The Grievance Machine: How Republicans Weaponize Fear to Win

Why Democrats must build their own outrage machine now: it’s time for a coordinated attack on Trump’s grievance empire…

As you’re reading these words, Trump and his Republican allies are spraying “a firehose of lies” accusing Democrats of responsibility for the fires in LA. And those lies are working; even mainstream media like The New York Times and The Washington Post are repeating them. Not to mention they’re being pushed like peanuts at a ball game into the faces of hundreds of millions by the right-leaning algorithms of social media.

If Democrats were to create a “Shadow Cabinet,” they could effectively neuter much of this BS. Details on that in a minute, but first some background.

While the phrase “The best defense is a good offense” is often attributed to Jack Dempsey, it was General and President George Washington who, reflecting on how he won the Revolutionary War, wrote to his former aide-de-camp John Trumbull: “Offensive operations, often times, are the surest, if not the only means of defense.”

Democrats need to learn the lesson: The most powerful political offensive moves succeed by capturing control of and expressing deeply-felt grievances.

There’s a simple neurological reason for this: at the foundation of Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Human Needs” is “Safety,” which is why the most effective grievances are those expressing fear for safety or the security of voters’ assets and family.

Gays are going to convert your kids, immigrants are going to kill or rape your wife, schools are going to cut off your son’s penis, Haitians in Springfield are going to eat your cat, poor people are stealing your tax dollars with welfare payments, women who get empowered will deny you sex, Jews are funding Hispanics taking your job, Joe Biden is causing your inflation, Democrats want to take away your car, Black Kamala is trying to take a job that’s rightfully a white man’s role, “woke” teachers are training white children to feel guilt for things their relatives did, the “deep state” is making your life miserable through over-regulation…

Every one of those and more were specific — and false — grievances used at various times by the Trump campaign to win the 2024 election. They work because grievance is a variation on fear of danger or outrage over loss, something that’s such a foundational set of human emotions that babies express them in their first months. Grievance is hard-wired into us, part of our most ancient survival mechanisms.

Which is why grievance is one of the single most powerful tools politicians and revolutionaries have used throughout history, from ancient Rome to today:

— Hitler harnessed German grievance against the punishing terms of the Treaty of Versailles to climb to power.
— Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson used grievance around Britain’s “taxation without representation” to spark and win the Revolutionary War.
— For Confederates, it was the threat of losing their source of free labor.
— The Klan, Woodrow Wilson, then George Wallace, and today Trump and his MAGA movement exploit racial grievance against Blacks and Hispanics “taking” privilege, jobs, and power from white men.
— The “Me Too” movement used legitimate grievance against horrible, predatory men to create a national reformation.
— Black Lives Matter used honest grievance against white cops who kill Black people with impunity to mobilize a national march and change laws and policies across the nation.
— Bernie Sanders nearly became president based on the appropriate grievances Americans harbor about being robbed and ripped off by the morbidly rich.
— MLK’s Civil Rights movement peacefully highlighted Black people’s grievances over being second-class citizens, producing major changes in law and interpretation of the Constitution.

Republicans and the billionaires who fund and support them have been using grievance as a primary political weapon ever since the election of Barack Obama, starting with the birther and then the Tea Party movements.

They were aggrieved by virtually everything our first Black president did, from Obamacare to wearing a tan suit; there wasn’t a single week that went by during his eight years in office when Republicans weren’t outraged by something he had done or was accused of doing.

And, of course, even though George W. Bush and Dick Cheney used private email servers for government business for eight years (and Hillary didn’t), her “private email server” became a years-long grudge that was daily promoted in the media and — with a boost from James Comey — helped Trump defeat her presidential campaign.

Republicans, since the days Newt Gingrich first took over the House in the mid-1990s, have become expert 24/7/365 purveyors of grievance; Rupert Murdoch has made billions peddling it every single day on Fox “News” and in The New York Post.

In the 2024 presidential election, fully 95% of Trump’s ads were grievance-based attacks on Harris while only about half of Harris’ ads attacked Trump (as opposed to promoting her policies). Predictably, the grievance ads won the day for Trump, both motivating his voters and discouraging Democratic voters from even showing up.

All of which raises the question: Why aren’t Democrats cranking up a grievance-based outrage machine right now to run daily for the next four years? One that’s coordinated across the party and media, with specific daily complaints that expose the hypocrisy and outright corruption of Trump and the GOP?

They certainly could have done it during his last presidency.

Trump put a union-busting lawyer in charge of the Department of Labor: Democrats could have screamed about every anti-labor action Eugene Scalia took (and there were many). He put a series of anti-environment fossil fuel toadies in charge of EPA and Interior, a woman who hates public schools in charge of education, a man Forbes called a “grifter” in charge of the Commerce Department, a guy who’d illegally thrown tens of thousands of people out of their homes to head Treasury, etc.

Where was the outrage when Jared Kushner’s crew suggested that letting people die of Covid and blaming Blue state governors was “an effective political strategy”? Or when Trump cut taxes for billionaires, saddling our kids and grandkids with trillions in debt?

Republicans are still talking about Bill’s affairs and Hillary’s server: why is it that when Republican crimes and perfidy are exposed it’s a one-day or, at most, week-long story but Republicans pound on Democrats for years?

Remember when it was proven during Trump’s last year in office that Putin had put a bounty on US troops in Afghanistan and Trump not only refused to act but tried to downplay it? Where was the outrage? Where was the widespread publicity about the individual soldiers who died as a result of it? If a Democratic politician had tolerated and even ignored that, we’d still be hearing about it every day and on every Sunday show!

Why didn’t a single elected Democrat complain loudly during Carter’s funeral about Reagan stealing the 1980 election by cutting a deal with the Iranian ayatollahs? Even the former Lt. Governor of Texas, who was there, has confirmed the story for The New York Times.

Or blame Trump for shutting down all but one of the US Air Force bases in Afghanistan just to pre-cripple Biden’s efforts to end the war?

Or talk over and over and over again about how researchers for British medical journal The Lancet concluded that almost a half-million Americans would still be alive today if Trump hadn’t botched the Covid response?

Why doesn’t every voter know the details of how he threw away the pandemic plans Obama left him and then encouraged people to get infected?

Every day of those four years represented a chance for Democrats to collectively and loudly raise a stink. Every day they could have held press conferences and riled up their base. Every day they could have shown up on radio, TV, and podcasts to rail against Trump’s depravity, cronyism, and criminality.

If they had, Trump wouldn’t be about to take the White House now.

Why was Ivanka selling Goya beans from the White House — a clear violation of the Hatch Act — just a one-day story? Or Trump taking hundreds of millions in illegal emoluments from foreign governments via his properties and hotels?

When he stole top-secret nuclear documents including the names of US spies overseas and left them where foreign agents could easily find and copy them, why didn’t Democrats scream every day for years that he’s a traitor trying to sell his country out in a way that would make Benedict Arnold blush?

Remember when Richard Nixon wanted to get rid of Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas (the most liberal member of the bench)? He had his Attorney General John Mitchell manufacture out of thin air “suspected” allegations that Fortas’ wife was involved in a shady deal to avoid a few thousand dollars in taxes. Republicans turned it into such a massive grievance-fest in the media that Fortas resigned to save his wife the embarrassment of FBI and congressional investigations.

Why haven’t Democrats done the same — only with legitimate complaints — to Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch? Why haven’t they subpoenaed (and enforced the subpoena) against Roberts and his corrupt colleagues (Dick Durbin?!?)? Where is the investigation into the millions that Ginny Thomas has taken and her alleged involvement in January 6th?

Here's a more contemporary list of recent Trump, Musk, and GOP atrocities. The simple reality is that every day offers things worthy of genuine outrage.

Instead, though, Democrats have, since the Reagan era, focused on doing the people’s work, trying to make things better for average Americans: They thought voters would recognize their good works and reward them at the polls.

Ask Sherrod Brown how that worked out. Or Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Kamala Harris.

The simple fact is that playing the victim card will always resonate more powerfully with voters than highlighting wonderful accomplishments. Case in point: Joe Biden and the fact that most Americans have no idea about his incredible and many successes on behalf of the working class.

Timothy Snyder has been suggesting Democrats should create a Shadow Cabinet, an idea I’ve been pushing on my show for over a decade. Democrats should come up with people qualified to take every job from Defense Secretary to EPA to Transportation and every time one of Trump’s people takes an action, the “shadow secretary” for that department should hold a press conference criticizing that action and offering a better alternative to help Americans.

The DNC should coordinate these things, offering a tip sheet to every elected Democrat and the press — it could even be a Substack newsletter — with the grievance(s) of the day. (Call it something else, of course.) Push the shadow cabinet officers to producers for radio, TV, and podcast shows with the same effort publicists for authors and athletes put in every day.

It’s the 21st century and the Republicans and their billionaire backers (as I noted here at Hartmann Report yesterday) have re-written the rules of politics. Democrats must wake the hell up and take the challenge to institutionalize outrage if they want to regain power in DC and statehouses.

Turns out Washington and Dempsey were right: the best defense is a good offense. And it’s about damn time for Democrats to figure it out and make use of it.

My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My new book, The Hidden History of the American Dream, is now available.
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