Which Groups Have Legitimate Grievances?

Start with who currently holds the dominant coalition position in American elite institutions, meaning universities, major media, large corporations, foundations, and the administrative apparatus of government. This coalition currently designates certain conflicts of interest as legitimate grievances and others as threatening aggression, and the pattern is fairly consistent once you map it.
Groups whose conflicts of interest count as legitimate grievances in current elite American culture include Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, women as a category, LGBTQ individuals, recent immigrants including undocumented ones, Muslims in most contexts, Indigenous peoples, Asian Americans in some contexts particularly around discrimination in elite institutions though this is complicated, Palestinians in an increasingly dominant portion of the elite coalition particularly after 2023, the global poor as an abstraction, and climate affected populations as an abstraction.
Groups whose conflicts of interest tend to be designated as threatening aggression or whose grievances are treated as illegitimate or suspicious include White working class and rural Americans particularly males, White ethnic Americans who express explicit ethnic consciousness, traditional Christians particularly Catholics and evangelical Protestants when they act on their convictions in public life, Israeli Jews and their American supporters increasingly since 2023 though this varies significantly by institutional context, Orthodox Jews when their interests conflict with progressive social norms particularly around education and sexuality, small business owners and the self-employed when they resist regulatory frameworks, gun owners as a cultural category, and anyone who expresses explicit concern about the demographic transformation of America or about immigration levels.
The pattern underlying these designations is not random. It follows the Alliance Theory logic. The dominant coalition in American elite institutions was assembled over roughly sixty years through a series of alliance formations that brought together groups who shared rivals more than they shared positive interests. The coalition’s coherence is maintained primarily through its shared opposition to the cultural and political authority of White Protestant America and the institutional structures that expressed that authority. This explains why the coalition can simultaneously include groups whose positive interests are in significant tension with each other, such as Black Americans and recent Hispanic immigrants competing for the same labor markets and urban spaces, or feminist women and trans activists whose claims about the nature of gender are directly contradictory, or Muslims and LGBTQ Americans whose values on sexuality and gender are sharply opposed. The transitivity logic holds the coalition together against shared rivals despite the internal contradictions.
The designation of White working class grievances as threatening aggression rather than legitimate grievance is the most analytically important case because it is the clearest example of the dominant coalition’s convenient belief operating against strong empirical evidence. The material conditions of White working class Americans, the decline in life expectancy, the collapse of stable employment, the opioid epidemic, the dissolution of community institutions, represent genuine social catastrophe by any objective measure. These conditions meet every criterion that the dominant coalition applies to designate other groups’ situations as requiring urgent policy attention. But the coalition’s formation logic requires designating explicit White working class grievance as either illegitimate, because Whiteness as such cannot be a legitimate basis for group identity within the coalition’s framework, or as the expression of false consciousness, racism, or authoritarian personality, following the Frankfurt School framework that John Higham rejected but that became dominant in elite cultural institutions.
This is Stephen Turner’s convenient belief and epistemic coercion frame. The formation that elite institutional actors undergo systematically produces the intuition that White working class grievance is a symptom of something pathological rather than a legitimate response to genuine material deprivation and cultural displacement. This formation is enforced through the professional socialization of journalists, academics, human resources professionals, and nonprofit workers in ways that make alternative framings feel obviously wrong rather than simply politically disagreeable.
The Israeli-Palestinian case is the most rapidly shifting designation in current elite American culture and deserves separate treatment because it illustrates the coalition conflicts.
For roughly fifty years after 1967 the dominant position in American elite culture treated Israeli security concerns as legitimate grievances and Palestinian militant activity as threatening aggression, with significant variation across the political spectrum but with a clear overall tilt. This position reflected the alliance structure of diaspora Jewish intellectual and organizational influence in elite institutions sufficient to shape the normative framework within which the conflict was interpreted. Since roughly 2010 and accelerating dramatically after October 7 2023, this designation has shifted in significant portions of the elite coalition, particularly in universities, legacy media, and among younger professionals. Palestinian claims are increasingly treated as the paradigmatic legitimate grievance of an oppressed people, while Israeli military responses and American Jewish organizational support for Israel are increasingly treated as forms of threatening aggression or as expressions of a settler colonial power structure that the coalition’s framework requires designating as illegitimate.
This shift is a coalition realignment. The younger and more diverse coalition that has emerged in elite institutions over the past twenty years has a different alliance structure than the postwar liberal coalition that Strauss and the neoconservatives helped shape. It is more heavily weighted toward non-White and non-Jewish members whose formation does not include the specific historical experience that made postwar Jewish organizational concerns central to the coalition’s normative framework. The transitivity logic of the new coalition places Israel on the side of Western colonialism and American military power, which are the coalition’s primary rivals, rather than on the side of a vulnerable minority community, which was its location in the postwar coalition. American Jewish organizations are discovering with considerable shock that the coalition they helped build and in which they invested enormous organizational and financial resources has a new alliance structure that no longer automatically designates their interests as legitimate grievances.
The trends are interesting.
The first trend is the fragmentation of the postwar liberal coalition along the lines that the transitivity logic predicts. Coalitions held together primarily by shared rivals rather than shared positive interests tend to fracture when the shared rival loses power or when internal contradictions become impossible to manage. The Democratic Party coalition is currently experiencing both pressures simultaneously. The cultural and political authority of White Protestant America that held the coalition together as a shared rival has declined to the point where it can no longer perform that unifying function with the same force. Meanwhile the internal contradictions, between Black and Hispanic working class economic interests and professional class cultural politics, between feminist and trans activist frameworks, between Jewish organizational interests and the Palestinian solidarity movement, between recent immigrant communities with traditional values and progressive social norms, are becoming increasingly visible and increasingly difficult to manage through the coalition enforcement mechanisms that previously contained them.
The second trend is the emergence of a counter-coalition that is still in the process of formation and whose alliance structure is not yet stable. The populist nationalism that Donald Trump’s movement represents is an attempt to assemble a new coalition around a different set of shared rivals, primarily the professional managerial class and its cultural and institutional authority. This counter-coalition is drawing in groups whose interests and values are in many respects as contradictory as those of the coalition it opposes, including White working class voters, Hispanic working class voters, some Black male voters, religious traditionalists of multiple backgrounds, small business owners, and various ethnic and cultural groups who feel their tacit formations are under assault from the dominant coalition’s enforcement mechanisms. Whether this counter-coalition can achieve sufficient coherence to sustain itself as a stable political force depends on whether it can develop positive shared interests sufficient to supplement the negative shared rivals that currently hold it together.
The third trend is the acceleration of what I call the custodianship crisis in American elite institutions. The rapid demographic and ideological transformation of universities, media organizations, and large corporations has produced a situation in which the tacit formations of the people who built these institutions and the tacit formations of the people who now staff and lead them are in significant tension. The explicit rules and formal structures of these institutions were built by and for people with specific tacit formations, and those formations are no longer being transmitted through the institutional socialization process. The result is the pattern identified in the transition from tacit moral culture to explicit compliance systems, institutions whose explicit rules are proliferating and becoming more elaborate precisely because the tacit moral common ground that made the explicit rules workable has eroded.
The fourth trend is the most speculative but analytically most important. The framework of legitimate grievance versus threatening aggression that the dominant coalition has used to organize American political culture is facing an empirical challenge that is becoming increasingly difficult to manage through the formation and coalition enforcement mechanisms that previously contained it. The inconvenient facts are accumulating. Policies designed to address designated legitimate grievances are producing outcomes that are difficult to defend on their merits. Groups whose grievances have been designated as threatening aggression are not disappearing through assimilation and normalization as the framework predicted they would. The convenient beliefs that structure the dominant coalition’s framework are facing the kind of sustained empirical pressure that Turner identifies as the condition under which convenient belief systems either adapt or become increasingly brittle and eventually crack.
What is not yet clear is whether the cracking of the current convenient belief framework will produce something more empirically honest and more genuinely attentive to the full range of legitimate conflicts of interest in American society, or whether it will simply produce a new coalition with a new set of convenient beliefs that designates different groups’ conflicts of interest as legitimate and different groups’ as threatening aggression. The historical precedent is not particularly encouraging on this point. Coalitions that lose institutional dominance are typically replaced by new coalitions with their own convenient beliefs rather than by a genuinely more honest accounting of whose interests matter. The analytical tools my framework provides are useful because they make this pattern visible regardless of which coalition is currently dominant, which is the only basis on which an honest assessment of whose conflicts of interest count as legitimate grievances can be made.