Cristiano Ronaldo’s career-hobbling interview with ghastly celebrity bottom-feeder Piers Morgan, in which the Gelled One denounces just about everybody in the Manchester United orbit as being guilty of the grave sin of under-appreciating Cristiano Ronaldo, comes as the latest in a long line of similarly petulant outbursts on the part of rich and powerful men. This most delicate of entities, the Aggrieved Male Millionaire Ego, is having its moment, and it isn’t pretty. From insurrections, to invasions, to racist invective and corporate suicide, the millionaire’s meltdown generates radioactive fallout that has very real effects. From Trump, to Putin, to Kanye, to Musk, Ronaldo has contributed to the brain-melting toxicity of what may one day be described as The Age of Grievance. What characterizes this ear-splitting era? To begin with, a certain infantile narcissism. Not a boot smashing a face, but a cigar-chomping baby gushing crocodile tears, forever. Much maligned on the part of right-wingers as a symptom of identity politics and wokism out of control, the cancer of complaint has metastasized to every inflamed organ of society, including those on the right side of the body politic. These men, all conservative, are reflecting in their gilded mirrors precisely the politics of animus that is supposed to animate the campuses and streets of the nation. This strange state is our new Leviathan, a self-regarding era of internet capitalism that has made literally everyone a narcissist. The Age of Grievance is the resentment of all against all, and proves that, if nothing else, at least resentment is bipartisan now. Or, to be more accurate: ressentiment is. And it is everywhere.

Ressentiment, while similar to its cousin, resentment, has slightly broader shoulders, as popularized by Nietzsche. It is more systemic in nature. It is a revolt against privilege on the part of the disenfranchised. Nietzsche sees it as a product of Judeo-Christian morality, a principled revolt against power that he dubs slave morality. Listen to Fox News, and America has apparently perfected this Nietzschean slave morality, this ressentiment. From campus safe spaces to cancel culture, it has become axiomatic on the outraged right that outrage and sensitivity to offense is a strictly leftist phenomenon. And, let’s be clear, it is that too. But what then are we to make of this new figure, the ranty millionaire? Let’s call him Grievance Man. His is the discourse of ressentiment rendered in the service of his unbounded narcissism. He feels justified in speaking not because of his lack, but precisely because of his abundance. In an era in which the Supreme Court equates money and speech, he speaks his world into submission. Or he feels he should. And when it doesn’t listen, there’s hell to pay.

Where ressentiment functions among socially fragmented movements as a tool of revolt (despite often feeding capital in that process), the new ressentiment is conducted by the wealthy on behalf of power, as a tool of subjugation. Which is to say, this new ressentiment works for capital itself. It might be called capitalist ressentiment. What separates plain old resentment from true ressentiment is that the capitalist ressenter claims that his grievances, while personal, are actually also universal. They are being conducted in the service of the people. This is the element of supposed principle required to systematize grievance into ressentiment. Grievance Man claims to be populist, to be working for the masses, while in reality he is in it for himself. But in his populism, the ressenter may actually raise some good points. Trump’s criticisms of a rigged system, Putin’s impression of being goaded by Nato, or Musk’s complaints about dwindling free speech might have a basis in validity, but none of these are their actual objectives: these are the cover. Their objectives are strictly narcissistic. And they break things in the process, because the widening gyre of their ressentiment always spirals out of control. Thus Ronaldo’s complaints against the Glazer family’s rapacious evisceration of a storied club are fair enough, but it doesn’t follow that he should savage everyone else too, including his talented manager, who has done an extraordinary job of maintaining sang-froid in the face of the striker’s failing form and flailing tantrums while ushering him kicking and weeping toward retirement, or Saudi Arabia, or anywhere else that will pay him half a mill a week to miss goals he would once have scored in his sleep. He has decided to burn the house down, which feels an awful lot like Trump’s assault on Congress, Putin’s assault on Ukraine, whatever it is Ye is doing, or Musk’s assault on (sorry, purchase of) Twitter. There is much to be said about capitalist ressentiment, but its howl is getting louder, and increasingly dangerous. To the narcissist, to speak while wealthy is to shape the world. When the world refuses to be shaped, the speech becomes a scream. Or in Ronaldo’s case, it becomes a pouty scream into the doughy pillow of famous Piers’ ample bosom, forever.