NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE H illary Clinton is worried about loneliness in the United States. Or, rather: Hillary Clinton is pretending to be worried about loneliness in the United States. “To defend America against those who would exploit our social disconnection,” she writes in today’s Atlantic, “we need to rebuild our communities.” “Over the past two decades,” Clinton observes, “Americans have spent significantly more time alone, engaging less with family, friends, and people outside the home.” That problem, she concludes, is not only bad for our health and well-being but for the future of the country. Why? Because social isolation “saps the lifeblood of democracy,” it has made us “susceptible to a would-be strongman and demagogue,” and it “diminishes civic engagement and social cohesion, and increases political polarization and animosity.”

I do not disagree with all of this. Writers from Robert Putnam to Tim Carney have chronicled the many ways in which Americans have become, in Clinton’s words, “more isolated, lonely, and unmoored from traditional sources of meaning and support.” The rise of the Internet has undoubtedly reduced the frequency of our in-person social interactions. And there, indeed, is a connection between the atrophying of certain communities and the rise of figures such as Donald Trump. But I must confess to finding it utterly astonishing that, in the course of 3,500 words on this topic, the only frame within which Clinton seems able to set the problem of American loneliness is the supposed perfidy of the Republican Party and its friends. Per Clinton, this is yet another story about the “vast right-wing conspiracy” — a phrase that she uses unironically — and the dastardly group of “right-wing leaders” who sustain it. As ever, Clinton’s tale is hilariously one-dimensional. Its villains are the “ultra-right-wing billionaires, propagandists, and provocateurs who see authoritarianism as a source of power and profit”; “right-wing politicians like Newt Gingrich and media personalities like Rush Limbaugh”; and Steve Bannon, whose “key insight,” Hillary proposes, was to turn “socially isolated gamers into the shock troops of the alt-right, pumping them full of conspiracy theories and hate speech.” Its heroes are “the significant investments being made under President Joe Biden,” which will “lift both incomes and aspirations,” “the historic legislation enacted by Biden and the Democrats in Congress,” and . . . well, Hillary Clinton, for having written a book titled It Takes a Village. “It’s clear,” she writes in saccharine self-congratulation, “that the problems I diagnosed in the 1990s ran deeper than I realized, and were more dire than I could have imagined.” Oh, Cassandra, what have we done?

Clinton disregards any implications that do not fit her theory. She frets at length about the ideological views of isolated young men — whose alleged political extremism she casts as the primary incentive to restore community in America — while ignoring that, in a whole host of other areas, loneliness and isolation are far more reliable predictors of progressive politics than they are of unreconstructed Bannonism. Among the correlations that Clinton neglects to acknowledge are that married Americans overwhelmingly vote for Republicans while single Americans overwhelmingly vote for Democrats; that there is a clear link between communities with more children and a preference for conservative politics; that Americans who attend religious services at least once a week are more Republican than Democrat by 15 points; and that, whatever their other faults may be, Republican voters have more friends across the political divide than do Democrats and, perhaps as a result, are better at explaining what their ideological opponents believe. “To defend America against those who would exploit our social disconnection,” the piece’s subtitle reads, “we need to rebuild our communities.” It seems not to have occurred to Hillary Clinton that if the people of the United States were, indeed, “to work together to help families raise healthy, successful children,” the most likely consequence would be a profound diminishment in the fortunes of the Democratic Party. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc works both ways, you know.

This myopia plagues the piece throughout. When diagnosing what has gone wrong, Clinton acknowledges that “many of the activities and relationships that had defined and sustained previous generations, such as attending religious services and joining unions, clubs, and civic organizations” have died out. And yet, when called upon to provide a solution, she embraces only those items that appeal to her politically. The exhaustive list of communal activities that Clinton claims “inspire” her includes “moms and dads showing up at school-board meetings and getting involved in local politics for the first time because they refuse to let extremists ban books from the neighborhood library” (but not, for some reason, those parents’ showing up because they want to prevent their kids from being shown porn); teenagers turning to old-school flip phones so they’re no longer at the mercy of giant tech firms and hidden algorithms; “companies giving employees time off to vote”; and “workers bravely organizing corporate warehouses and coffee shops, or walking a picket line.” It does not include churches, small businesses, sports leagues, or homeschooling groups — all of which undoubtedly help to allay loneliness but are evidently indulged by the wrong sorts of people. Most amazing of all, Clinton has the temerity to offer up this ludicrously tribal view of the country while decrying the “toxic ‘us versus them’ dichotomies” that she insists are holding us back. How nice it must be to be so perfect.

The title of Clinton’s piece is “The Weaponization of Loneliness.” I suspect that she intends this as an accusation, but, in truth, it’s a confession of intent that, before too long, will have been downloaded by every last one of Clinton’s fellow monomaniacs and impressed seamlessly into the service of The Cause.