Editor's Note: This opinion piece originally published on author Dan Sally's personal page and has been republished on IVN with his permission.
It takes a beautiful media mind to know how to turn a near-death experience into the ultimate photo op before the smoke has cleared from your would-be assassin’s rifle. Trump’s defiant fist in the air while chanting “Fight” embodied the spirit of his campaign and those who follow him.
Trump has used his numerous legal and political struggles to cast himself as a figure unfairly targeted by elites who see him as a threat to their continued dominance of our economy and culture. The same economy that has grown the least in the regions where he’s most popular and the same culture portrayed in popular media that seems further and further away from the communities where his voters live.
In this sense, the latest assassination attempt is yet another example of how far “they” will go to stop him.
But who is the “they” that we’re fighting against?
In the most literal sense, the “they” was Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. While many details about Crooks and his motives are still coming to light, what facts have emerged put him among a larger group of isolated young men who chose to make headlines with a semi-automatic rifle and a public place.
Classmates described Crooks as a loner who was frequently bullied for the way he dressed. He was a gun enthusiast who wore a Demolition Ranch t-shirt at the time of the shooting - a firearms-focused YouTube channel.
What’s most telling isn’t how neighbors described Crooks and his family, but how little they were able to say about them. One neighbor described Bethel Park as a quiet town where “people kind of keep to themselves”. So it’s not hard to see how someone like Crooks may have slipped through the cracks.
America: Lonely Island of Liberty
The lack of social cohesiveness in communities was first noticed by political scientist Robert Putnam and the subject of his book Bowling Alone. He documented how between the 1960s and 1990s, participation in civic organizations, attendance at religious services, and even family dinners had all declined, while the number of people living alone tripled.
Since his book’s publication in 2000, these trends have continued.
Loneliness and isolation have become such a problem in our society that Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory on the issue last year. The report cited how the health impacts of loneliness equate to smoking 15 cigarettes per day, leading to an increased risk of heart disease, stroke, hypertension, and premature death. Loneliness is also attributed to a higher risk of mental health disorders, including depression, anxiety, suicidality, and self-harm.
Like Putnam, Murthy’s report lays much of the blame on a combination of economic pressures, urbanization, and technological changes weakening the ties between people in their communities.
These trends also follow a decline in trust in institutions and a decline in affiliation with America’s two major parties. The same lack of trust and partisan allegiance that has made someone like Trump so appealing.
This also isn’t the first time this has happened in American history.
The Last Time Things Were This Bad
In the late 1800s, technological changes via the Industrial Revolution made a small group of very wealthy as income inequality widened, displaced jobs, brought economic growth to America’s cities at the expense of rural communities, and led to concerns politicians were more beholden to powerful business interests than to the voters.
In short, absolutely nothing like the present day.
In his 2020 follow-up to Bowling Alone, The Upswing, Putnam and his coauthor, Shaylyn Romney Garrett document how the decline in civic participation and rise in individualism in this era was notably similar to today. There were concerns about rising juvenile delinquency among young men who sought relevance via violence and criminality. There was even a media-savvy Republican candidate whose larger-than-life personality and populist rhetoric ruffled feathers within his party.
But what brought America out of this era wasn’t one strong political figure tearing down the establishment, but a large number of ordinary people organizing and taking action to push through reforms that improved labor conditions, improved regulation of business and the financial sector, and gave voters more of a say in who was elected into office and what they did while there. Reforms such as women’s suffrage, the direct election of senators, and the party primaries gave more voters more say in the electoral process and moved government towards serving the greater good.
Investing in the Right Kinds of Capital
Much of Putnam’s work focuses on the value of what he refers to as bridging social capital over bonding social capital. Whereas bonding social capital refers to the connection between people of similar backgrounds, such as religious, ethnic, or economic, bridging social capital refers to connections between those who are different.
Where civic organizations once served as a way to connect people of different backgrounds, our increased isolation has worked to the advantage of figures and organizations who increasingly speak to those more like “us” who often foster suspicion of people like “them”.
It would be overly simplistic to say this could be solved by one single reform. A number of policies and actions by private citizens are required to help turn this around.
This being said, there are steps we can take to encourage those seeking office to invest in bridging strategies and lessen the divides between Americans.
Open primaries would help by allowing the 50% of voters who affiliate with neither party to have a say in who makes it on the ballot in the general election, as opposed to more partisan voters who prefer more hard line candidates.
Ranked-choice voting, which allows voters to rank their candidates in order of preference, would give candidates an incentive to appeal to voters outside their in-group, as second and third choice votes would matter as well.
Both would ease partisan divisions in Washington and get an increasingly unproductive American government back into the business of passing laws that benefit the American people. With this, we might finally be able to address the economic changes that have Americans working more and connecting less while giving young men like Matthew Crooks the support they need to live productive lives.
So, when we’re asked to fight, we should be clear about who our enemy is. The popular answer seems to be our fellow citizens. A more accurate answer seems to be the structures that isolate and divide us.