The book’s full title – Them: Why We Hate Each Other – and How We Heal – speaks to its grand ambition. Sasse argues that the whirling cesspool of American politics need not be so ugly and futile, that we can recover our sense of decency and our national pride. It’s an appealing message, but only Sasse’s biggest fans will be satisfied by this book. Its diagnosis of our ills is superficial and one-sided; its proposed solutions are feeble. Were it a book from nearly anyone else, its lightness would be laughable.

But Sasse is not anyone else; he may seek to stand for President in 2020 and, now 46, will still be young enough to run four years later. Let’s wade into the book’s shallow pools, therefore, to see why he falls so short. We will also find nuggets of wisdom there that may, in time, grow into a mature understanding of America’s maladies and help him fulfill his substantial promise.

Further reading

What does America want?

By Henry Olsen

Them is really two books. The first of these (I’ll consider the second in my next article), addresses the purported decline in America’s sense of community, which Sasse blames for both a decline in life expectancy and individual happiness. He says this isolation, this loss of community, simply transfers our natural needs for meaning and belonging to a national, political stage, where we are easily manipulated by an unscrupulous but highly profitable ‘politainment’ industry.

Community is at the heart of Them. As Sasse tells it, America was once filled with towns like the one he grew up in, Fremont, Nebraska. Children grew up under the watchful eyes of a league of parents. The Friday night football games at the local high school were where “everyone showed up”, where “there were no rich and poor – there were only Fremont Tigers”. In these “tight-knit places so many of us had called home”, “the town was in it together”.

Today those places, according to Sasse, either don’t exist or are quickly fading away. Parents are not “keeping an eye out on the roving bands of kids, making sure they aren’t up to no good. No longer is the town packing the stands for the game.” The result is loneliness, and loneliness is tearing America apart.

People used to have one primary community for all of their lives. Sasse’s own family lived in Fremont for four generations; his maternal grandfather had carved the altarpiece that is still used by the local cemetery. These days, though, economic opportunity draws people into the vortex of the city and the suburb.

Further reading

America 2025: a nation violently divided

By Henry Olsen

Sasse cites a dizzying blizzard of social science to support his claims, along with references to the work of Charles Murray and Robert Putnam (men who also grew up in small, Midwestern towns and also noted a decline in community cohesiveness). He fails to note, though, that Putnam’s most important work dates from the 1990s, chronicling decline in the period Sasse (who graduated high school in 1990) recalled so fondly.

Ambitious people like Sasse, though, become nomads. Sasse paid taxes in a dozen states in the first decade of his marriage. The result of this rootlessness: no one knows each other and everyone retreats into their own, social media-fuelled echo chamber, replacing real attachments with virtual ones.

Sasse argues that the very survival of our republic and our happiness as individuals is at stake. With such a challenge, what could the remedy possibly be? Not what you’d think. Sasse is one politician who seems to genuinely hate politics. His opening chapter is entitled “More Politics Won’t Fix This”.

And so we come to his wholly unsatisfactory recommendation. He says challenges which are global in nature can only be addressed by tiny individual steps. The ones he proposes – limiting internet screen time; spending time in your community; making regular time to meet old friends – are not going to make Fremont great again.

Further reading

A culture war the Founding Fathers couldn't foresee

By Henry Olsen

They might, at a push, reinvigorate community on the margins, but they’d take an awful lot longer to change mass behaviour. It’s like Abraham Lincoln on the eve of the Civil War saying that slavery is an evil that is ripping America apart, and then saying that rather than ban slavery in the territories it’s important to follow St Paul and be nicer to the slaves. As they say in the South, that dog don’t hunt.

Sasse’s diagnosis is also seriously flawed. Even if we accept his glowing description of 1980s Fremont, the fact is that most Americans stopped living in these places decades ago. The explosive growth of the automobile dependent suburb, subsidised by the federal government through its housing and transportation policies, meant that by 1970, 70% of America’s population lived in a metropolitan area. By 1990, the year Sasse graduated from high school, that share had risen to 77%. In short, Fremont’s Dodge County, which remains a non-metro area, has long been a throwback to America’s distant past.

Life in a metropolitan area is defined by the separation of work, life, and play. You work in one place, drive or take public transit to another to shop, go to yet another place to worship, and none of these places needs be within a mile of your home. You share these different experiences with different people in each place, and these people also share their lives with different people in each place. You may not know any of your neighbours, but that does not mean you do not know plenty of people or that you do not form friendships that matter with them. It’s just that the human interactions you do have are by choice rather than by accident and are unbounded by geography.

Further reading

The ugly truth behind Amazon's beauty contest

By Ian Birrell

A serious attempt to return to the geographically-bounded communities that Sasse remembers would mean tackling this separation head on, forcibly rebundling them – a gargantuan undertaking, and one unlikely to succeed. Maybe America could do something like Britain does: create mandatory green space between discrete towns, to nudge people into identifying with a small area and thus subtly encouraging the informal interactions upon which genuine community depends. Doing this now, however, would leave America’s vast suburbs largely in place, committing tens of millions of people to the allegedly inferior life there.

American politicians who propose limiting the growth of cities are almost always found on the Left – and are criticised by those on the Right for sacrificing consumer preference and cheaper housing on the altar of social planning. If the community deficit is as serious as Sasse proposes, perhaps it’s a sacrifice worth paying. But given Sasse cannot bring himself to consider limiting of the size of cities, perhaps this isn’t quite the problem he makes it out to be.

That’s because his real aim is not in recreating community; he aims to heal America’s political divide. Sasse implicitly acknowledges that in his youth Americans did not hate each other because of politics. Yet most Americans did not live in tight-knit communities during this time. Something else must have happened to bring about the intense vitriol and anger that makes Sasse and millions like him despair.

Further reading

And finally: the good news from flyover county

By Peter Franklin

We can begin to see what that might be by looking at what’s missing from Sasse’s own description of Fremont. Fremont High and its Friday night games looms large in his retelling, the place where “everyone” went. But it turns out Fremont High was not the only high school in town. Archbishop Bergan served many of the town’s Catholics and fielded their own sports teams. Indeed, despite their tiny size their basketball team won the Nebraska state championship during Sasse’s freshman year, something that a self-described “gym rat” who spent “enough hours there that it came to feel like an extension” of his home was surely aware of. Everyone, it turns out, does not mean everyone.

People like Sasse who extol tight-knit communities almost always miss those on the margins who don’t quite fit in. Possibly because these people generally avoid outing themselves. They’ll show up at mandatory events like pep rallies and cheer the obligatory cheers, and then go back to their quiet closeted lives where they can carve out a space of dignity far from the maddening crowd.

If they are lucky, like the kids at Archbishop Bergan, they can carve out their own space to establish their own community. If they are not, like countless outsiders, punks, theatre kids, and anyone else who has ever found themselves on the margins of high school, they cling to the shadows and ensure they remain unseen.

Further reading

Trumpism: America's new religion

By Peter Franklin

America was once a nation of communities dominated by people of faith like Sasse. Coincidentally, Sasse’s life spans the period when this group passed from a majority to a distinct minority. This, not the supposed decline in community, might have something to do with the change in the tone of American politics since Sasse’s youth.

There’s an old medieval German expression that’s relevant here: “Stadtluft macht frei” – city air makes one free. Under German feudal law, a serf who could escape to a city and remain there undetected for a year and a day was freed of his obligations and became a freeman. Cities and their modern suburban equivalents have always been havens for those who don’t care to fit into tight communities, for the people who want to be free.

Visit Americas cities and suburbs and you will find all those people who want to be free from old-time community – career women, ethnic minorities, non-Christians of all stripes, LGBT people. Analyse America’s political divide and you will find the cities and suburbs on one side and the rural and small towns on the other.

Further reading

How long can Trump hang on to the evangelicals?

By Francis Fitzgerald

Scratch the surface of any angry debate, such as the one surrounding Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, and you will find partisans on both sides of this divide, each convinced that the other means to force them into the shadows.

This divide between those who reject traditional American community and those who revere it is at the heart of the bitterness that typifies today’s politics. Sasse, as we will see in the second part of this review, is not wholly unaware of this. Feckless paeans to a fading communitarian past will not heal our divide, but in parts Sasse is on to something which, properly developed, might.

Levittown, Pennsylvania, could have been one of those towns. Once economically reliant on five large manufacturers, the 55,000-person community could have fallen and stayed down when those employers left or downsized. But unlike other towns, Levittown got up. Today its houses are well-kept and protect new young families, and its high streets, though different, still cater to people with jobs and a future. If you didn’t know its history, you would think it was the sort of place that healthy countries always have – one that gives ordinary people comfort, hope, and community and that allows those with greater talents or ambition a start to achieve something more – and you’d be right.

More on Levittown

Trump won because he cared – lessons from Levittown

By Henry Olsen

I went to Levittown recently to discover why its residents, White and working-class for the most part, abandoned their long-time voting patterns to embrace Donald Trump. But I also went to find out why Levittown avoided the fate of countless communities who suffered from America’s de-industrialisation. What I found was something I did not expect. Levittown survived and renewed itself because of the spirit of its people.

Of course, that wasn’t the only thing that contributed to the town’s rebirth – private and public investment also played a role. Alberto,[1. The names of all interviewees are pseudonyms, which I provided them by agreement to encourage candour in our discussion.] a sixty-ish college drop-out and community activist, for example, told me about how smart government had aided the town’s comeback. He told me about how the county and township governments cooperated to offer tax incentives for smaller companies that wanted to locate there. These entities also cooperated with state government to reposition a port once used by US Steel into a hub used by many businesses to ship or import what they build or use. Today, steel has been replaced by concrete and asphalt going out and sand coming in to be taken by truckers to the burgeoning oil and gas fracking fields in northern Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale fields.

Levittown also bounced back because of shrewd decisions made by US Steel. “Once the old plant declined,” local politico Greg told me, “US Steel became a land developer because of all the property it owned.” With state and local help, the old steel plant became home to hundreds of small manufacturers, especially those involved in chemical production or refining. “Lots of tool and die shops here too,” Greg said as we drove past a couple of them. At its height the old US Steel plant employed 10,000 workers. Today, Greg says, the property provides over 7,000 jobs among over 100 different employers. These new jobs don’t pay as much as the old manufacturers, but they also don’t require a college education and, perhaps combined with a spouse’s earnings, provide a solid middle-class income.

Levittown’s location also helped. It sits only five minutes from two major thoroughfares, I-95 – America’s main north-south road on the East Coast – and Route 1, a significant local road. This doesn’t just attract small businesses: many independent truckers choose to live in Levittown, taking advantage of the affordable homes and easy access to the roads they earn their living on. Frequent rail service is available from local railroad stations for commuters heading into bigger cities. And as well as the local port, Philadelphia’s own port and international airport sit only 30 minutes away.

Local schools also played their part by emphasising vocational education for the town’s children. Greg drove me to Lower Bucks Technical High School. It’s a huge, modern building, a far cry from the smaller and older technical high school that services the much wealthier and larger suburban Washington suburb in which I live. Here kids who won’t go to college can be trained for jobs in a wide variety of industries from cosmetology, to auto body repair, to air conditioning unit servicing. Apprenticeships with area employers ensure graduates quickly get real jobs making real money. “21-year olds here can make $50,000 to $70,000 a year starting out in these jobs,” Greg said. He fretted that perhaps that was too much money for people so young. “I’m not sure I could have been trusted with that much pocket money when I was 21,” he confessed. But we both agree that’s a better problem for a community to have than the alternative.

More on flyover country...

Flyover France – the forgotten frontier

By Peter Franklin

None of these factors, however, completely explain why Levittown lives where other, similar places are dying away. I lived in the Philadelphia region for over a decade, and I can name many old, industrial communities that look just like the decaying towns of the hinterland. They had tax credit incentives; they sit near good roads and Philadelphia’s port and airport. One old town on the Delaware River, Chester, has received state and local funding for a host of redevelopment projects over the years, including a prison built there in the 1980s to help provide jobs for the local inhabitants. Yet Chester remains a troubled town with abandoned homes, boarded up buildings, and a population about half what it was at its height. The future once happened there, but today it is still happening in Levittown.

Which brings me back to the spirit of Levittowners. Everyone I met was bouyant and optimistic. There was certainly nostalgia for the old days, but no one complained they were down and out. They glowingly spoke of things much of America has lost: neighbours who knew their neighbours, kids playing together in the streets, block parties every summer. Here people still knew and trusted each other, there was no trace of giving up.

I ended my trip in the living room of Charlotte, a local nurse married to a fireman. We were joined by Brendan, a local policeman, and Judy, a mom who now works in an office. When I asked about how Levittown came back, they kept talking about the spirit of its people. Those men and women had come from far and wide to settle there 60-some years ago, leaving old coal towns and the big cities of New York and Philadelphia. In one sense they were immigrants, leaving an old life they knew for a new one they could only conceive of. And, like other immigrants, they had the grit and drive to make a go of it in their new hometown even when times turned tough. “Levittowners are survivors,” was how Charlotte summed it up, her friends nodding in agreement.

When she said that, I recalled a passage from Claire Berlinski’s biography of Margaret Thatcher, There Is No Alternative. Berlinski recounts her own visit to one of the coal fields shut down by Thatcher that had led to the momentous 1984-85 coal miner’s strike. She met two former coal miners on her journey. One had reinvented himself as an artist and was happy and making a healthy living. The other had never again found steady work, was dependent upon government benefit, and had suffered from multiple addictions and health problems. She wondered after her meeting why the mine closure could have such a different effect on two very similar people. Perhaps the answer was simply what Charlotte had recounted: one man had the resilience to survive, while the other didn’t.

As I left that night on the train, passing by the same decrepit communities and neighborhoods in the Philadelphia region I have been passing through for 30 years, I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe Charlotte’s statement was ultimately all that needed to be said. We’ve become so used in our modern age to look for material causes that we overlook the truth that lies right under our noses. Perhaps character really is king.

More from this author

Test article

By Henry Olsen

Levittown, a medium-sized suburban community north of Philadelphia, was created by developer William Levitt, starting in 1951, as one of America’s earliest affordable suburban communities. Over sixty years after its first house was sold, it remains a White, working-class town, but unlike better-known Trump-friendly, White blue-collar places like Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna County or Ohio’s Mahoning County it is still economically well-off. Yet despite this relative affluence, it behaved just like these other places, moving dramatically away from a traditional Democratic voting history to make Trump the most successful Republican nominee in these areas in the last thirty years.[2. Trump received 45.6 percent of the vote in Levittown the highest share received by a Republican nominee since at least 1988. Mitt Romney, the 2012 nominee, received less than 38% of the vote and lost by over 24% to President Obama. Trump, however, lost by less than 6%, an improvement of over 18% on the margin. Trump’s improvement over Romney on the margin was roughly 24% in Lackawanna County and about 25% in Mahoning County. See https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/]

My visit unearthed just how complicated and varied Trump’s appeal to these voters is. Some people mentioned economic concerns as an explanation for Levittown’s shift, while others mentioned immigration and the cultural and economic issues it raises. But more than anything people mentioned a deep psychological resonance that made Levittowners feel Trump understood and cared about people like them. They may not like Trump’s tweets, but his brash manner and his open embrace of the value of work was for them a breath of fresh air in an otherwise long-stale political climate.

Understanding populism

Test article

By Henry Olsen

Although the town is doing well – the median household income is over $72,000 a year above the US median – economics still resonates because of Levittown’s past. Many of its original residents worked for one of five large manufacturers, the largest of which was United States Steel. As elsewhere in the Rust Belt, the factories gradually closed down or dramatically reduced in size. Jane,[3. All names of interviewees are pseudonyms, allowing their ability to speak openly about their community] a sixty-year Levittown resident, told me that the U.S. Steel plant went from a high of nearly 10,000 employees in the 1980s to a current total of about 150. While Levittowners eventually adapted and found new jobs, they paid less and had less generous benefits than the old jobs that had gone. “Bringing manufacturing back was a big thing for Levittowners,” says Jane. It’s a now familiar refrain: “US Steel workers used to make $25 an hour [close to $50 an hour in 2018 money] and get up to 13 weeks of vacation each year. The jobs they have now don’t pay anything near that well.”

For Bill, a retired carpenter, Trump’s economic message was personal. Telling me about how his union couldn’t get work when competing against contractors employing foreign labourers, who may be in the US illegally, it was not hard to see why Trump’s message resonated so deeply. “If Trump had been President,” he says, wistfully, “I probably wouldn’t have had to retire.” Some people even think Trump will get them their old jobs back, says Jane, not just bring back manufacturing more generally.

The sense that these jobs were unfairly lost also helps explain this Trump-friendly narrative. Jane emphasises that US Steel’s foreign competition was subsidised by foreign governments. “We sent our jobs overseas and then we sent money [via foreign aid] to countries that turned around to stab us in the back,” she said. Bill went further: “immigration is a big thing because it is a big handout. We can’t get big handouts like they can.” It was a odd comment, US laws do not offer legal immigrants anything different from what it offers citizens and immigrants not here legally are often not allowed to receive many government benefits, but whether Bill and Jane are correct is beside the point – what matters from a political standpoint is that voters like those in Levittown feel like their government has abandoned them.

This sense of abandonment – of being “left behind” – came up time and again in my discussions with local people. “They want officials to pay attention to them,” Anthony, a young 30-year old anti-Trump Republican, told me. “They aren’t seeing any direct benefit from any of the policies” politicians talk about. In fact, the disaffection goes deeper. Levittowners, one astute local politico named Greg told me, tend to believe that “if I work hard and play by the rules it will work out.” But, as Greg said as we drove round the old steelworks, “there’s a sense that not everyone is playing by the same rules. Many of these folk think ‘I’m working my ass off, and this just isn’t working for me’.” That’s a common view among the White blue-collar workers who turned to Trump.

Disaffection with the status quo – the ‘establishment’ – drove voters to Trump the outsider: “The institutions that used to help you are now working against you, many people think. The game is rigged and it’s time to change it.” Interestingly, as both Bill and Greg told me, that outsider could just as well have been socialist populist Bernie Sanders. I was told about exchanges on primary day where Democratic voters told their GOP counterparts that they were voting for Hillary Clinton’s challenger, Sanders, but they were voting for Trump in November if Clinton won.

These pro-Trump feelings rarely extended to specifics. Time and again I would ask people what exactly voters thought they would get from Trump, and time and again I found only a general sense that things would get better for people like them.

More from this author

The elites missed populism's rise (but shouldn't have done)

By Henry Olsen

But perhaps they were already getting the specific thing they craved more than anything else: the feeling that someone in power cared. Bill surprised me by repeatedly saying that “Trump is a very compassionate person.” He mentioned a story he had heard from Trump’s personal airplane pilot about how Trump once sent his jet to pick up a young person who couldn’t get to a hospital for medical treatment he needed, but it was clear that this idea of caring extended well beyond that one specific example. “Supporting Trump was the second-best decision I ever made”, he said – quite a statement from a self-described “life-long Democrat” who voted for Obama in 2008.

To really understand this devotion-inspiring appeal, however, you have to look beyond the economic. For many blue-collar Whites, Trump’s pull was personal.  Greg put it this way: “Trump is telling them ‘it’s OK to be you’. The rest of culture is telling them ‘it’s not OK to be you’.”

As Greg told me, whether the message is economic – “you have to go to college to succeed” – or cultural – “I like to listen to AC/DC; what’s wrong with that?” – Levittowners and people like them have felt the brunt of elite disdain. In voting for Trump, these blue-collar workers were rebelling against the idea that America is no longer for people like them.

“Levittowners just want a good Christmas for their kids and go to the Jersey Shore for a couple of weeks. They want some acknowledgement that is OK,” Anthony said. Trump gives them that, and they are willing to overlook nearly everything else in exchange.

It is against this backdrop that another aspect of Trump’s appeal starts to make sense. Anthony told me that one reason his neighbours liked Trump was that he “says what everyone thinks”. And that even extends to some of his cruder comments. “If I was down at the bar, that’s exactly what people would say,” the young Republican says of Trump’s “shithole countries” remark. For these Americans, Trump’s blunt, crude talk is just another way of showing he understands and values their way of life.

I left Levittown with more questions than answers. How would Levittowners feel if the US economy wasn’t roaring? Would they still overlook Trump’s shortcomings if he suffers a serious foreign policy reverse that threatens America, such as in the dispute with North Korea? Most importantly, I wondered how deep this psychic longing for recognition was.

Like almost everyone I know, I am a college graduate with a good job who enjoys all the benefits the wide global economy brings. My life experiences are largely those that are treated with respect by media and academic elites, and the unsubtle message Levittowners, and blue-collar workers like them across the country, get is that their children should be more like me than like themselves. Returning to Washington from Levittown I couldn’t help but reflect on what it felt like to be, if not on the bottom, then on the downslide. Rather than viewing global blue-collar discontent through an economic lens, we ought to be looking at populist-backing voters more as people like us, holding similarly cherished identities and hopes. And maybe if we did that, we might all be a little bit better off.

Suggested reading

Slaying Dragons: Global Elite Condescension

By Henry Olsen