Political analysts often look at election results through a narrow political lens. That is, they want to know how a candidate won, and perhaps extrapolate from that some lessons that can help them predict future elections. In his great new book Alienated America, my colleague Tim Carney goes one step further: He uses the 2016 election results as a jumping off point for an insightful exploration of contemporary life that chronicles why for so many people, the American dream seems dead.
President Trump’s election was more shocking to political elites than any prior election in American history. As analysts have struggled to figure out what happened, two competing explanations have emerged for Trumpism. On one side are those who believe that racism and xenophobia, stoked by Trump’s rhetoric, helped drive up white working-class turnout in the decisive states. On the other side are those who have insisted that it was actually economic anxiety that gave us Trump. Carney offers an alternate explanation: that it was the breakdown of local civil society — that part of the nation that exists between the individual and the government — that explains Trump’s rise. This can include places of worship, VFW halls, unions, or T-ball leagues — all of those institutions that bring us together outside of the political sphere. “When Trump caught so many political commentators off guard, we looked for an explanation amid the closing factories, but we should have been looking for the closing churches,” Carney writes.
I don’t want to give away too much of the book. For more specifics you can read an adapted excerpt from Carney’s book that ran in the Washington Examiner’s magazine. But what I will say is that even if you think racism or economics is a better explanation for Trump’s rise, you should grapple with Carney’s argument. In the book, he marshals a significant amount of data to bolster his case, and it should be enough to convince even a skeptic that his theory at least is part of the mix of factors that made Trump president. For instance, looking at data, he found that social connectedness (measured in ways such as frequency of church attendance) was more predictive of Trump’s success during the primaries than other factors, such as economics.
It should be noted that Carney focused on data from the primaries. That’s because those people who may not have liked Trump but came around to supporting him in the general election because they hated Hillary Clinton more don’t tell us as much. At least, they don’t say as much about his appeal as those who flocked to him from the beginning when there were other candidates to choose from who promised to govern as conservatives. Trump’s dark rhetoric about the state of the country and promise to “Make America Great Again” clearly resonated with one set of Americans, for whom Sen. Marco Rubio’s retort that “America is already great” fell flat. Carney makes a compelling case that it was in these places that had seen an erosion of civil society.
Though Carney cites a lot of data and research, his book is filled out with personal stories and on-the-ground reporting from his time on the campaign trail. This and his elegant writing (with occasional touches of humor) make it an easy read rather than a dense social science study. Ultimately, he is telling a narrative of the state of American communities over the past 50 years.
Truth be told, I’m probably more enamored with individualism than Carney, and perhaps more wary of the conformity, intrusiveness, and prejudices also associated with old-fashioned close-knit communities (downsides that Carney himself acknowledges). But even a libertarian purest or person whose Randian senses tingle at the mention of religion or community should be able to acknowledge that as civil society erodes, government is going to step in to fill the vacuum. So anybody who wants to limit the power of the state has an interest in stronger communities.
If you’ve read this far, you may believe you’ve heard all you need to about the book and no longer need to read it. But you’d be wrong. I’ve spoken to Carney about these themes for several years now, and I still got a great deal out of the book and found it was time well spent.
