Loneliness is breaking America
Polling data from AEI’s Survey Center on American Life found that 17 percent of Americans said they had not a single person in their “core social network.” These “socially disconnected voters were far more likely to view Trump positively and support his reelection than those with more robust personal networks,” wrote Cox.
It’s not just Trumpism that feeds on isolation. Consider QAnon, which has morphed from an internet message board hoax into a quasi-religion. In his book “The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything,” journalist Mike Rothschild shows how central a sense of digital community is to QAnon’s appeal. “It’s one of the reasons why baby boomers have fallen in with Q to such a surprising degree – many are empty nesters, on their own, or retired,” he writes.
It’s also likely a reason that QAnon started expanding in tandem with COVID-19 lockdowns, finding new life among Instagram influencers, yoga practitioners and suburban moms. Suddenly, people all over America had their social lives obliterated, and many mothers found themselves trapped in domestic isolation beyond anything imagined by Betty Friedan. Stuck at home, they had more time to get sucked into internet rabbit holes. QAnon, which came to merge with COVID-trutherism, gave them an explanation for their misery and villains to blame.
A cruel paradox of COVID-19 is that the social distancing required to control it nurtured pathologies that are now prolonging it. Isolated, atomized people turned to movements that turned them against vaccines. Here, too, Arendt was prescient. She described people shaken loose from any definite place in the world as being at once deeply selfish and indifferent to their own well-being: “Self-centeredness, therefore, went hand in hand with a decisive weakening of the instinct for self-preservation.”
One of the most vivid characters in Bender’s book is Randal Thom, a 60-year-old Marine veteran whose wife and children left him because of his drug problem, and who spent time in prison. “The rallies became the organizing principle in his life, and Trump fans loved him for it,” writes Bender. “Like Trump himself, all of Randal’s past mistakes didn’t matter to them.”
When he got sick with what he believed was COVID-19, he refused to go to the hospital, lest he “potentially increase the caseload on Trump’s watch.” (He survived but died in a car crash on his way home from a Trump boat parade in October.)
Toward the end of Bender’s book, Saundra reappears. She’d just been at the Capitol for the Jan. 6 insurrection and seemed ready for more. “Tell us where we need to be, and we just drop everything and we go,” she says. “Nobody cares about if they have to work. Nobody cares about anything.”
If you give people’s life meaning, they’ll give you everything. – NYT