Once again, Weigel nails it. It is especially important that Christians of any ilk heed and obey the principles he espouses because they reflect the teachings of Christ. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

“Woke,” shorthand for what was once known as “political correctness,” helped fuel a grievance-based progressive politics that did immense damage to the American body politic, while filling young minds with a surfeit of historical nonsense. The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which falsified the story of the United States by reading our entire national history through the lens of America’s original sin, slavery, was wokery’s Platonic form. It poisoned school curricula and underwrote the race-baiting politics that followed the murder of George Floyd.  

Unfortunately, just when the politics of grievance seems to be running out of gas on the American left, it has emerged with a vengeance on the American right. Slogans like “we’ve been ripped off”—which distort the record of the most successful peace-keeping security architecture ever created (NATO), and which provide cover for tariffs that could wreck the world’s most successful engine of economic growth—exemplify a new grievance politics that’s the flip side of wokery. And in the form of social media mobs, right-wing grievance politics is alarmingly similar to the cancel culture of the left.

It’s not that grievances aren’t real. Some are, and there is a moral obligation to address and remedy them. But grievance politics inevitably leads to the dissolution of political communities—or, just as insidiously, makes political community difficult, if not impossible, to form.

Why haven’t the Palestinian people been able to form and sustain a self-governing political community capable of making peace? Because as my friend, the late Arabist Fouad Ajami, put it in 2001, “A darkness, a long winter, has descended on the Arabs . . . [who] abandoned [themselves] to their most malignant hatreds.” And because of that, “Nothing grows in the middle between an authoritarian political order and populations given to perennial flings with dictators.” 

…Contrast these examples of grievance-based, and often lethal, politics with the Tuskegee Airmen. 

I’ve long harbored a deep respect for these first African-American military aviators, who overcame centuries of racial stereotyping and prejudice to become successful fighter pilots in World War II. Anyone who has watched the films The Tuskegee Airmen and Red Tails cannot but be appalled by what these heroic men endured in order to serve their country in the U.S. Army Air Forces. They triumphed, not through the politics of grievance, but by following the motto “Rise Above”—which did not refer to flying their P-51s above the B-17s they protected from the Luftwaffe, but to rising above the mindless racism that harmed the racists at least as much as it harmed the victims of prejudice.

American public life today would be considerably improved if those addicted to grievance politics, woke and MAGA, adopted the chant of the Tuskegee Airmen in Red Tails: “Nothing’s difficult. Everything’s a challenge. Through adversity to the stars.” 

Read it all.