Resentment (ressentiment) "is Other, it's never you and I", or "the overwhelmingly thoughtless Othering on the left"

Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin

    "Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, you and I:  when it comes to resentment, we are all Nietzscheans.  Nietzsche gave the complex emotion for which he consistently used the French ressentiment a bad name, especially in On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). . . .
     "But is this negative intellectual tradition all there is to resentment?  No, says Robert A. Schneider. . . .  There is a different, more positive strand that was only sidelined in the early nineteenth century, and Nietzsche didn't even originate the negative line. . . .
     "Why does all this matter, and why is this an important book for the historical moment we inhabit?  Re-enter Obama and Clinton:  'they get bitter, they cling to their guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.' (Obama explaining the 'left behind' to San Francisco donors while on the presidential campaign trail, April 6, 2008); 'you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.  Right?  They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic - you name it'.  (Clinton at a New York LGBTQ fundraising event during her own presidential campaign, September 9, 2016).  For centrists and those on the left, resentment is terrible because it is driven by envy, yearns for golden pasts that never existed, targets minorities, constructs an Us (West Virginians in the US, northerners in the UK) versus a Them (Washington, Brussels, Westminster, all ciphers for 'elites'), stems from psychological maladjustment to changed circumstances (deindustrialization) and is ultimately pathological:  resentment is Other, it's never you and I."

     Jan Plamper, "Get even:  a history of political resentment," a review of The return of resentment:  the rise and decline and rise again of a political emotion (University of Chicago Press, 2023), by Robert A. Schneider, Times literary supplement no. 6268 (May 19, 2023):  11.  "The strength of Robert A. Schneider's succinct, accessible book is to have given resentment an intellectual genealogy.  It is less successful when trying to show a way out.  The 'measure of understanding and, dare I say, empathy' for Trump voters it suggests at the end remains murky.  Nonetheless, The Return of Resentment gives us the necessary tools to follow the injunction to take seriously the grievances of right-wing populist voters - at last."