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.