By Rich
Lowry
Tuesday,
August 08, 2023
Hillary can’t
say she didn’t warn us.
In a
new 3,500-word essay on “The Weaponization of Loneliness” in
the Atlantic, the former secretary of state and presidential
candidate says her jejune 1996 book, It Takes a Village, forecast
the country’s current crisis of loneliness and offered still-relevant
solutions.
And, oh
yeah, hapless lonely people exploited by authoritarian right-wingers basically
kept her from the White House in 2016 (and here you thought it was Russia).
Now,
social isolation is a real social problem in America, as Hillary correctly
recounts in her essay, and it has contributed to the Trump phenomenon. But that
it has been uniquely weaponized against progressives, or that conventional
progressive policies are the antidote to this deep-seated phenomenon, is as
absurd and self-serving as you’d expect from a woman who managed one of the
more shocking losses in U.S. presidential history and has been offering excuses
ever since.
In her
telling, an army of so-called incels, or involuntarily celibate men, organized
by Steve Bannon is part of a growing threat to U.S. democracy. You can see
the appeal of this gloss on our politics to someone who has long warned of the
“vast right-wing conspiracy,” and uses the phrase, once again, in an essay
otherwise devoted to warning about the threats of conspiratorial thinking.
Rather
than shadowy forces, from Russian hackers to Bannon’s a-socialized acolytes,
determining the course of the country, it is the middle of the electorate that
remains crucially important, and it is open to persuasion on the big questions.
Donald Trump fought Hillary to a draw among independents in 2016 and eked out a
narrow victory, and lost them to Biden and was defeated in 2020.
To read
Hillary, you might think that no one who supports the Democrats is ever lonely.
As it
happens, Republicans are the party of married people. As Conn Carroll pointed
out at the Washington Examiner, in the 2022 House races,
Republicans won married men by 20 points and unmarried men by seven, and won
married women by 14 points. The GOP, on the other hand, got wiped out with
unmarried women by nearly 40 points.
This
marriage gap has a connection to loneliness. According to a Gallup survey in
2020, 41 percent of single people reported being lonely the day before, whereas
only 16 percent of people who were married or in a domestic partnership said
the same thing. (This was in the midst of the pandemic, by the way — overall
loneliness has declined since.) By region, New England has the highest rate of
loneliness, and big cities are significantly more lonely than rural areas.
This
means that Hillary forged a coalition of the lonely (or at least the more
lonely) in 2016, and the worst thing that could happen to her party is more
people getting married and living in small places with a stronger sense of
community.
Of
course, Hillary doesn’t offer either of those as potential solutions to the
crisis of loneliness. No, but Joe Biden’s infrastructure program might help —
as if people are disconnected because they can’t take high-speed rail to go see
friends. She’s heartened, too, by parents protesting “book bans” and workers
engaged in union organizing. Left-wing activism, apparently, is what can knit
us all back together.
She
invokes “the wisdom and power of the American village” and says “we have more
in common than we think,” without ever giving any sense that she acknowledges
the values of the other side, or even its legitimacy. If she doesn’t use her
infamous word from 2016, “deplorables,” to describe her opponents, that’s
clearly what she still thinks about them.
Hillary
may not be lonely, but she’s a case study in the myopic self-righteousness of
the Left that is unjustified, high-handed, and off-putting. It’s no wonder that
if Hillary’s “village” is the community on offer, millions of rational,
well-adjusted, happy Americans want nothing to do with it.
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