The Hunger for Injustice and Grievance

This seems to me the biggest problem with the whole mentality of the left.

Every group (and individual) has grievances and has suffered injustices. It's right to acknowledge these and, where appropriate, to address them.

I say "where appropriate" because it seems obvious that sometimes trying to correct an injustice might cause more trouble than the injustice itself-- if it's a relatively minor injustice, if it's hard to define and isolate, if trying to correct it would involve a serious assault on freedom, if you're simply going to create an opposite injustice, etc.

Both the left and the right, conservatives and liberals, and everybody else, has their pet grievances and injustices-- but grievance seems essential to the left. To them, grievance seems to constitute group identity above all else-- so that it's hardly an exaggeration to say that a group not only has grievances, but is its grievances.

This occurs to me most often when I'm reading something a progressive has written about Irish history. It generally reflects a strange sympathy with the Catholic majority in Ireland, despite all the reasons progressives should have for lacking sympathy with them (including the fact that they were a majority!).