Data used in the study came from a longitudinal survey of Canadians, who were followed from May 2006 to December 2019. The association between inequality and mortality was moderated and made stronger by age, gender, racialized minority status and income at the household and area levels.

The study is currently gated but can be previewed/accessed here.

From the abstract:

The findings demonstrate that economic decline following deindustrialisation resulted in distress and created unique risk factors for substance use and self-harm for men. These results suggest that effective interventions to reduce DoD among men in post-industrial settings must avoid pathologising masculinity itself. Instead, strategies should focus on the broader structural forces that undermine men’s access to stable, fulfilling employment and offering forms of support that are compatible with masculine identity.

Food for thought.

Read the full paper: “They’re Lacking Purpose. It’s a Recipe for Suicide.”: Masculinity and Gender-Based Inequalities in Deaths of Despair in England

NPR’s Short Wave podcast looks at concern for climate change and how its impacting the decision to have children among millennials and zoomers.

Listen to the full segment here.

If you’re interested more, check out Jade Sasser’s Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question: Deciding Whether to Have Children in an Uncertain Future (discussed in the podcast).

From Tradesafe:

Some white-collar workers are eyeing the trades as a more stable, hands-on alternative to corporate life. At the same time, many blue-collar workers are setting their sights on office jobs that offer better pay and flexibility. Using survey responses from 1,000 employees and search trends from all 50 states, this report explores how fear, fatigue, and future uncertainty are fueling a surprising career swap.

Why White-Collar Workers Are Fleeing to the Trades and Blue-Collar Workers Are Climbing the Corporate Ladder

Many Americans watched the assault on the Capitol in horror. Here was a violent confrontation replete with mock gallows and a crowd chanting “Hang Mike Pence” while the assault took place, injuring 140 law enforcement officers. The real-time spectacle, played out before a national audience on televisions and livestreams, included insurrectionists using flagpoles and bear spray to assault Capitol police. Organized, right-wing paramilitary groups (some of whom were tasked with security at that morning’s political rally where Trump spoke) took part in the assault, and a subsequent House select committee recommended criminal charges against the former president for his role in instigating the violence.

Scarcely a year after the insurrection and eyeing a return to office, Trump pledged to pardon January 6 participants if reelected. He subsequently, in 2023, released a charity song that featured a choir group of individuals imprisoned for their actions on that day. Following the 2020 contest and Republican claims of election fraud, a majority of ordinary rank-and-file Republicans came to question the legitimacy of the American electoral system.

The steps of the US Capitol are far from the only scene of political violence in recent memory. Several right-wing plots targeting statehouses were planned (and foiled) including one aimed at kidnapping the Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer. At the same time, the growing response to police violence and racial inequities in the criminal justice system—brought together under the banner of Black Lives Matter—boiled over into protests across the nation following several high-profile police killings. Activists and reform advocates called for the abolition of police departments in major cities; most municipalities increased law enforcement spending in response, with state and federal governments (under Biden) adding to the pot.

Rarely stated as such, the dramatic rise in mass shootings in recent years can be described as another related form of political violence.

Regardless of political background, most Americans despaired as these events unfolded. Arguably, the violence on the ground is not unrelated to the vehemence we see in our political system today. Decades-long processes of sorting and polarization of members of the two major political parties led to a survey shortly before the 2020 presidential election that found four out of every five Americans—that’s 80 percent—who supported either major party candidate believed that supporters of the opposite candidate had “fundamentally different views of core American values”

1. Deane, C., and Gramlich, J. 2020 Election Reveals Two Broad Voting Coalitions Fundamentally at Odds. Pew Research Center (blog). (Accessed August 4, 2023).

Human sociability is embedded in our DNA; aside from opposable thumbs our need for social interaction is what sets us apart in the animal kingdom. It has been evolutionarily advantageous for humans to cooperate, as those who didn’t don’t go on to procreate. Especially relevant for the subject at hand, social interactions powerfully influence an individual’s identity, esteem, and notion of what to expect out of life — and how best to achieve those ends. In social science terms, we refer to “social capital" as the tightness and multitude of interpersonal bonds that make up human sociability. These ties both help to form and maintain strong bonds, and create conditions conducive to forging new relationships.

Well-established, decades-long declines in both social capital and trust (toward government, elected officials, institutions, and even toward one another) were bound to be exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. And indeed, 42 percent of all adults surveyed by Pew in June 2021 said they had become less involved with civic groups.

As art imitates life, alienation appears regularly in our art and entertainment.

(See the following two figures following respondents’ trust toward government and external efficacy, or an individual’s sense that government is responsive to their needs. Data comes from the American National Elections Studies cumulative file.)

Trump has continued to dominate the political landscape for a host of reasons, in spite of (or buoyed by) the lack of any political core to the man or semblance of a strategy during the campaign(s) or administration. Those who would be the political opposition (the Democratic Party) are stymied by their choice to repeat past failures with less extreme precursors (the Tea Party), strict allegiance to their wealthy and corporate donors — as well as the party’s general political ineptitude that stretches back decades. All of this disregarding the malfeasance of the Republican Party, failures of the political media, and erosion of public institutions that were thought to have checked the nation’s slide toward autocratic rule.

There is much to say, but today I wish to concentrate on the path ahead as voting formally begins for the 2024 presidential election. Odds are, we’re on track for another Trump administration. This post is being written on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, where the final Des Moines Register poll indicates a 28-point delta between support for Trump and his nearest rival, Nikki Haley. (Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy remain in the running, but the Republicans have avoided a repeat of 2016, when a morass of primary candidates helped to win Trump the nomination.)

Find someone enthusiastic about a second Biden term.

Trump has secured Evangelicals, and has made inroads with the college educated, younger voters, African Americans, and Hispanics, versus 2016/2020.

Somehow, the 2024 general election appears poised to lead inexorably to a repeat of 2020; a contest pitting two wildly unpopular aged white men. I believe the odds are slim that Trump’s many, many legal troubles prevent him from being on the ballot. The chances that a health issue sidelines one candidate or the other are greater, in my mind. But barring some unexpected, non-predictable event, I would say the ballots could be printed up today. And it pains me to say that Trump is possibly in a better position to overtake Joe Biden this go-around. I’m a perennially pessimistic person — but that negative outlook successfully anticipates the future more often than not today.

Following are a few of the considerations I’m factoring in to support this conclusion.

But first: Ignore the polls — for now

I’d like to mention what’s not driving my thinking. Surveys right now will tell us something about the primary races (although state-by-state primary polling is significantly less reliable than general election polling) but basically nothing about the margins next November. This includes the generic ballot (Democrat versus Republican), head-to-head (Trump versus Biden) matchups, and approval/disapproval surveys — sampling registered or likely voters. This isn’t because I dislike or don’t believe (read: understand) scientific polling, but rather because individuals’ sentiments in January have little bearing on how they will think eleven months from now. The past few years have thrown out many so-called “laws” that American politics scholars have invented, but basic, non-polling based predictive models of the presidential contest held up pretty well, actually.

For one, Emory’s Alan Abramowitz and his “Time for Change” model correctly predicted Trump’s win in 2016 in my view. This requires an explanation. Technically speaking, the model (at that time) used GDP in the second quarter, presidential approval mid-year, and an indicator variable noting the length of the incumbent party’s control of the presidency. This simple three-variable model predicted a Trump victory in 2016 in the popular vote. Abramowitz spent the leadup to that election walking back his prediction, in talks and interviews saying that he didn’t believe his own model. As we know, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost in the electoral college. This outcome can occur due to the Senate’s malapportionment. But in an environment where essentially everyone predicted a drubbing, this model was more right than wrong.

Note: Abramowitz simplified his model to only consider mid-year presidential approval after 2016, claiming GDP and the incumbency advantage are not predictive due to heightened partisanship in our sharply divided age. (This is Debatable.) Helmut Norpoth of Stony Brook also predicted a Trump victory in 2016, factoring in results from early primary states. (This model in turn failed in 2020.) The takeaway here? Place your bets in a few months, based on approval or GDP, your call. Regarding the claim that incumbency no longer matters: 2024 will be confounding given that it’s likely to be in some sense a matchup between incumbents.

Now let’s go to the list!

1. Trump’s grip on the GOP. This deserves more explication than I’m presently prepared to deliver, but suffice to say: The Republican Party is Trump’s apparatchik to lose. This was in no way the case leading up to the 2016 election. To wit: Trump’s recent wishful thinking for a worsening economy in advance of November is one potentiality House Republicans might likely be able to achieve.

2. Redistricting and GOP voter suppression efforts. The 2024 election will be based on the 2020 census, which saw population loss in notably blue states (California, Illinois, New York) and big gains in some red states (Texas, Florida). Compounding matters, partisan redistricting (gerrymandering) on a state-by-state basis using the new census figures favored Republicans (due to a majority of state legislatures controlled by Republicans, and some Democratic-controlled bodies—New York—acquiescing to conservatives). Furthermore are measures introduced state-by-state to make voting more difficult, under the auspices of “election integrity.” Reduced numbers of polling places, restrictions to early and absentee voting, voter identification requirements — these changes all favor Republicans by making it more difficult to vote for younger, lower income, and non-white populations. Go figure.

3. The economy in the short term. Believe the ballyhoo: The economy is improving based on all the ordinary metrics. But the pandemic is still having pernicious effects, meaning indicators like GDP this year might not translate to the results we expect. Talking heads have been explicating the improved economy but pessimistic population by pointing out that a decline in the rate of inflation isn’t very visible or felt by consumers. Prices are still higher than they were, outstripping any wage growth some households might have seen. Interest rates, meanwhile, set by the Federal Reserve, are unlikely to return to the dramatic lows witnessed during the pandemic/the past decade. The stock market is hot but benefits few. Indeed, a lot of economic sizzle since the heart of the pandemic has served to only bring the country back to its pre-2020 baseline. The removal of pandemic-era safeguards (the moratorium on evictions) and end of emergency spending programs will have detrimental effects felt by voters. In the meantime, households are still accumulating debt (including notably the exorbitant amount of outstanding student loans the Biden administration once promised to alleviate). Traditional economic measures like GDP don’t do a good job of measuring the financial health of the average household — they were never intended to.

4. Longer-term economic and societal trends. More important than any of the preceding points are the long-term trends that have given rise to conservative populism and Trump & Co.’s cryptofascism. Real wage declines, manufacturing losses, and the hollowing out of the middle class are steady state trends dating to the late 1960s, as are soaring expenses like real estate, childcare, and education. The populists have a point; Trump’s rhetorical flourishes succeed because most American households really are worse off than a generation before. People are angry, and all the factors benefiting Trump in 2015 have only grown more dominate in the minds and lives of Americans. We are growing only more alienated and distant from government, and each other.

International affairs—e.g. wars in Ukraine and the middle east, other volatilities spurring migration (not the least of which, climate change)—appear at present to play into the authoritarian dynamic driving politics in the US and abroad.

Individuals gobsmacked by the 2016 election or Jan. 6 insurrection need to pay heed to history and resist the urge of Pollyannaish American exceptionalism. Maybe something changes. But I doubt it.

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Writing in 1953, Robert Nisbet defined alienation as:

“The state of mind that can find a social order remote, incomprehensible, or fraudulent; beyond real hope or desire; inviting apathy, boredom, or even hostility.” The alienated individual “not only does not feel a part of the social order; he has lost interest in being a part of it.”

Alienation (from the Latin alienus, or ‘of another place or person’) is a term familiar in the common lexicon. Still, this has not prevented myriad interpretations (some contradictory) in the scholarly literature. Alienation can be used to describe both people and groups. We can speak of an individual experiencing alienation (feeling ostracized or alone, detached from those around them), and also characterize a society or polity in which many find themselves to be thus afflicted. In the following passages I begin to describe my theory of alienation as a sociopolitical phenomenon—the felt sense of a widening chasm between individuals and society.

It’s helpful to begin with a psychological understanding of people vis-à-vis the groups they associate with—and one step further, intergroup relations—and I rely heavily here on two related research streams from the mid-20th century psychology literature: Social identity theory and self-categorization theory. The overarching lesson of social identity theory is that an individual’s sense of self is derived through their membership in affiliative groups. We learn who we are through the differentiation of the ingroup from the outgroup. The mere presence of groups begins the process of drawing boundaries.

I use social identity theory to predict that individuals will increasingly differentiate between in- and out-groups as they withdraw from (or find themselves apart from) society writ large; the need to make sense of the self prompts individuals to “fall back” to more proximal identities (e.g. partisan, racial, ethnic, or regional) as a compensatory strategy to reduce the psychological stress of not belonging. This may in turn further ostracize the individual from the relevant superordinate group identity (the nation as a whole, for example).

It’s important to note that social identity theory is wholly distinct from the contemporary discourse on “identity politics” — the former is innate and intrinsic to human sociality; the latter is chiefly polemical and pejorative.

To wit, I expect that alienated Americans: 1) are disillusioned by the state and (chiefly public) institutions, both of which are viewed cynically and with suspicion; 2) experience a sense of social distance from the surrounding community (be it the nation as a whole or another salient superordinate group); 3) perceive in society a steady erosion of moral norms, contributing to perceptions of societal conflict and moral incertitude or decay.

Causes

To the query of what precipitates alienation, then, the answer appears manifold. There are economic, social, and political factors that often appear associated and antecedent to alienation, such as: Rising income and wealth inequality and the accompanying decline in comparative life satisfaction for most people in contrast to those at the very top; long-term processes like the weakening of workers unions, deindustrialization, and globalization which increase the precarity of ordinary citizens’ lives and livelihoods; government unresponsiveness to constituents1 and regulatory capture; and acute political developments (for example, rapid immigration or the growing political influence of previously marginalized groups). Alienation as a process is likely compounded by present-day political sorting and polarization, two trends driving social divisions today.23

The measurement strategy I employ in later empirical analyses relies on the assumption that as alienation increases so do perceptions of moral conflict, decline, and incertitude. This expectation draws from Émile Durkheim’s work on the related concept of anomie, or the experience of moorlessness and the loss of societally prescribed rules and norms of conduct. As the alienated individual further withdraws from society, they grow more closely to resemble that affliction which Durkheim suggested led to the individual’s suicide.4

I suggest that one consequence of alienation is the adoption of a perspective of society oriented around groups; that is, focused more on intergroup relationships and competition as moral conflict grows more salient in the mind of the alienated individual. This leads to such phenomena as moral disengagement, or the holding of views that rationalize derogating or harming opponents5. As Jim Morrison once wrote: “People are strange when you’re a stranger; faces look ugly when you’re alone."

Consequences

A multitude of problems can arise when an individual comes to lack meaningful social relationships. The same can be said of attachment to social groups, and, likewise, society wholesale. When the individual is deprived of a place in society, their sense of self, of belonging, of understanding the world becomes less sure. This extends equally to the social and political domains.

Alienation can be thought of as one consequence of the psychological distress brought on by chronic malnourishment of the fundamental human need to belong.6 This want may occur at the level of individuals, e.g. interpersonal relationships, or at the level of groups, between the individual and society or between the individual’s relevant social groups and society (the nation as a whole). Understood fundamentally as a distressing psychological state, alienation can begin to be talked about as a biological or evolutionarily induced response to the loss of social ties.

Under Maslow’s 1943 hierarchy of needs7, the desires for belonging and esteem comprise the middle portion of human needs, after the most basic for food, shelter, and safety. But a body of evidence today suggests that these ‘secondary’ psychological needs are no less crucial for individuals to thrive.8 The alienated individual today is less sure of their environment and which social groups occupy it. The study of alienation is the study of what happens when Maslow’s hierarchy is hollowed out — or when Colonel Kurtz goes upriver.

We’re covering a lot of territory, so bear with me here.

A basic process of primate sociality is the formation of small social groups, or “grooming cliques.” These coalitions of individuals form the basis for strong social ties – those close interpersonal relationships in which mutual grooming might arise. On our first date, with some hesitancy, I ventured to tell my now-spouse that she had food in her hair. Thus began the formation of a strong social tie rooted in mutual trust and aid. The growth of such dyadic (meaning one-on-one) relationships, typically forming hierarchically structured small groups of individuals, are thought to help primates navigate life living in close proximity to others. Primate behavioral specialist Robin Dunbar writes that such coalitions

“essentially allow primates to manage a fine balancing act between keeping other individuals off their backs while at the same time avoiding driving them away altogether and thereby losing the benefits for which the groups formed in the first place.”

Dunbar calls this evolutionary pressure toward sociality the “social brain hypothesis.”9 Primates, universally among them and unique to their order, are social animals first and foremost. But we also do not allow just anyone to join our grooming circles. It is prudent to be cautious in the selection of close kin and mates, as mistakes can prove costly.

An influential anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford, Dunbar examined the relationship between two long-standing curiosities of the primate order, and specifically of the anthropoids, a group that includes monkeys, apes, and humans: First, their inordinately large brains (consuming some 20 percent of caloric intake in homo sapiens); and second, their sociality and the resulting complexity of social life, found elsewhere only in whales and dolphins. Considering all anthropoids, Dunbar found a significant positive relationship between volume of the neocortex—the location of higher-order brain functions including sensory perception, cognition, spatial reasoning, and language—and social group size as observed in nature, wherein each individual knows one another and their respective relationships with others.

This social group size appears to represent an upper bound of sorts: a function of each anthropoid’s respective cognitive capacity to simultaneously maintain a given number of relationships of sufficient depth “that they can be relied on to provide unstinting mutual support when one of them is under attack” (ibid). In social network analysis, these relationships might be said to constitute strong (versus weak) ties. They are strong in the sense of the dyadic or paired relationship between individuals, but also because individuals have many mutual, overlapping ties – resulting in a close-knit web of stable social relationships.

In the 1998 paper establishing the social brain hypothesis, the coefficient of determination (or R²) between size of the nonvisual neocortex and mean group size is a heady 0.61. (In the social sciences, one can rarely expect such a strong association between two variables.) Extrapolating from this, homo sapiens’ nonvisual neocortex suggests a social group size of about 150, known today as Dunbar’s number. And indeed, this number reflects the approximate community size of traditional hunter-gatherer and small-scale horticultural societies extant by the Upper Paleolithic period some 50,000 years ago. This “magic number” continues to find widespread use in business, education, and military applications.

Suffice to say we have diverged from this ideal community size in the time since humanity gave up foraging. Small cities today tally hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, the US adult population is 332 million, and the world population stands at 8 billion, on its way to ten by 2056. A majority of that population owns a cellphone, opening up real-time access to one another no matter physical distance. In 2011 Pew found that the average American had 634 “social connections”—online and off. These represent a “handful of very close social ties and a much larger number of weaker ties.”10 Technology today allows us to maintain contact with individuals we’ll never meet or interact with again. But some argue these weaker connections are inadequate toward satisfying an individual’s need for sociability. An individual may have hundreds or thousands of “friends” on Facebook and still no close connections to rely on or console.

As In Chimps So Too Humans

This is not to say that contemporary life precludes the formation of the same types of close, personal ties to family and friends as we understand formed the social networks of premodern man. Likewise, it is sufficient to say that modern advancements like the cell phone do not guarantee the presence of strong, close relationships. Primates of all species can face exclusion or expulsion from a social or familial group, often the result of competition for scarce resources (food or mates) or deviance from group norms (shirking, malevolence, or illness). In chimpanzees, adolescent males are pushed toward the periphery of the group by more aggressive adult males, until they mature and become reintegrated members of adult male society.11 This exclusion is a rite of passage; a necessary step in maturation for male chimpanzees. Humankind’s ability to exclude or punish is far greater.

Early studies of chimpanzees raised in isolation in captivity found them to become timid and withdrawn, evincing “stereotypies” like rocking, swaying, and thumbsucking; growing agitated and aggressive when introduced to novel objects (e.g. a ball or toy dog).1213 These behavioral effects of isolation have been witnessed in other species as well, including our own.1415

“Repeated exposure especially to unpredictable and inescapable stress can lead to learned helplessness in humans and nonhuman species, a state that is characterized by anxiety, inactivity and neophobia,” or the fear of novelty, write Reimers and colleagues, “as well as chronically increased cortisol values” (2007, p 428-9)

Or, in the case of social exclusion specifically, dysregulated cortisol patterns.1617 In sum, chronic psychological distress can have enduring effects on an individual’s physical and mental well being; particularly if experienced early in life.1819

As I wrote earlier, alienation is the product of feeling like you don’t belong. It may arise from insecurity about yourself vis-à-vis those around you (the experience of “imposter syndrome”) or uncertainty about how to behave in a given situation (feeling out of place). Baumeister and Leary call the need to belong a “fundamental human motivation.”20 The central conflict then is between the individual and society, and (of political interest) the point at which enough individuals in a population perceive themselves dispossessed such that we can say alienation becomes a societal affliction. So while depression or loneliness appear superficially similar, alienation stands as its own phenomenological concept—and the measurement strategy pursued subsequently is sensitive to this distinction. Alienation becomes increasingly politically significant the more the perception becomes chronic and widespread among some non-trivial proportion of the population, to the point that it can be said to sublimate into a collective consciousness—a shared perception or understanding—for the given group, and that group can be truly described as “alienated.”

Setting aside illness or forced solitude, the pool of alienation-inducing experiences in modern society is quite broad. Conflict can be thought of as a necessary component, either 1) at the level of the individual, where they may feel chronically unsure or stymied toward some pursuit (including group membership); 2) within or between relevant social groups vying for status or resources; or 3) at the mass societal level where rapid change can provoke uncertainty and perceptions of societal conflict in predisposed individuals. My focus for now centers mainly on the first condition. These mechanisms may operate independently or synergistically, and this association between alienation and views of societal conflict forms the basis for the measurement strategy I develop.

Alienation becomes politically salient at the point at which a significant enough proportion of the population is thusly afflicted. This is where I argue we find ourselves today.

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This post is a rewritten excerpt from my 2023 dissertation “The Alienated American.”

All rights reserved. No portion may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

References1

Oliver, J. E., & Rahn, W. M. (2016). Rise of the Trumpenvolk: Populism in the 2016 Election. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 667(1), 189-206.

2

Iyengar, S., Lelkes, Y., Levendusky, M., Malhotra, N., & Westwood, S. J. (2019). The origins and consequences of affective polarization in the United States. Annual review of political science, 22, 129-146.

3

Mason, L. (2018). Uncivil agreement: How politics became our identity. University of Chicago Press.

4

Durkheim, Emile. (1897/2005). Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press.

5

Kalmoe, N. P., and L. Mason. (2022). Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy. University of Chicago Press.

6

Fiske, Susan T. (2018) Social beings: Core motives in social psychology. John Wiley & Sons.

7

Maslow, A. H. (1943). A Theory of Human Motivation. Psychological Review 50, no. 4: 370–96.

8

Jetten, J., C. Haslam, and S. Haslam. (2012). The Social Cure: Identity Health and Wellbeing. Taylor & Francis.

9

Dunbar, R. I. M. (1998). The Social Brain Hypothesis. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 6, no. 5 (1998): 178–90.

10

Hampton, K., L. Sessions Goulet, and K. Purcell. (June 16, 2011). Social Networking Sites and Our Lives. Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech (blog).

11

Goodall, J. (1986). The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior: Patterns of Behaviour. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

12

McCulloch, T., and G. Haslerud. (1939). Affective Responses of An Infant Chimpanzee Reared in Isolation From Its Kind.

13

Menzel, E. W., R. K. Davenport, and C. M. Rogers. (1963). The Effects of Environmental Restriction upon the Chimpanzee’s Responsiveness to Objects. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology 56, no. 1: 78–85.

14

Weiss, R. (1975) Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation. New edition. Cambridge/Mass.: The MIT Press.

15

Beerda, B., Matthijs B. H., Schilder, J. A. R. A. M. van Hooff, and H. W. de Vries. (1997). Manifestations of Chronic and Acute Stress in Dogs. Applied Animal Behaviour Science. Behavioural Problems of Small Animals, 52, no. 3: 307–19.

16

Sapolsky, R. M. (2005). The Influence of Social Hierarchy on Primate Health. Science. (New York, N.Y.) 308, no. 5722: 648–52.

17

Dickerson, S. S., and P. M. Zoccola. (2013). Cortisol Responses to Social Exclusion. In The Oxford Handbook of Social Exclusion, 143–51. Oxford Library of Psychology. New York, NY, US: Oxford University Press.

18

Nicolson, N. A. (2004). Childhood parental loss and cortisol levels in adult schmen. Psychoneuroendocrinology 29.8: 1012-1018.

19

Schreier, H. M.C., M. B. Enlow, T. Ritz, C. Gennings, and R. J. Wright. (2015). Childhood Abuse Is Associated with Increased Hair Cortisol Levels among Urban Pregnant Women. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 69, no. 12: 1169–74.

20

Baumeister, R. F., and M. R. Leary. (1995). The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation. Psychological Bulletin 117, no. 3: 497–529.

“Americans have had a growing sense at some visceral level of disintegrating social bonds.”

Robert Putnam, "Bowling Alone" (2000, p. 367)

Let me know if you’ve heard this one before.

As a youth I knew of no adult truly satisfied with their lot in life. Cynicism was the civic culture of my childhood in rural upstate New York in the 1990s. Neither of my parents had a college degree, and they subsequently worked — as opposed to having “careers” — my mother paid under the table to clean houses and my father employed mostly part-time as a rural letter carrier for the postal service (a plum job for someone with only a high school degree). Other adult relatives and acquaintances secured what employment there was to be had: seasonal work at the local ski mountain, kiosks at the mall, farms that required new fencing.

None of this is to say that my childhood was particularly difficult or that the Clinton-era economy was not mostly working out for those around me. But irrespective of political leaning or party (my parents steadfast Democrats) the lasting impression I had was a view of government and public institutions as hindrances rather than help. Fire departments, ambulance squads, schools and town councils operated in spite of laborious mandates from distant entities in Albany or Washington DC. The editor/proprietor of what passed for the local newspaper drove a Bronco with a bumper sticker that read “I am the militia.” This provincial mindset was, I could only assume, representative of much of rural America in the 1990s, beset by events like the Oklahoma City bombing and standoffs in Waco and Ruby Ridge. Over the ensuing decades, the general American public has arguably only grown warier of politics and “big government.”

A Global Pandemic

Writing amid the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems self-evident to say that conditions are ripe for many Americans (not to mention others across the globe) to feel cynical, forgotten about, and alone as ties within and between local communities continue to loosen. Academics, albeit not the most affected, are at least aware of this phenomenon given research with snappy titles like Alienated America, Strangers in Their Own Land, The New Minority, and Deaths of Despair. I believe this line of work is onto something, although its authors often skirt the heart of the matter. My argument, and the central contention of this project, is that conditions in the 21st century are increasingly conducive to the atomization of individuals — and this development has major implications for a host of today’s societal woes, from rising morbidity due to drug and alcohol use to open hostilities following national elections or instances of police brutality.

Trends in recent decades propelling this sense of alienation or estrangement include increasingly inequitable social and economic conditions, dwindling government responsiveness to non-wealthy constituencies, and an increasingly strained relationship between people and groups on one hand and political and civil society on the other. These trends are associated with steadily decreasing levels of trust and political efficacy as captured across a multitude of studies and surveys.

These long-term trends come before factoring in the effects of the global pandemic beginning in 2020. The rapidity with which public health measures became politicized early on in the US was impressive, with political divisions between Democrats and Republicans drawing the lines for debate over the most appropriate public health response. In an environment where trust in government, the media, and experts were all in steady decline, the emergence of a very real public health threat—and accompanying dissatisfactory federal response—only served to further erode confidence in those institutions. After two years of pandemic response across both Democratic and Republican administrations, at the state and federal level, fully half of Americans in January 2022 gloomily expected that “the worst is still to come.” In February of that year, the US recorded its one-millionth excess death attributable to the pandemic.

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This post is a rewritten excerpt from my 2023 dissertation “The Alienated American.”

References

Gilens, M. (2005). Inequality and democratic responsiveness. Public Opinion Quarterly, 69(5), 778-796.

Gilens, M. (2012). Affluence and influence: Economic inequality and political power in America. Princeton University Press.

Oliver, J. E., & Rahn, W. M. (2016). Rise of the Trumpenvolk: Populism in the 2016 Election. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 667(1), 189-206.

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