When a U.S. senator sets pen to paper to explain the core problems of Washington and America as a whole, you don’t expect the explanation to come down to “loneliness.” But that’s the central message of Republican Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse’s new book, Them.
The cruel irony is that Sasse is right, and there’s nothing that he, as a federal lawmaker, can do about it.
Them, Sasse’s title, invokes the tribalistic antagonism of today’s politics. “Tribalism” is mostly uttered today as a derogatory word, but Sasse argues, aptly, that humans are meant to live in tribes. The problem is that more natural and healthy tribes have faded away, and that the sort of fake-tribes that replace them in the modern age are harmful.
Political strife today is so intense “because the local, human relationships that anchored political talk have shriveled up,” Sasse writes. “Alienated from each other, and uprooted from places we can call home, we’re reduced to shrieking.”
Throughout, Sasse emphasizes the importance of place. He recommends buying a cemetery plot to root yourself and your family in a place rather than skating about the surface of the earth, ready to go where the wind takes you. “Our world is nudging us toward rootlessness, when only a recovery of rootedness can heal us.”
Sasse is dead right about the central problem. To understand the problems of economic immobility, deaths of despair, political strife—and, frankly why Donald Trump won the GOP nomination in 2016—you need to look at the local level and study the erosion of rootedness.
I’ve passed through similar territory in writing my own book, “Alienated America,” due out in February. These two books on eroded civil society, written at the same time, reflect a lesson of Trump’s win that the materialistic accounts and the bird’s-eye analyses missed: That America’s woes are localized and stem from community collapse.
The strength of Sasse’s Them is its accurate assessment of the root problem. The weaknesses are the crucial connections Sasse never quite makes, thus leaving his account incomplete.
For instance, when Sasse discusses family breakdown among the poor and working class, he seems to totally miss the cause. “If we are going to make any lasting difference in the lives of our neighbors struggling in poverty—or wrestling with loneliness—we must tell the truth about the irreplaceable role of family.”
Sure. Family and marriage are good, and we should say that. But preaching marriage and family values won’t bring them about. Sasses places the retreat from marriage primarily in the working class and the poor, which is almost true. More precisely, it’s happening in places where community institutions have evaporated and social cohesion is a faint memory. Family and marriage aren’t easy, and they need an infrastructure around them in order to be sturdy.
So if you want to increase marriage among the poor, the answer isn’t explaining its importance to the poor, but building the scaffolding that provides the support and the modeling for family. Sasse correctly sees family as a source of social capital, but he doesn’t seem to acknowledge that social capital is a source of strong families.
The biggest problem here, though, is that Sasse tried to write a book about the decline of community in the U.S. without writing about church. Sasse mentions his own religious observance a bit and has a true and good riff on religious liberty. But when discussing institutions of civil society, he almost entirely ignores the immense role that church plays, and how much harm is absence is creating.
It’s not special pleading to expect religious congregations be featured in a book on community. About half of all civic participation originates from religious institutions, estimates Robert Putnam of Bowling Alone. Particularly, for the poor and working class who cannot afford to live in the best public school districts, who may not have the cash and spare time to put Bobby on a travel team, and who don’t belong to country clubs, a mosque, synagogue, or church, will always be the most accessible institution of civil society.
Perhaps it’s a Midwestern nicety of not talking about religion. Perhaps it reflects a politician’s need for ecumenism. Whatever the reason, the absence of religion leaves a chasm in his discussion of human-level communities and “natural tribes.”
The most important thing about Them, though, is that it correctly states the core problem in American society today: we are not connected enough to one another in the sort of communities and sort of relationships that can form the foundation of the good life. Sasse was sharp enough to see this. And he’s smart enough to know it’s a problem the U.S. Senate cannot solve.
