podcast
The Axe Files with David Axelrod
David Axelrod, the founder and director of the University of Chicago Institute of Politics, and CNN bring you The Axe Files, a series of revealing interviews with key figures in the political world. Go beyond the soundbites and get to know some of the most interesting players in politics.
Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni
The Axe Files with David Axelrod
May 2, 2024
“Measuring misfortune is no strategy for living,” writes journalist Frank Bruni in his new book, “The Age of Grievance.” Yet, he says, we live in a culture obsessed with feeling victimized, searching for every micro-aggression, and leaning in to personal grievance as a sort of social currency. Frank joined David to talk about his book, the civic challenges posed by grievance, why Ron DeSantis is the most emblematic politician of our era, the need for political reform, protests on college campuses, and how to approach others with more grace and less judgement.
Episode Transcript
Intro
00:00:05
And now from the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago and CNN Audio, The Axe Files, with your host, David Axelrod.
David Axelrod
00:00:16
'The last time journalist, author and Duke University professor Frank Bruni visited, we spoke about a wrenching trauma in his own life, the loss of sight. He returns to talk about our country's current self-inflicted trauma, the topic of his latest book called "The Age of Grievance." We spoke about the shredding of the American community in this era of social media, political polarization and rapid change, and how we begin to repair it. Our conversation was recorded before a live audience at the Institute of Politics, and here it is. Frank Bruni. Good to see you, my friend.
Frank Bruni
00:00:54
It's really good to see you.
David Axelrod
00:00:54
It's been a while. I the last time we got together on one of these podcasts, you had been through trauma in your life, and you wrote about it. You lost your sight in one eye. And the very rare eye stroke, and you, and the other eye was in jeopardy. I only raise this not to revisit old territory, but first of all, I ask, how are you doing? You quit your job at the Times, or at least as a full time columnist. You're still writing. And you went down to Duke to teach. I mean, how's life?
Frank Bruni
00:01:34
Life is good. Thank you for asking. My vision has been stable. It's funny. I mean, I still struggle. Just this morning, I think, because I slept badly last night. I was trying to do some reading, and things were getting sort of swimmy and wobbly, but I kind of know how to take a break and forge on. And I'm, I'm lucky. Things are good.
David Axelrod
00:01:51
Good. You know, I, this it leads into the discussion that I want to have, because you write a little bit about this in your in your new book, "The Age of Grievance." And, there was a line in there that, really resonated with me, which was, "measuring misfortune is no strategy for life."
Frank Bruni
00:02:12
Right.
David Axelrod
00:02:14
And you talk about the fact that your first, the first impulse is to be angry.
Frank Bruni
00:02:20
Yeah.
David Axelrod
00:02:20
About what's happened to you. Talk about that and how that impacted on you, and how that in some ways inspired you to write this book?
Frank Bruni
00:02:29
'Yeah, the analogy isn't perfect, but one of the essential parts of my journey after I had my stroke, I was told that I would live forevermore with a 20% chance of going blind. Which I guess is the case even as we sit here now. One of the tough things was not to feel angry, like that question why me? One of the tough things was not to kind of just descend into self-pity. And after I got through that, as I continued to do the sort of political analysis and commentary I do, and I began, you know, looking at the country through, I guess, literally a different set of eyes, I realized that we have a civic challenge that sort of parallels that personal challenge. I see way too many of us, and I'd be curious to know if this resonates for you, who, our political discussions begin with how I've been wronged and what I'm owed. They proceed from a place of kind of anger and self-pity and recrimination. And while in many cases.
David Axelrod
00:03:28
That's weird, I never see that.
Frank Bruni
00:03:29
Yeah. You know. You must be living in some mythical Scandinavian country. But, I mean.
David Axelrod
00:03:37
They got their own issues.
Frank Bruni
00:03:38
Yeah. That's true. But. So maybe I was uniquely sensitive to it. Also, I was kind of living, as we all are in, the Trump era. I mean, you know, I've never, I think, encountered a grievance politician of that intensity. I don't think we've ever had a grievance presidency to rival his. And that, I think, has been an accelerant of this corrosive culture of ours. But I think it's also a reflection of it. I think he was elected because at this moment in time, he embodied and he communicated a kind of fury that was pervasive in America.
David Axelrod
00:04:14
And he kind of has a feral genius for finding that those seams of resentment and so on. But in some ways, Frank, I mean, and, you devote a chapter to social media. But I think we're kind of living in a social media world. And I don't mean just because people are on social media, but the foundational principle of social media as a profit center is sort of at the core of all of this. And you write about that. Talk about that.
Frank Bruni
00:04:46
Yeah. I mean, there's all sorts of science and studies that show that nothing, nothing goes viral on social media, nothing gets clicks, nothing gets shares like something that is an expression of pure anger. And so we have this platform, this this whatever you want to call social media, that encourages us to be angry, that rewards us when we're angry, incentivizes it. And I think that has that has done enormous, enormous damage. Social media, I think, is doing damage in more ways than we typically even realize. So there's a lot of talk about the algorithms. Absolutely true. Absolutely a big concern.
David Axelrod
00:05:20
Well, those algorithms are what shove us into our silos. They they know more about us than we know. It's the marriage of social media and big data that is so insidious. They know more about us than we do, and they know what antagonizes us, which causes us to be fearful, resentful. And they organize what we see accordingly.
Frank Bruni
00:05:41
Correct. Correct. They they encourage us to be more separate and not to see common ground. You know, you go to social media, you see your viewpoint validated. You then kind of marinate in it even more than you were, and you, and you cease to hear any dissenting voices or to believe them. But I think social media also asks you to engage in everything at the hottest temperature possible. That's a whole other problem. And I think we give that too little, too little recognition.
David Axelrod
00:06:07
What do you mean by that?
Frank Bruni
00:06:07
'It's the anger thing, right? If I go on social media and I say, boy, you know, I'm reading about and watching what's going on on the Columbia campus and on other campuses. And, you know, this is really tough stuff, because free speech is very important. Anti-Semitism is unacceptable. Like wading through all this, making sure we're protecting everybody's liberties, making sure we're, like, being true to all of our principles that sometimes seem to be in tension. This is tough to deal with. I'm really trying to. No one's going to share that.
David Axelrod
00:06:37
Yeah.
Frank Bruni
00:06:37
'They're gone. They're going, they're going to share look at those horrible anti-Semites, or they're going to share look at these people trampling on students rights, rights and telling us we don't have free speech. That's what they're going to share.
David Axelrod
00:06:47
Yeah. Nobody refers to social media as the home of nuance. It's not it's not hospitable to that. But I guess what I've come to the conclusion, in thinking of in thinking about all of this, and your book underscores this. Politics is now organized by some of the same principles. You know, I say this often, but why is Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has zero caloric content, why is she the one of the great fundraisers in the Republican Party? Because she is the sort of personification of the social media sort of she approach. She.
Frank Bruni
00:07:33
She hates the people you hate even better than you hate them, right? And we have more and more politicians saying, vote for me because I hate the people you hate as well as anybody else. I'm going to torment them better than anybody else. Look at, I mean, I think.
David Axelrod
00:07:50
Did you see her, by the way, on the steps, I'm sorry to interrupt you.
Frank Bruni
00:07:51
I try not to see her.
David Axelrod
00:07:53
She it's. Well, she's hard to avoid.
Frank Bruni
00:07:55
I really do try not to see her.
David Axelrod
00:07:56
The.
Frank Bruni
00:07:58
I value this thing called contentment.
David Axelrod
00:08:01
How do you do that? I want to know. We'll have to talk about that at the end. But, no, after the vote this weekend on Saturday when she got beaten back by Speaker Johnson on the funding for Ukraine in particular, you know, she was fulminating on the steps of the Capitol. And one of the things that she said was, you know, he's he's he's a lame duck. He's not going to be speaker again. And she said, he can't even raise money. And I thought that was a really revealing comment.
Frank Bruni
00:08:36
It's a real compliment to him. Yeah.
David Axelrod
00:08:36
Yes. I mean, but, really what she was saying is, you know, if you cooperate with the other side, if you try and find middle ground, you can't raise any money. And I thought, I don't know that she meant it to be this sort of enlightening comment, but I found it to be a real insight into the sort of psychology of all of this.
Frank Bruni
00:08:57
I no, absolutely. I mean, I was thinking, and I write about this in the book, we talk a lot about Trump. And Ron DeSantis ultimately wasn't successful in what he most wanted, which was the Republican presidential nomination and, and and after that, the presidency. In some ways, to me, he's the most emblematic politician of our area. If you think about what he claims as his distinctions as governor of Florida, he talks about all the people to whom he's delivered a comeuppance. He has this enemies list, and he works his way through it. Disney, the prosecutor in Tampa who dared to speak up for abortion rights, and on and on. It's like this tote board that he's, like, crossing off. Like I got that enemy, got that enemy, got the next enemy. In what? When did we when do we become a country in which a successful politician's signature phrase, which is his, is Florida is where woke goes to die? The fact that the phrase death, I mean that the word, a variation of the word death.
David Axelrod
00:09:52
Well, he always used those. He talks about slitting the throats of bureaucrats.
Frank Bruni
00:09:54
I'm going to start slitting throats on day one when I get into office. Great! Let me cast a vote for you. I can't wait for the blood.
David Axelrod
00:10:02
'But some people did, of course. And what he was trying to do was out-Trump Trump, right. Which is, turns out is impossible to do. But, but it isn't. You know, I want to point out that in this book, a lot of the examples you choose are not just about right-wing politicians and commentators. You have a lot to say about the intolerance on the left, as well.
Frank Bruni
00:10:29
Yes. I don't think. It's a really tough thing to write and talk about, because I don't want to, I don't want to get into false equivalencies, and I don't think I commit them in the book. And I don't think when we're talking about grievance and recrimination and vengefulness and all that sort of stuff, I don't think the dangers are the same on the right and the left, or at least I don't think right now each side poses the same sort of risk. January 6th was an act of the right. Organized political violence in this country is predominantly, overwhelmingly on the far right. Election denialism, it's much more prevalent, and we've seen the examples of it on the right. That said, this sort of dynamic where you enter the political arena with a sense that you want to, with a sense that it's us versus them, they're evil and I'm virtuous. This is a kind of Manichean battle. I have been uniquely wronged, and I need recompense and redress for that. That kind of thinking exists across the political spectrum.
David Axelrod
00:11:27
Well, and in fact you write, and I think you write that, you know, Trump, that's also accelerated that, because there was such a reaction to him. And in so many ways, I think that exacerbated things, because people said, first of all, they were horrified by him on the left. But also, if he's playing by those rules, we're going to play by by those rules, and you get this mad spiral. But I have, you know, a lot of progressive friends. I think they would claim me.
Frank Bruni
00:11:56
They would claim you?
David Axelrod
00:11:57
They would claim me. Yes. I've been guilty of nuance from time to time myself.
Frank Bruni
00:12:02
You got to work. You got to work on that.
David Axelrod
00:12:04
But. But you know, they are so reflexive in their judgments about everyone who voted for Donald Trump, everyone who lives in rural America. I have a place in rural Michigan, and I have a lot of neighbors who I who I really appreciate as people. Some of them voted for Barack Obama, then voted for Donald Trump. But they're good people. And, we relate as human beings to each other. But to my, some of my friends who never venture out of the border of the metropolitan area, they are caricatures, and that and it's very insidious and very dangerous, because we're we're the American community is being sundered.
Frank Bruni
00:12:50
'We're great at casting judgment, and we're really bad about giving people kind of some time, and having some--.
David Axelrod
00:12:56
Grace.
Frank Bruni
00:12:56
'Faith in people coming along. Well, I mean, go back. Let's talk about someone who whom you worked for with, whose political career you helped make happen, which is President Obama, right? It wasn't until he was running for reelection, what was that 2012, that he did publicly what everybody knew was the private case, and he came out in support of marriage equality, right? It wasn't. People forget this. It wasn't until early 2013 that Hillary Clinton went on the record in support of marriage equality. And yet, by 2014, if you listen to the kind of progressive Democratic conversation, some 68-year-old woman in Alabama who wasn't yet on the train was a deplorable. She was an irredeemable bigot. She's only one year behind Hillary Clinton, right? I mean, we don't there's no grace anymore. There's no allowance for where people have come from, what it might take for them to get to a different place. And the problem with that is, is.
David Axelrod
00:13:50
Both ways.
Frank Bruni
00:13:51
'Yeah. And the problem is that is when you cast those judgments, when you vilify and damn people before you give them a chance, you've guaranteed they're never going to get where you want them to go. You're undermining your actual goal when you make it an all-or-nothing, black-and-white thing in real time.
David Axelrod
00:14:06
One of the things that I learned doing this podcast is how how surprising people can be if you're just willing to listen. And I had Ken Buck last week on my podcast, who was the congressman from Colorado who quit and who is, you know, I mean, there are a million things that I think are completely nuts that, you know, from my point of view on a policy matter. But. And he was very much a Freedom Caucus guy. Ran afoul of them because he, he, certified the election and stood up for the election. But he also was a guy who was willing to work with Democrats on policy issues. Big, for example, on antitrust around Big Tech. You know, the person who told me I should talk to him was Amy Klobuchar. But that's more, that's rarer and rarer, because there are political penalties for cooperation.
Frank Bruni
00:15:11
You know. Well, we're sitting here less than a week after Mike Johnson brought the Ukraine aid, you know, and the Taiwan and Israel aid, etc., to a vote, less than a week after it was passed. I don't think Mike, Mike Johnson has any business being Speaker of the House, because he was assertive in trying to overturn the legitimate 2020 election. Right? I do not, across the board, have any kind of respect for Mike Johnson, because that is that is something I don't think you can easily forgive. However, we have to take our moments and our allies where we find them. And he did something very important. And and I wrote about it this week. I said, you know, let's let's give him a bit of praise, because if we're going to move forward in this pluralistic, diverse democracy, we have to be willing to give praise and thanks to people with whom we typically disagree when they do something we think is honorable, because that's a great way to maybe set it up to happen more in the future. That may not be as emotionally satisfying is just being constantly angry, but it's much more constructive and productive. And Mike Johnson said something really important. He said, you know, I went, I read these intelligence briefings, I learned stuff I didn't know before, and I changed my mind. How often do you have anyone say that? Now, again, no business being speaker, but let's congratulate him for that.
David Axelrod
00:16:23
'You know, the the the fact is, no one who had certified the election could have been speaker, because they would not have been accepted by the caucus, which was taking its signals from Donald, Donald Trump. Although him getting the intelligence briefings reminds me of the joke that George W Bush told at a White House correspondents dinner. And he said, I know people don't think I'm that smart. I think even my staff doesn't think I'm that smart sometimes. I mean, every day they put these intelligence briefings on my on my on my schedule. By the way, that is an example of what we need more of, and you write about this, which is a little bit of humility, a little bit of self-effacement, a little bit less, you know, so a.
Frank Bruni
00:17:13
Little, a little bit less, I alone can fix it.
David Axelrod
00:17:15
Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Who you referring to there?
Frank Bruni
00:17:20
I heard those, I don't know. Those words were somewhere in our political discussion in the last decade. I can't place them now.
David Axelrod
00:17:26
But just getting back to a second, how do we penetrate the reward system? We have misaligned incentives in politics, in media. I think all of this is churning so rapidly that we as a society can't, society can't even get our arms around the impacts of everything we're being exposed to. How do we reclaim that?
Frank Bruni
00:17:50
'I think it's with an effort that involves a lot of different fronts and a lot of different facets of society. And I and I devote a chapter, at least one chapter of the book to this. But, I mean, I think we need to look at certain matters of political reform. Those, some if we did things differently, we might get a different kind of politician who's not a slave to the incentive structure you just mentioned. I think we have to work on it in the classroom, and I know we'll come back around to that, because we're here at the university, and I now, I now teach. I think, you know, I think there are people who are studying, who need to be encouraged, different ways you could set up social media platforms. You know, the social media platforms in favor at a given moment are changing all the time. It's a really fluid situation. We don't have to have a social media platform that incentivizes things the way the current one, current ones do. In fact, before Elon Musk bought Twitter, a professor at Duke who's in the forefront of this, was working with Twitter people--it all went away when Elon bought it--about coming up with some sort of like analog to Twitter, some sort of offshoot, where the stuff that would rise to the top and that you would most likely see wasn't, weren't just the posts that got the most likes or the most shares, but the post that got the most likes or shares from a diverse group of people. Like, so this post weirdly got as many shares from people whom we can profile as being on the right as people on the left. This post seems to represent some kind of consensus. Let's put that at, let's make that the trending thing. We can do all these sorts of things. We have the digital and the technological abilities. And I think, I think we need to try.
David Axelrod
00:19:22
We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with more of The Axe Files. And now back to the show. The question, you know, becomes, I mean, this is a hugely profitable industry. You know, these social media platforms. And the question becomes, can you compete with that?
Frank Bruni
00:19:55
Let's find out.
David Axelrod
00:19:56
No, I'm for.
Frank Bruni
00:19:57
Give it a try. Because here's the thing. I mean, there's a real. I think we all end up surrendering to or just kind of snapping back to our worst impulse or our most tribal instincts, but, I mean, I know, and I'm guessing it's most of the people in this room with us right now. I know it's you. I mean, I know an enormous number of people, it feels close to a critical mass, who do not want to go on like this, who do not want to be fighting constantly with people who have slightly or somewhat different political opinions, who recognize that compromise should not be a dirty word. That common ground is sacred ground. I mean, these people exist in large number. And maybe if we develop, maybe if we if we recognize that that market is there and we're just smarter about developing products, platforms, whatever you want to call them for that market. I mean, let's give it a shot.
David Axelrod
00:20:44
You know it, but it requires still, I think we should give, take some responsibility ourselves. It requires the market to take some action, as well. I mean, it is easy for us to disdain the incumbent politics of our time. But it takes some effort to say, you know what? I'm going to vote in a primary. I'm going to stand up for this candidate. I'm going to give Mike Johnson credit, right, for doing what he did. And so, you know, I, I think part of the problem is that we have become a little passive about our obligations in a democratic society to really engage. And the people who do engage tend to be the people who are most influenced by grievance.
Frank Bruni
00:21:34
'So, you're right. So the other people have to step up and engage with as much passion for dispassion. Right? But to your point about a market--
David Axelrod
00:21:41
Come on, you dispassionate people. Get in the fight.
Frank Bruni
00:21:46
But to your point about the market, a great illustration of this is. So after the 2016 election when I would be in a kind of public setting like this, as someone who'd been writing about that election for the Times and had been at the times for a long time, I would constantly get the question from groups of people like this, why did you all write so much about Donald Trump? And I said, it's a great question. Let me ask you a question. Why did you all read so much about Donald Trump? So you talk about the market. We're getting the news that we deserve or that we want more than ever before, because we, we have ways to measure what the audience is doing. If people had clicked with the same eagerness and frequency on stuff about John Kasich as they did on Donald Trump, within a week or two weeks time, you would have seen a bevy of John Kasich coverage, because we know what readers are doing and consumers are doing as never before, and we are commercial enterprises that invariably adjust to that. So there is a responsibility in the market.
David Axelrod
00:22:38
This is, of course, always been that struggle with journalism. It's both a business and a trust. You know, and those things come into conflict. And, and in a competitive era like this where the internet has created all of this competition and eroded the financial base of of legacy media, being a trust and a business is harder, harder than ever. You mentioned the, you that we're on a campus here at the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago. What do you make of what's going on around the country? You referenced it earlier, but this fury that we've seen on campuses and, you know, you mentioned Mike Johnson. He put a little money back into the goodwill Bank with the right by going up to Columbia and, you know, making an event.
Frank Bruni
00:23:32
Calling for the National Guard to come out.
David Axelrod
00:23:32
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, before we completely confer sainthood on him.
Frank Bruni
00:23:38
I wasn't.
David Axelrod
00:23:40
No, no, I'll. Listen. I am totally with you. I think he did a courageous thing. I think we need more of that. I would like to see more instances where Republicans and Democrats come together around legislation. I mean, and, you know, he, he, he it took him a while, but he got there, and I give him credit for it. I'm not here to castigate him. But the point is, this is a rip roaring thing that's going on right in the middle of a political campaign. And it kind of feeds all the worst instincts that you write about in your book.
Frank Bruni
00:24:17
Yeah, no, it's distressing to watch. It is tough stuff, as I said before. It's distressing to watch because the various people engaged on, you know, just for, for, for ease's sake, opposite sides of this. I don't see anyone trying to understand how the other people feel. I see I see what I too often see in our political and cultural debates. I see each side saying, I am being wronged here because of those people. And here's how, here's how deeply, I'm being wronged here, and here's how furious I am. And if I if I convey my fury at a volume and with a vocabulary that is more intense than the other sides, that's the way I'm going to win the day, and that's the way I'm going to get the most attention. Nobody seems to want to pause and say, well, why do these students feel so unsafe? And why are they so kind of deeply hurt and offended and destabilized by what we're saying? Nobody seems to want to pause and do that. Nobody wants to pause and say, okay, bringing the police in, calling for the National Guard. You know, these things are extremely emphatic, and they and they and they seem to run counter to principles of academic freedom. And. This is really tough stuff, but nobody is trying to engage in it with that recognition. Nobody is trying to talk about it with any nuance. It becomes a competition for who's the most victimized.
David Axelrod
00:25:35
Right. Well, I think at least as politicians go, there is an impulse to weaponize everything. And this is part of that weaponization. You know, I I'm sure I've said it before on this podcast, so I ask people, forgive me who've heard me say this before, but it's really on my mind these days. My father was a refugee from Eastern Europe, Jewish refugee. When he was a kid, he remembered stepping over dead bodies when he went with his father to try and find some food. And ultimately, his home was blown up, and they. And they left. And, you know, I, I have a sense of solidarity with Israel but not necessarily the Israeli government at all times. And I actually I was trying to think of what I would be like when I was 20 years old and watching these images from Gaza. And, you know, I'd be deeply disturbed. I'm deeply disturbed by it now. So I understand the impulse of young people to see this humanitarian disaster and want to do something about it. But if it tips over into the dynamic that you've now described, where you every Jewish student is in some ways complicit.
Frank Bruni
00:26:50
But just I mean, if you if you're a Jewish student and you're hearing chants and cries that are glorifying Hamas, that I mean, one of the worst chants that I saw repeated whatever was like "October 7th every day." Are you freaking kidding me? Like, if you can't understand that saying that is, I mean, deeply offensive isn't a strong enough term. If you can't understand what that means to a Jewish student who's hearing it, or really to kind of any moral person who's hearing it, to me if I'm hearing it, but I'm not personally threatened, there's something wrong with you. But as you said, to not be able to understand that a 20 year old seeing on on his or her their TikToks TikTok feed the devastation in Gaza, you know, the toll in Gaza. Of course you have to be bothered. This is a really morally complex situation. You see it with nuance. You just modeled nuance. And thank you for that. But what, you know, to go back.
David Axelrod
00:27:41
There goes my ratings.
Frank Bruni
00:27:42
Yeah. Well. Well, no, maybe you maybe you can like, actually own the market on nuance. You can corner the market on nuance. But I mean, but but anyway.
David Axelrod
00:27:53
No, no, you know, yes, I would like to believe that thoughtful, caring people would be as empathetic to the victims of October 7th and as appalled by the mutilation and sexual assault and everything that went along with it and understand the security, the the sort of sense of insecurity that, that and it was meant to provoke in, in, Israelis at the same time, you know, I think it's possible to hold these thoughts at the same time and have, and have. But, just because you are on a campus, now and you're actually teaching this very subject or have been teaching it the, the.
Frank Bruni
00:28:44
I have a course called The Age of Grievance.
David Axelrod
00:28:45
Yeah, yeah. But you've talked about the infantilizing process, the infantilization of Americans, and I assume students are part of what's on your mind. Talk about that.
Frank Bruni
00:28:55
'I think we spend way too much time worried about never offending them. Never. I mean, the trigger warnings are the cliched example of this, and trigger warnings are not as common in the classroom as people think, but they do exist. And in a kind of metaphoric and emblematic way, they kind of say it all. Life is triggering. Right? I mean, you are going to meet all sorts of people who act in ways and say things that aren't to your liking and that sometimes maybe insult you. You're going to encounter circumstances that call into question your competencies at times, because we're all not good at everything, etc. and on and on. And there is something about education currently in many places. There's something about the modern campus that I think too often sends students the message that everything should be clover all the time. Grade inflation's a great example of this. I mean, everyone I'm sure has read the stories, but I mean, the normal grade at an elite university right now is an A-minus. I was in a meeting at one point at Duke a.
David Axelrod
00:29:52
I was a half a century before my time.
Frank Bruni
00:29:53
No, no, no, we are. We grew up way too late. But, you know, I mean, I was, I was I can't remember the exact numbers, but this in a meeting at Duke at one point, and they, and they showed the statistics for what grade point average you needed to be on the Dean's List, which I think is top 10%. But again, I can't remember all of this. And it was something like 3.92. I mean, so that means if you don't. I mean, I've taught students, and they're just living in this world and trying to get through it, but, I am blessed and complimented enough that I have a lot of STEM students who, when they have to take a humanities class, will take one of my classes. A lot. And my classes tend to be somewhat writing centric, writing based. And some of them, that's not their strength. And they get a first paper back and it has an 86 or an 87 on it. And it's like a it's like an existential crisis for them. Because they know that if they want to get into med school, the difference between a 3.99 and a 3.83 could be make or break. And they didn't invent that system, but they're living in it. And you think, I mean, how do we get out of this? Because that's insane. I mean, they're not, you know, but.
David Axelrod
00:30:59
Well, there's also the whole notion of not wanting to hear words that are offensive. You know, we've had that debate for many years now, and you, in several places in the book you have sort of the most absurd examples of this. Talk about that.
Frank Bruni
00:31:17
Oh, the forbidden language glossaries. Yes. I mean, many organizations have lists of words that they say they want no one's speaking anymore.
David Axelrod
00:31:25
Some of them I didn't even understand.
Frank Bruni
00:31:27
Oh, yeah. A year or a year or two. A year or two ago, Stanford came out with, I think it was called the Harmful Language or the Hurtful Language Glossary. And there were words on there like brave. Brave, brave is is not allowed because some people hear a kind of reductive caricature reference to Native Americans there. that's not what I hear when you, and I, you know, you have to educate people on why the word might be bad so they know to be offended by it, because otherwise they weren't. There's an example in that there was the, the, I think it was, which, I think was, Higher Ed. One of the websites ran a hilarious story about one of the one of the banned expressions was hip hip hooray. Because because according to Stanford, that was a Nazi chant. And a journalist with Inside Higher Ed, it was that, it was that publication slash website, went out and interviewed several rabbis, and they're like, that's going to be news to all you know, congregants. You know, I mean, it was like this search, this search for things to be offended by, which kind of says it all about the age of grievance. Like, we're itching for offense. You know, we want to find the worst possible interpretation of something so that we can then play the role of victim and feel as wronged as we see other people telling us they feel, because we don't wanna lose out on that competition.
David Axelrod
00:32:42
And again, if you're spending 10 or 12 hours a day, I'm holding up a cell phone here, for those of you who can't see on my podcast, that.
Frank Bruni
00:32:52
Your screen is very clean.
David Axelrod
00:32:54
Oh, no, no it's not.
David Axelrod
00:32:55
You're making me feel really slovenly. Yeah.
David Axelrod
00:32:59
That it is not clean. But in any case.
Frank Bruni
00:33:02
I'll give you a good example. And, I mean, there's so many versions of this forbidden language list. Sierra Club has one. Various universities have them. One of the things that always makes the list, always, is blind study, blind faith, anything blind, because that is insulting to people with vision disorders and vision impairment. Okay, I'm half blind and I live in danger of going blind. I know a metaphor when I hear and see one.
David Axelrod
00:33:29
You're not half insulted by that?
Frank Bruni
00:33:30
If you want to tell me you think I have blind faith in something, I'm not going to go report you to the censors or whatever. I'm just going to. I'm just going to, you know, tell you no, on that thing, I actually have, have, you know, sighted faith or whatever. But, I mean, it just gets really, it gets really ridiculous. And the problem is when we're when we're fighting these silly battles, right? When we're taking it into these dimensions, it enables people to kind of. A, they lose sight of what's really important and urgent and what's not. And in it.
David Axelrod
00:33:58
Because there are things that are deeply offensive.
Frank Bruni
00:33:59
Right. And it enables them to tune you out when you're actually saying something that they need to hear. It kind of it diminishes your credibility as someone coming into the public square with something important to talk about when you're waging these really kind of petty, invented, you know, marginal, whatever word you want to put on that.
David Axelrod
00:34:18
I was, I was interested in an anecdote you told about the 2012 election. And there was one point, there was a story about Mitt Romney bullying an effeminate classmate when he was in high school. And they called you into comment on this, I guess because you're a gay man. They thought that you would supply the requisite umbrage about it, and you gave a more nuanced answer and that they, they they either didn't go forward with the.
Frank Bruni
00:34:54
They unbooked me. They unbooked me. No.
David Axelrod
00:34:57
You could have feigned outrage and got on there and done your thing.
Frank Bruni
00:34:58
I told that story as an example of how many of us, how everyone seems to kind of choose a brand, feel they have to play to the brand. I think it's a problem in the media. And now I'm talking about conventional media, not social media, where I think so many people are rewarded for having one lens with which they look at the world. And you go to read them or you listen to them because you know they're going to put that lens over everything.
David Axelrod
00:35:20
Yes, Your views are, your views are affirmed but not necessarily informed.
Frank Bruni
00:35:23
'And you want that person to be predictable, which means that person can't be intellectually honest, because they're they're reading off a script. Jason Horowitz, who now works at the Times, was then working at the Washington Post. He wrote this long story for The Washington Post where he had been looking into Mitt Romney's childhood just in the course of doing profiles. And at the Cranbrook Academy in suburban Detroit where Mitt Romney went to private school, some people remember that he and some other students had bullied this this fellow student who was somewhat effeminate. They didn't call that student gay at the time. It was a different time, but it was clearly a kind of gay harassment. And, you know, obviously it was not it was not something, that was kind or to be admired or whatever. This kind of blew up the way stories blew up. It's an easy one to talk about. CNN, MSNBC, everybody's talking about it. Somebody at MSNBC called me, I forget which show it was, and said or emailed me and said, would you come on a panel tomorrow to talk about the Mitt Romney story? And I knew why they were calling me. First openly gay columnist in New York Times. I wrote a lot about gay rights. I said, sure, fine. Yeah, I'll be there. And then, as you know, sometimes this happens that they do. Someone called to give a pre-interview. And they said, well, what would you say about it? And I said, well, I would say it's a really sad and distressing story. Your heart goes out. Your heart goes out to the student who was that was the victim of this bullying. And you certainly never want to see this happen. But I would also say it's 45 years ago, an entirely different America. I know I'm not the person I was when I'm a teenager, when I was a teenager, and I assume Mitt Romney isn't. So I would say like, let's let's condemn this, let's say it should never have happened, but let's also recognize that it doesn't necessarily tell us a whole lot about Mitt Romney today in a much more enlightened world, 40, 45 years more mature. And I got an email like, really shortly after saying, you know what? We don't, we don't need you anymore for the panel tomorrow.
David Axelrod
00:37:13
'We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with more of The Axe Files. And now back to the show. You look at the model for cable television right now, and, you know, you've got these. I mean, I'm sitting in the middle over there at CNN, but MSNBC has basically gone all in on the on the sort of an, you know, Trump 24 anti-Trump progressive dogma. Fox is Fox. And they're doing pretty well with that. I mean, they're getting audiences with that. So again, it's a question of misplaced incentives. I mean, these these these stations are, these networks are struggling because all of cable television is struggling. That is a cheap and easy way to get an audience.
Frank Bruni
00:38:16
It's it's it's so dark, because you're not only getting an audience.
David Axelrod
00:38:20
And I've got a lot of friends over there.
Frank Bruni
00:38:22
But you're you're not only getting an audience. Let's take Fox News. You're not only getting an audience by being skewed, you're keeping your audience by letting them tell you what the truth is and then and then giving it back to them. I mean, the Dominion voting system story is so scary. $787.5 million judgment. And why? Because it was proven.
David Axelrod
00:38:41
Against Fox.
Frank Bruni
00:38:42
eah, against against Fox. And why? Because it was proven in internal emails, internal texts that as they were putting these people on the air saying, oh, the voting machines were rigged or the voting machines were corrupted or whatever, they knew it was ridiculous. They were talking with each other, you know, this is just crazy. Whatever. And then they kept booking the people because, as was said in those texts, in those emails, and that's why Fox was like, we got to settle this and get the hell away from it. It was literally said, if we don't do this, they'll go somewhere else. Like, if we don't do this, One American News will do it, or Breitbart will do it or whatever. And I mean, this is such a bastard. I mean, bastardization is not a strong enough word. This is the opposite of what news is and is supposed to be. They were basically like, we know what the truth is. Our audience wants a lie. So let's go all in on the lie, because that is that is the only path of economic sanity.
David Axelrod
00:39:36
Yes. Yeah. And they. Yeah. And they parted with almost with three quarters of $1 billion because they knew that it would be ugly to move.
Frank Bruni
00:39:46
In on.
David Axelrod
00:39:46
What caught them, the king of grievance, Tucker Carlson had to leave.
Frank Bruni
00:39:50
But this this strikes to the problem that includes social media, but isn't just social media. Once the internet came along, once the cable dial became hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of stations, we are able to search for people to curate the information and the news we want. And it turns out to be our nature, as we as we go about that curation, to choose things that tell us exactly what we want to hear. I mean, nobody has the same script.
David Axelrod
00:40:17
That is. Yes. And that is a if if you want to have one American community, but you're all hearing different things. I mean, you point out in the book that there could be an event and if you, depending on which network you listen to or which, you know, site you read, you have an entirely different interpretation of events. And it's very hard to come to consensus if you're not at least agreeing on what the basic facts are.
Frank Bruni
00:40:45
That's right. And and it's so insidious, because I know so many people, and I've seen some of my students, who feel that they're very deeply informed because there are these 20 different sites they check out, but they never kind of pause and say, wait a second. All, each, each one of these 20 sites is an anagram of the other one. Right. But here's where I think, and I think University of Chicago is a paragon of doing this well. I think more more.
David Axelrod
00:41:10
You say that behind our backs?
Frank Bruni
00:41:11
I do. Yeah, I do. No, and I think more schools need to do it. A lot of this is reflexive behavior that people, students will try to change once they're made aware of it. So we have really interesting discussions in my classrooms about how did you kind of set up your news feed, like how much intention has gone in to whom you're following on the various social media platform,s into what's bookmarked, etc.? And if you get people, in this case students to kind of pause, reflect at it, to ask themselves what? What kind of person do I really want to be? What am I really trying to accomplish here? Is, is the information scape that I'm that I'm striding across doing that for me? You can, you can. They will make adjustments. Sometimes they will change. But nobody's having that conversation with them. We're not having that conversation with one another.
David Axelrod
00:42:01
'Well I'll tell you. I mean if you permit me a 30s of advertising, I'm very, very proud of the Institute of Politics because of the tradition of discourse, civil discourse that we've modeled. And, you know, we've had some hard conversations here, but in the main, they've been respectful conversations. And we have a community. And I think what's what's been shattered is that sense of community. I mean, I think there is real happiness to be found in, if you can get there, in kindness, in grace, in empathy, and in the hard work of trying to understand each other instead of villainize each other. Frank, you write a little bit about the about history. I want to talk about how we got here. We've, we've we've talked a lot about the media, but there have been events. I mean, you know, there's the old expression, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean someone's not after you. You know, we've gone through a very, very difficult period. I mean, and, you know, one thing you didn't talk about so much is the dislocation that globalization and trade and and automation has brought. And we're here in the Midwest, there are a lot of communities that were decimated by that. There's reason to be disillusioned if you're on the losing side of that equation. You covered the 2000 election, in which there was that was the first election in which there was disquiet about the result. We, obviously 9/11 and then 20 years of war that followed, but disproportionately the burden of which was borne by a small percentage, 1% of the population. And then the financial crisis and the pandemic. This has been an incredibly difficult period. So if, you know, to some degree, how much is that has has that uniquely shaped where we are? We've had other periods, after the Gilded Age, or during the Gilded Age, where, you know, you had anti-immigrant sentiment. You had populism. William Jennings Bryan made his famous Cross of Gold speech like a few blocks from here in, 1892, 1896, I guess. How much of this. You're pretty tough on us as a whole. But how much of this is explained by events?
Frank Bruni
00:44:31
A lot of it is explained by events. And.
David Axelrod
00:44:33
Sorry for the long wind up there.
Frank Bruni
00:44:35
No. It's good. I mean, one of the chapters in the book, that I don't know if most enjoyed writing, but I was most interested to write, speaks to this. Which is, everything you're talking about is part and parcel of a turn in this country in my adult lifetime toward a magnitude and a depth of pessimism that are so different from 20, 30, 40 years ago. The idea that we are a sort of congenitally and expansively optimistic country has always been a little bit overstated. If you go back, there are plenty of periods where that wasn't true. But fundamentally, I do think the idea that America is a land of optimism, tomorrow will be better than yesterday was, you know, the endless frontier and all that. There's a lot of truth to that in terms of the American psyche. That is not where we are anymore. If you look at poll results over time, there's been a big change in the percentage of Americans who, when you say, do you expect your kids to do better than you did? That.
David Axelrod
00:45:31
27%.
Frank Bruni
00:45:33
Used to be easily a majority and often a big one. Not anymore. When when people no longer have a sturdy faith in the future, when they don't trust the economy to grow, and they don't think the metaphorical pie is expanding, they invariably get much more possessive and petty and competitive about their piece of the pie. They become much more sensitive to the idea that I'm not being given a fair shot at my piece. If you if you think everything is a zero sum game, your relationship with your fellow country people is going to be entirely different. And that as a result of many of the events that you just mentioned and ticked off, is a big part of why we're so dyspeptic.
David Axelrod
00:46:15
Well, speaking of ticked off, I mean, one of the reasons people are ticked off is that it is not an imagined thing that the American Dream is really sort of a fiction in that we are, I think we're 27th among the, you know, major industrial nations in terms of social mobility, you know, and we have a high, high level of economic polarization, inequality. I mean, these are not imagined.
Frank Bruni
00:46:46
You know, and when you add to that pessimism, we have these, and this is a phrase I think I borrowed.
David Axelrod
00:46:51
Don't worry, folks, we're going to lift this thing up again. I don't want you guys to go home filled with grievance.
Frank Bruni
00:46:58
This is a phrase I think I borrowed from Tom Nichols, who writes for The Atlantic and wrote a very good book called "Our Own Worst Enemy." We have these engines of envy, right? That, when you add them to pessimism, are a real problem. We talked about various problems with social media. Another problem with social media is people go on their Instagram feeds or whatever, and they get this completely false sense of how charmed everybody else's lives are. I mean, on Instagram, somebody is always clinking champagne glasses on a tropical island as the sun is setting at a wedding, right? I've never been to a wedding like that, but apparently everyone else is going to them, or that's what people think.
David Axelrod
00:47:32
Well, look at the shows, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and all that.
Frank Bruni
00:47:37
These promote envy. And we've also in our service economy, and I write about this in the book too, we've we've developed these tiers of coddling and these microclimates of privilege that never existed before. Right? I mean, look at them.
David Axelrod
00:47:49
I've never even heard that, microclimates of privilege.
Frank Bruni
00:47:52
It's in the book. But I mean, look at like when I mean, when I, when I was, when I was young, my, I had very indulgent parents. And so I went to a lot of amusement parks. I don't remember a cut the line thing. There was no cut the line dynamic. I don't remember all of these different things you could pay extra for so that while somebody else was on a 2.5 hour line sweating in the sun for Space Mountain, you were zipping to 20 different rides in three hours, because you could pay for it. These things happen in front of you. When you go to the airport you see whether someone's going into TSA or Clear or just the line for everybody else. You see who gets on the plane and doesn't have to worry about the overhead bin, and who ends up having to check their bag at the last minute. Our service economy has these gradations that didn't exist in the same way before. And so even as we're worried that our economy's not growing and that it's a zero sum game, we're constantly face to face with the people who have it a little better than us and the people who have it a little better than them. And then the people at the tippy top.
David Axelrod
00:48:55
Here's a tip for travelers, by the way. So many people now are having, are buying Clear that you're better off on the TSA line. I just want you. That's a free bit of advice for, for all of you.
Frank Bruni
00:49:08
The solution to grievance. Just stick with the TSA line.
David Axelrod
00:49:11
That'll show 'em. But one of the thing that strikes me as we talk about this. First of all, the media environment exacerbates the problem, the problems that you're talking about here. So let's just stipulate that. But also, we did come through this extraordinary time in our history, of World War Two and of the Depression, the economic boom that followed in which all boats really were lifted for several decades. And it was sort of, not that it was perfect. And, you know, there were whole classes of citizens who were who were left behind, including women. But, but there was a sense of, more of a sense of community, more of a sense of possibility, more of a sense that we can achieve great things. And I wonder if the atomization of us as a society and nothing to really draw us together is part of this age of pessimism, as well.
Frank Bruni
00:50:15
It is. And it's not just we talked about how people get siloed and atomized on social media. It's also true in terms of where we live. You know, there's been a lot written about this. This is proven.
David Axelrod
00:50:24
Sorting.
Frank Bruni
00:50:25
Yeah. We're sorting ourselves in every facet of our lives. So obviously what we need to do is we need to figure out some ways in which we kind of unsought ourselves. And those ways exist. I mean, there's a reason a politician that both you and I admire, you introduced me to him years ago when he was still the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. But there's a reason Pete Buttigieg spent so much time during his presidential campaign talking about a national service program. Because we don't have those sorts of shared experiences and shared missions. We especially don't have shared experiences and shared missions that cut across lines of region and class and education level and race, and allow us to have conversations with people we wouldn't normally meet to understand them not as caricatures or stereotypes, but as flesh and blood human beings. Because almost always, when you see squabbles that then devolve into epic battles that have no business being epic battles, almost always you see people who have ceased to regard one another as complex human beings and just see them as sort of combatants and stereotypes in a war.
David Axelrod
00:51:30
Yeah, yeah.
Frank Bruni
00:51:31
But we can we can do that. We can do national service. We can design. We could. There's a wonderful book written by. I'm going to I'm going to mangle his last name, so I'm not going to say. But the book is called "Palaces for the People," and it's basically about how if you invest in certain sorts of public infrastructure, you create meeting grounds for diverse people.
David Axelrod
00:51:50
Yeah. You wrote about this. Yeah.
Frank Bruni
00:51:52
The public library's still for those of us who still use them, the public library is still a place where you walk in, and it's not all the same kind of person, at least not unless you're like in a very kind of particular enclave. So why aren't we putting more money into public libraries? Why aren't we putting more money into public squares. When we when we have the opportunity to do, to redesign or design cities, why aren't we being really careful about placing the park not so that it's within one kind of community, but so that each side of the park touches a different kind of community, and that park ends up becoming a crossroads. We can do these things if we prioritize them.
David Axelrod
00:52:30
You know so much when you when I read your prescriptions for solutions, political solutions and other solutions, I find myself in agreement with virtually all of them. But being the hack that I am, my thoughts run to can. But how do you implement? Would? Would there be a willingness to implement national service? You know, would would that be accepted or would that become a polarizing thing? The the, the, you know, the compuls, the compulsory.
Frank Bruni
00:52:58
'That is it's interesting. I think one of the reasons that conversation gets shut down is because we all assume it would be compulsory. I agree with you. It could never work as compulsory. But you could build in all sorts of incentives that would tempt people to go into national service. And you could almost see a way, if you did it correctly, in which it becomes so, for lack of a better word, fashionable that nobody doesn't want to. Nobody wants to be the person who's not doing it. But you could. First of all, national service can take many forms, and in kind of like, vis-a-vis each of those forms, you could give some of the people who do it sort of first in line shot at certain job applications in interviews. You could you could relieve student.
David Axelrod
00:53:36
Or at least get them to cut the line on Space Mountain.
Frank Bruni
00:53:39
Yeah. All right, there you go. But, I mean, rather than just relieving student debt with a pen sort of indiscriminately, you could do a sort of GI Bill version of if you do national service, you will get some money for college, or you will have certain college loans forgiven or however you want to do it. You can build in incentives that I think would get more people than many people may be believed to do this sort of thing, and I think it would be one of those things that built on itself.
David Axelrod
00:54:04
Yeah, there is a mismatch that makes some of these things harder, that goes to a lot of what we discussed before that really worries me, which is that change is coming because the exponential pace of media of social media and technology, changes coming at us faster and faster. The perception of change, as you point out, designed to raise our level of anxiety and divide us. And in our democracy, in most democracies, we're designed to move more slowly when we're divided. So you have government sort of flat footed and seemingly unable to address these, you know, major issues, and people feeling more and more anxious about the pace of change. So so that worries me. This is another major thing. But what we need is some wisdom in terms of recognizing these problems and awareness that we have to, that we have to deal with them. So what gives you hope?
Frank Bruni
00:55:05
Look at some of the stuff that has happened during the Biden presidency, that the description you just gave, one would assume nothing has happened.
David Axelrod
00:55:14
Yes. and that's not true.
Frank Bruni
00:55:16
We keep seemingly trying to shoot ourselves in the foot and yet hobbling forward anyway. Right. That gives me an enormous amount of hope.
David Axelrod
00:55:23
Yeah, although that seems like a bad model.
Frank Bruni
00:55:26
I'm not, I'm not I'm. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's it's.
David Axelrod
00:55:29
You only have ten toes, you know.
Frank Bruni
00:55:30
It's great that the Ukraine vote finally happened. It's not great that it took so many months and how many lives were lost.
David Axelrod
00:55:35
And and we hope that it's not too late. Right. Because so much ground has been lost. I'll tell you what gives me hope. And you may share this. There are a few young people in this room.
Frank Bruni
00:55:50
I thought you're going to say Taylor Swift.
David Axelrod
00:55:53
That's the windup.
Frank Bruni
00:55:53
I just feel like every conversation ends with Taylor Swift.
David Axelrod
00:55:56
Yeah, I've managed to avoid that in 570 something podcasts, so I'm not going to jump on the bandwagon now.
Frank Bruni
00:56:02
I've broken the record. I'm sorry.
David Axelrod
00:56:02
No, but every time I sit down with young people here or wherever I travel, you know, I've had so many conversations have made me make me. Because they're they're skeptical as they should be, but they're not cynical, and they recognize their obligations to build something better. They're frustrated with us for not building something better. And I just think if we if we sort of get out of the way, give them some helpful guidance, but give them the opportunity to grow and lead that we could get to a better place. And so I actually come here to the the Institute of Politics to charge my batteries when I'm feeling a little bit depleted. And you probably feel the same way. I hope so, because if you don't, I'm going to feel stupid.
Frank Bruni
00:56:50
No, no, I I, I do, I do. But I wasn't entirely joking about Taylor Swift, I really wasn't. No, I was thinking about this as her.
David Axelrod
00:56:59
I have nothing against her.
Frank Bruni
00:57:00
I know. No. But in all seriousness, as her tour became the kind of phenomenon it did, right, and as she became the kind of phenomenon she is, it speaks not just to her music or her talent or the marketing. It speaks to something else. People began to rush toward that, because it was common ground. It gave them a common language. They could talk. It was something everybody was. It showed to me that there is a hunger for shared experiences. There's a hunger for a common vocabulary. That gives me a lot of hope.
David Axelrod
00:57:34
Yeah. Well, in that, you know, you see it in sports, actually, this whole Caitlin Clark thing and the this rise of women's basketball and this kind of, it's like there are things that you can have conversations about. And wherever people come from, they can jump in, and all of a sudden you have this, this, this common link. It's one of the things that I, I love about sports.
Frank Bruni
00:57:57
Why do why do millions of Americans who pay no attention to professional football all season long tune in to the Super Bowl and decide on a team to support? Because they yearn for that common experience. They want to be part of something larger. And if that can exist at a Taylor Swift concert, if that can exist to the Super Bowl, well, then there's a chance it can exist in our civic life.
David Axelrod
00:58:17
All right, well, let's make that our final prayer. The book is called "The Age of Grievance" by Frank Bruni. As everything you write, Frank, it's well worth reading, and I hope that a lot of people will, because it goes to sort of the central challenge of our time. But always a pleasure to be with you. Thank you.
Frank Bruni
00:58:33
My privilege. Thank you.
Outro
00:58:37
Thank you for listening to The Axe Files, brought to you by the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago and CNN Audio. The executive producer of the show is Miriam Finder Annenberg. The show is also produced by Saralena Barry, Jeff Fox, and Hannah Grace McDonald. And special thanks to our partners at CNN, including Steve Lickteig and Haley Thomas. For more programing from the IOP, visit politics dot uChicago dot edu.
