Social isolation causes extremism
Timothy P. Carney
Humans are tribal creatures. We are made to belong to things — families, churches, communities, clubs, subcultures, teams, et cetera. Individuals deprived of these natural sources of belonging and connection will seek a tribe in some other way.
In Alienated America in 2019, I argued that America’s deficit of belonging explained so many of our current social maladies. It explained our retreat from marriage, our falling birthrates, our deaths of despair, and our contentious politics — including Donald Trump.
DEMOCRATS OPTIMISTIC AS JULIE SU’S LABOR NOMINATION LANGUISHES SENATE
Young men join street gangs, white supremacist groups, and ISIS because they need belonging, and society doesn’t give it to them in healthier ways. In a far less acute manner, I argued, Americans join MAGA, Occupy Wall Street, and the #Resistance out of a deep need for a tribe.
This may sound obvious, but a lot of people spend a lot of time arguing against this.
Sometimes I detect a very strong desire among many intellectuals to deny any connection between protest movements and social alienation. Some of it is simply a desire for rigorous research, since alienation and social capital are not necessarily easy to measure. Some of it is that many economists and researchers are introverted, a bit Rousseauian, and averse to little platoons.
Many journalists don’t want to think MAGA or QAnon was rooted in any sort of suffering but instead was just a flare-up of bad people being bad.
Into this debate enters a rigorous new paper in the American Journal of Sociology, titled “Alienation and Activism.” Sociologist Miloš Broćić finds that “alienation in the forms of meaninglessness and social isolation predicts participating in both radical and reactionary movements.”
Broćić relies on the National Survey of Youth and Religion, which includes surveys and interviews of more than 3,000 teenagers and their parents from 2003 through 2013.
The kids were asked if they generally “feel alone and misunderstood” and if life felt “meaningless” to them. Children who felt alone or meaningless were far more likely to participate in protests. Specifically, “meaninglessness and social isolation were the strongest predictors for Occupy Wall Street.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
After January 6, I wrote about the connection between rootlessness and extremism. People stormed the Capitol in part because they felt alone and life felt meaningless to them.
If you want to keep your children out of antifa or insurrections, bring them to church or put them on a good baseball team. If you think that our problem is tribalism, you’re missing the fact that we all need something to belong to.