements treat opposition as a positive end, a way of building something better, like the end of a war or a well-defined and unjust social system. Others are just hostility without specific goals. Grievance politics has a constitutively negative orientation, setting it apart from liberatory movements, struggles to realize ideals, or efforts to defend cherished values. If you value something, threats to it disturb you. You will notice people who might undermine it, and you might defend it, which is part of what it is to value anything at all. But constitutively negative orientations are different. Values are just pretexts for expressing hostility. Some people require a new target and justification for their hostility once they knock out the last target.
The driving need of grievance politics is not to protect or preserve, but to oppose.
These orientations transform inward pain into outward hostility, offering a feeling of elevated worth and transforming powerlessness into righteousness while providing a sense of identity, community, and purpose. There’s a difference between emotions and emotional mechanisms. Emotions like anger, hatred, sadness, love, and fear are familiar, but emotional mechanisms are psychological processes that transform one emotional state into another, with one set of emotions as input and producing another set of emotions as output.
It’s hard to keep wanting something you know you can’t have.
If you desperately want something and can’t get it, you may experience frustration, unease, perhaps envy; you may even feel like a failure. There’s psychological pressure to transform frustration and envy into dismissal and rejection. The teenager who can’t make it onto the team convinces himself that athletes are just dumb jocks. Or, you’re filled with envy when you scroll through photos of exotic vacations and gleaming houses, but you reassure yourself that only superficial people want these things; your humble home is all that you really want. There’s a similar mechanism that transforms humiliation and low self-worth into a form of spiteful hatred. Philosophers call this ressentiment: a French word for resentment, but with a twist. Ressentiment transmutes pain, powerlessness, and humiliation into condemnation.
[M]orality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)
Ressentiment is an emotional mechanism that transforms feelings of worthlessness or humiliation into vindictive feelings of superiority, rancor, and blame, and helps ex-plain why some politicians and their activist fellow-travelers need hate in their lives: they have nothing else.
Picture two young people.
A young woman in a small town dreams of escape, fantasizing about the vibrant lives she sees portrayed in cities, lives full of culture, opportunity, wealth, and success. As the years go on, the dream seems unattainable. Jobs are scarce, advancement elusive, and nothing in her life resembles what she once imagined. Frustrated and unhappy, she feels like a failure in life. Then on some social media she encounters grievance-filled populist rhetoric. They tell her the people she once admired and envied—the people she now identifies as the urban elite—are selfish, out of touch, morally corrupt, hostile to her way of life and the causes of her suffering. Injustice now replaces what once seemed like an image of the good life. Rather than focusing on specific policy proposals for correcting structural economic injustices, she becomes energized by condemnation and hostility.
Now, see a lonely boy who watches others form friendships, build relationships, and move easily through social spaces, while he remains on the margins. He feels isolated, sad, and alone. One day he stumbles into a corner of the internet that offers an explanation: the problem isn’t him; it’s the world. Reading incel (involuntary celibate; almost always single men) websites, he comes to believe that feminism, social norms, and cultural hypocrisy have made genuine connection impossible for someone like him. In time, he internalizes this story. His disappointment becomes a source of pride, a mark of insight. His sadness transforms into anger. He has enemies to rail against and grievances to avenge.
The young woman imagines structural injustice; the young man finds an ideology that invents a grievance.
Beyond this difference, there’s a similar emotional arc. A person starts out with a positive vision of the good. Their lives are full of hardship, disappointment, and despair. Initially, they might blame themselves, and that’s painful. It’s hard to sit in one’s own pain, feeling responsible for it, feeling like a failure. It’s especially hard when you see other people enjoying the life that you wish you had. In time, the person encounters narratives that redirect the blame. Their unhappiness isn’t their own fault; it’s the fault of someone else. They are being treated unfairly, unjustly; they are being attacked, oppressed, or undermined. This kind of story offers release from feelings of diminished self-worth; a way to deflect pain, assign blame, and recast oneself as a victim. It also offers a community of like-minded people to reinforce this story. What emerges is a kind of negative solidarity: bound through animosity, they attack or dis-parage an outgroup. The individual now belongs to a group that shares outrage and enemies.
Their new friends organize life’s chaos and turmoil into a clear narrative of righteousness by opposing the enemy, which makes them good.
Opposition can bind. Communities forge unity through a common enemy (or interest), channeling their fears and frustrations onto scapegoats. This shared act of con-demnation offers not just relief but belonging. Grievance politics doesn’t just vent rage; it weaves pain into a story. It offers a script in which hardship becomes in-justice, and outrage becomes identity.
These patterns aren’t just speculative.
Scholars have tracked how pain, disappointment, and a sense of failure transform into grievance; how personal frustration turns into political identity. Researchers across psychology, sociology, and philosophy extensively examine how diminished self-worth can become anger, blame, and opposition directed outward. Movements that form and sustain themselves in this manner don’t organize around a shared vision of the good, but by shared animosity. Opposition builds the structure that forms meaning, co-herence, and solidarity. Often, these narratives begin with actual problems and legitimate grievances. The most effective narratives are superficially plausible, but they tend to be exaggerated and simplistic. While economic opportunities may be scarce and financial security precarious, the ressentiment narrative blames and fosters hostility, simplifying who is responsible and what actions to take.
Ressentiment transforms genuine frustration into wholesale animosity.
Constitutively negative/grievance movements define themselves by outside rejection. Unlike contingently negative movements built around pursuing goals worth realizing, grievance movements draw their energy from resistance, antagonism, and negation. Their integrity depends on the persistence of something to oppose. The result is a kind of political metabolism that requires enemies to function and, ultimately, wind-mills to tilt at.
If the enemy disappears, the orientation loses its shape.
This is not simply a matter of having enemies, common to many political movements. Nor is it a criticism of all forms of opposition; many just causes require resistance and a focus on enemies. For grievance movements, opposition isn’t a means to an end; it is the end itself. Resolution becomes a threat rather than a goal, for resolution would rob the movement of the very antagonism that gives it purpose. The Carlson monologues and Trump rallies are sustaining a structure of belonging built around the rhetoric of attack. They live through negation. Those whom Trump supporters claim have Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) also live through negation, just as many of those who blindly support the most radical points of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) “movement” need enemies to rail against to give their lives meaning. Neither “left” nor “right” has a monopoly on grievance politics.
In the traditional picture, grievance begins with ideals.
Grievance politics begins not with ideals, but with unease, with feelings of power-lessness, failure, humiliation or inadequacy. Political and ethical rhetoric transforms these self-directed negative emotions into hostility, rage, and blame. Negative emo-tions that would otherwise remain internal find a new outlet, latching on to ever-new enemies and grievances. The vision that redirects these emotions will cite particular values and goals, but the content of those values and goals doesn’t matter all that much. The values and goals justify the hostility. If the world changes, values and ideals can shift, but the emotional need remains constant: to find someone or some-thing to oppose. That’s why traditional modes of engagement with grievance politics always backfire. People often ask, why not just give them some of what they want? Why not compromise, appease, or meet them halfway? Surely, if you satisfy the grievance, the hostility will subside?
As one demand gets fulfilled, another one arises.
The particular goals and demands are just vehicles for expressing opposition. What’s really being sustained is the emotional orientation: the need for enemies. Under-standing grievance politics as a stance that draws its energy and coherence from oppo-sition itself changes how we respond. Fact-checking, appeasement, and policy con-cessions treat symptoms, not causes. When opposition itself is the source of emotion-al resolution and identity, the smallest concession does not vindicate, but drains the movement’s animating force. Working against grievance politics is an endless game of whack-a-mole that just wears out those opposing them.
The point is not to win; the point is to keep fighting and condemning.
Seeing the dynamic in this way also clarifies what real resistance would require. The aim isn’t just to rebut false claims, to condemn hostility, or to attempt appeasement. The solution is to redirect the energies that grievance politics mobilizes. To do so, we need alternative forms of meaning, identity, and belonging, which satisfy those needs in a way that doesn’t depend on hostile antagonism. We need an orientation that is grounded not in grievance, but in affirmation. One that draws strength not from hostility, but from commitment to something worth loving, revering, or cherishing. What we need are narratives that can sustain devotion—attachment that combines love or reverence with commitment and a willingness to endure. It orients a person toward something they regard as intrinsically worthwhile: something that gives shape to a life, even in the face of difficulty or doubt. Like constitutively negative orient-ations, devotion can provide identity, purpose, and belonging without requiring enemies. Its energy comes not from opposition, but from fidelity to a value that’s seen as worthy of ongoing care. Thomas Aquinas observed that “the direct and principal effect of devotion is the spiritual joy of the mind.” Devotion is a steadfast respons-iveness to what we cherish, capable of bringing deep, serene fulfillment without requiring an enemy. Offering devotion as an alternative to grievance politics does not mean dismissing all grievances. Anger, complaints, and critique are vital political tools, but grievance politics has no desire to repair or transform, only to oppose.
Perpetual grievance becomes the whole point; opposition displaces aspiration.
Our politicians and politicians-by-another-name—activists—need to stop making up enemies. Those engaged in grievance politics need to see that their lives are based a-round perpetual opposition, and, like sharks doomed to swim all their lives, they must hate something all their lives. Building identity through antagonism dooms that identity to perpetual conflict; it can neither stop nor rest but must fight to the death—theirs, because there’s always another enemy. The deeper challenge isn’t to rebut the claims or counter the policies because that’s just what grievance politics wants. It’s in providing a community that can sustain identity, meaning, and solidarity without re-quiring an endless sea of enemies.
At the end of Outlaw Josie Wales, the character Fletch tells a wounded Wales—who had just killed Terrill—that the war was over, whereupon Wales says he was tired of the killing and rides away. Terrill couldn’t give up; Wales could.
Grievance politics can only end with the destruction of those aggrieved.
Why The Samurai Lost Japan: A Study Of Miscalculation and Folly
WWII was the ultimate result of grievance politics in Europe and Asia. In a broad sense, the militarists/samurai of Japan before 1945 bore a grudge against the modern world that no longer needed swaggering swordsmen with their do-or-die ethics. The Nazis over in Germany were no better; in fact, not a lot different.
And Finally...
On 17 October:
1091: The first recorded tornado in the British Isles hits London, England. Although one of the strongest ever to hit Britain at F4 on the modern Fujita scale (based on accounts written 30 years later), the twister was said to have killed only two people, of a population of 18,000, but destroyed 600 houses.
1943: The Burma Railway is completed between Ban Pong, Thailand, and Than-byuzayat, Burma. Also called the Death Railway for the 12,000+ deaths of prisoners of war during the construction, the 1954 film Bridge on the River Kwai is a highly fiction-alized story based on a novel by Pierre Boulle, who also wrote Monkey Planet that be-came Planet of the Apes.
And today is BLACK POETRY DAY, commemorating the birth of Jupiter Hammon, the first published African-American, on this day in 1711 in Lloyd Harbor, New York. Hammon’s first published poem, “An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ, with Penitential Cries,” appeared in 1761.