Voting Alone: The Deep Costs of the Loss of Community

Recently in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson added his voice to a growing chorus of commentators who have been bemoaning the crisis of loneliness in American life.  Citing a litany of statistics on the decline of social life in the United States, he pours cold water on those who have pushed back against this narrative noting that, “In short, there is no historical record of any other period in U.S. history when people have spent more time on their own.”  

Interestingly, Martha Gill echoes Thompson’s concerns about the death of the “hang out” in a Guardian piece where she observes, “We spend more time online.  We socialize less. Our mental health is getting worse. These three trends have been obvious for some time – particularly among the young – but now more evidence is linking them, and alarm bells are sounding louder.”  

The multiple reasons Thompson cites for what he labels the “hang-out depression” are familiar, from the explosion of screen time that robs us of social capital and the pervasive busyness of American life to the deeper and more troubling “erosion of America’s social infrastructure.”  Thompson refers to Robert Putnam’s seminal work on the death of community in Bowling Alone (2000), and ends his piece pondering how our lack of “social fitness” may be damaging us emotionally, wryly remarking that, “Sartre said hell is other people. Perhaps. But the alternative is worse.”  

This phenomenon, as much as any other part of American social life, is what underlies the deeply pathological space that is American politics.  If a healthy democracy is dependent on a robust commitment to civic engagement, how is that even possible when more and more of us have little to no sense of community whatsoever?  There is a kind of unfocused rage that fuels so many of our darkest impulses made manifest by things like mass shootings, callous ecocide, and a host of other social ills.  

In a previous era more informed by modernism, one might have spoken of a sort of widespread alienation, but today, I fear, we are seeing the consequences of a populace that has, in many quarters, moved beyond alienation and relates to the “other” more as figures in a video game or a thing to “like” or “troll” than as a fellow human being. 

Hence, we may be stumbling into an anti-social moment where the old rules of civic engagement simply don’t apply in the same way that they did in the past.  Post Covid.  Post Fact.  Post Community.  Post Historical. 

Perhaps the ongoing decline of the traditional narratives of American democracy has reached a kind of critical mass.  It’s very hard to get people to fear the loss of democracy when they don’t have a deep understanding of what it means in the first place.  

When the primary stories are being told by commercial advertising and various forms of social media deeply informed by its logic, the result is that a consumer ethos is what we share more than anything else.  Thus, entertainment and passive consumption rather than critical thinking and active civic engagement constitute the new American hegemony.  This would seem to be fertile ground for an emotionally driven turn toward authoritarianism.  

At present, it appears that the fury on the right is ascendent, while the Democratic “left” is exhausted, uninspired, and reduced to hoping that prices fall further, the war in Gaza magically ends, and Trump is convicted of enough crimes to move a few independent voters in the suburbs.  

In yet another “election of our lifetimes” a lot of people who should be afraid of losing their agency as citizens seem depressed and bored rather than alarmed and ready to agitate.  How does one do politics on this terrain?  Is there space for an even vaguely nuanced discussion of policy? Is there a galvanizing issue that can break through enough silos to prevent a descent into autocracy and craven plutocracy?  We’ll find out, for better or worse, in a matter of months.  

Even if the Democratic Party manages to paper over its internal divides and push enough of the right buttons to swing the national election against Trump, it will only be by the thinnest of margins.  And then what?  

Only a real effort that addresses the erosion of America’s social infrastructure and rebuilds community at the local and national level will begin to heal what ails us over the long term.  

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