Against Misanthropy
In a modern moment ruled by alienation, dreary, apathetic politics has taken hold. To overcome the next Trump presidency, we’ll need to override that instinct.
Photo by https://www.flickr.com/people/126057486@N04, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The 2006 film Children of Men is set in 2027 where a global fertility crisis has plunged the world into an orgy of sectarian violence, ecological disaster, and a global refugee crisis. Democracy has collapsed and only authoritarian governments are able to survive. As humanity slowly waltzes towards extinction, a once-promising horizon sours. The hopes of the 21st century—technological liberation, an end to disease, the peace of a unipolar planet—are transformed by mass surveillance, state-of-the-art weaponry, and feudal-esque wealthy inequality into a new dark age. The absence of new people has brought our worst instincts to bear. The only salvation for mankind is presented to the audience via immaculate conception: The first pregnant woman in a generation is revealed to our hero Theo, and he is tasked with shepherding her to safety in a Britain shackled to the chains of a xenophobic police state.
It is in this dystopian narrative where we may find glimpses into understanding what the next four years may look like — not quite literally, but in spirit. When we imagine the destruction of society, we often picture total annihilation. Nuclear war. An unrelenting plague. The rise of a malevolent AI. An asteroid the size of Texas. In reality, empires fall apart gradually. The process by which the Roman Imperium buckled under its own weight took centuries. The Spanish Monarchy once controlled an entire continent and a half before slowly dwindling into geopolitical obscurity. On March 21st, 2025, when the United Kingdom officially returns the Chagos Islands to the island state of Mauritius, the sun will at last set on the British Empire after 200 years.
And much like our forebears, the twilight of Pax Americana will likely be an exhausting, sordid affair. The return of Donald Trump to the White House might not eclipse “democracy as we know it”—nor will it be able to end American hegemony overnight—but it will certainly be destabilizing as the chaotic contradictions of MAGA give way to the reality of its proposal. Think less apocalyptically and more of a continuity; the prolonged process of the hollowing out. Trump is a brain-rotted bull and our decaying institutions are fine China dinner sets held together with scotch tape and spit.
Where does this leave us? We can save the Monday morning quarterbacking for the more astute, wiser minds who have already embarked on that analysis. Instead, we should reckon with a more concrete element, one that allowed for Trump’s unprecedented influence. His domination over the past eight years can be seen in part as a byproduct of our broader shift towards misanthropy, one born out of a lack of meaningful human interaction. It seems that the very texture of our increasingly anti-social world gave us this innovative style of blood-and-soil revanchism.
Much like the characters of Children of Men, our day-to-day lives are defined by a deep, festering sense of isolation and loneliness. In one scene, Theo and his comrades take shelter in an abandoned school, a relic from a time when the harmonies of playing children were not a distant memory. The floors are caked with mud. The swing sets are corroded. The echoes of the emptied classrooms are haunting. And the message couldn’t be any clearer: When we lose purpose and connection, the kind that only publicly organized social institutions can give us, we lose the possibility of a future.
The quality of American social life has been steadily depreciating for decades. The cause of this is too complex to unpack in one essay, but the political scientist Robert Putnam relayed a prophetic analysis in his influential book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. As the union halls and church groups diminished as sites of socialization—and in concert with the dawn of the Internet—Putnam warned in 2000 that the demise of these spaces could be sociologically destructive, especially since they were only being replaced by the digital.
Since the 1970s, he explained, the foundational elements of post-war modernity—the way we interact, how our economy runs, and the technology that governs it—have depleted the social bonds that healthy societies need to thrive. Putnam also observed that this was not a novel circumstance.
According to Putnam, The United States experienced a similar upheaval at the turn of the 19th century when immigration and urbanization placed pressure on existing institutions. At first, American society was unable to cope with this development: “Crime waves, degradation in the cities, inadequate education, a widening gap between rich and poor…a ‘Saturnalia’ of political corruption,” he explained.
But it was in the first quarter of the 20th century, known in our country as the Progressive Era, that a sense of urgency mixed with a popular front of left-wing radicalism brought about reforms to the contemporary society we dwell in. “In fact, most of the major community institutions in American life today were invented or refurbished in that most fecund period of civic innovation in American history,” Putnam concluded.