Americans aren’t getting along so well. Surveys suggest that we are as polarized as we’ve been for 150 years. “We can’t fix this with new legislation,” writes Nebraska senator Ben Sasse in Them: Why We Hate Each Other and How to Heal. “We don’t need a new program, a new department, one more election.” “If we could wave a magic wand and make all of the political acrimony disappear,” he adds, “it might bankrupt some of the cable news networks, but it wouldn’t do much to fill the hole millions of Americans feel in their lives right now.”
Sasse’s book, out today, is an attempt to explain why, despite the country’s unparalleled prosperity, things seem so grim.
He takes a page out of Democracy in America. Describing his travels here in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of a country rich in associational life, “associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive” that cut across class and creed. These types of associations built and preserved healthy relationships, Tocqueville thought, between those who come from different backgrounds and have different views about the way things ought to be. In Them, Sasse writes:
Many of the seemingly insoluble troubles afflicting Americans, Sasse thinks, stem from the decline in voluntary associations—or, to use the modern term, mediating institutions: the families and societies and associations and churches and synagogues that traditionally kept Americans together. The family unit has fractured. Around 40 percent of children in America are born out of wedlock. Church attendance has cratered. Friendships, with technology and increased mobility, have fragmented. Politics has become the center of life instead of family, church, sports, or clubs. These associations and institutions once mediated between citizen and citizen, and citizen and government, and all at lower stakes than the national stage.
Tip O’Neill’s famous dictum that “all politics is local” has been inverted: All politics is now national. In no small part, the rise of bad-incentive-driven “politainment”—not just on cable news but in all media—has created outrage on a national scale where little or none should exist.
Sasse sees what’s gone wrong and suggests how we might make it better. The remedy is at home: in our neighborhoods, our communities, and our houses of worship. Most of our modern encumbrances don’t require arguments—or Facebook posts or tweets—but associating, accepting, and knowing “the other”—knowing them. This isn’t the kind of book that’s likely to light up cable news and set the talking heads aflutter. But his book is a serious one, and we hope its author will consider leading, not just our national conversation at a dangerous moment, but the country itself.
