President Trump began his presidency uttering the phrase “American carnage,” and the commentators scoffed. Every month, it seems, we get new evidence that the carnage is real.
More Americans are dying of despair now than during any time in history, a new study finds. Suicide rates are climbing. Alcohol deaths are, too. The picture on drugs is even worse, with overdose deaths tripling in the past 20 years.
These numbers highlight how off-base was the reaction to Trump’s line in his inaugural address. “Trump gives us ‘American carnage,’” wrote New York Times editor Andrew Rosenthal, as if these problems didn’t exist without Trump. The Times editorial that day chastised Trump’s “fantastical version of America.”
“With sweeping exaggeration,” the editors wrote, “Mr. Trump spoke of ‘carnage.’”
Of course, the carnage isn’t merely in the inner cities. Hidden in the new death data from the Trust for America’s Health is a telling correlation. The states with the highest and fastest-rising suicide rates include Montana, Wyoming, and Alaska. The states with the lowest rates include Maryland and New Jersey. Roughly, suicide in America seems inversely proportional with population density.
Put another way, isolation is killing us. The rise in opioid usage can be blamed on a similar phenomenon: “social vacancy,” as one West Virginia newspaperman put it. “People don’t feel they have a purpose.”
This highlights a weakness in the bipartisan elite consensus on the economy that existed before Trump crashed onto the scene: If free trade, subsidized trade, heavy regulation, and immigration policies aimed at maximizing the availability of low-skilled labor were bad for the working class, well, we could make it up to them with a more generous safety net.
But welfare and no work didn’t lead to healthy inner cities in the 1970s and 1980s, and it’s not leading to healthy rural counties today. As happened in the inner cities decades ago, rural America is seeing men drop out of the labor force and out of family life — marriage is falling, and out-of-wedlock births are increasing.
These ill effects are lost on most of the media because we live in bubbles where the evils are much rarer.
Recent numbers should shake us out of our slumber. Just because Trump says things are bad out there doesn’t mean we ought to deny it. Just because the struggling working-class families cling to their guns and vote for Trump doesn’t mean they deserve their suffering.
The carnage is real, even if Trump says so.
