America is plagued by “heimatlos”

And is anyone else experiencing election dread?

“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within” — Apocalypto tagline

Once, in the middle of Pennsylvania, I took a thruway exit to buy groceries at a Walmart. I can’t remember the thruway, exit, or Walmart, but I remember the disturbed feeling I had when I saw the people inside. I remember thinking: this country is unwell.

I was no stranger to rural America, but I was nevertheless shook by just how haggard, obese, and joyless everybody looked. In the parking lot, I heard the ceaseless drone of the interstate. I walked past the ramshackle trucks with offensive bumper stickers. I thought of how the crappy jobs, the soulless consumerism, the boxy corporate monstrosities, the depressing food deserts, and the joyless faces were not confined to this one Walmart but were pervasive across America.

Another time, I wandered through Altagracia, Nicaragua—a place with an average monthly income of $263. The houses were small. Roads were dirt. Half-starved dogs roamed the alleys, sniffing at garbage. The town was poorer than any American town, but it felt whole, connected, alive. After sunset, I saw teenage boys playing soccer in the street, little kids laughing and running around, teenage girls walking slowly together, groups of old men and women sitting in front of their homes talking. This is how a town should feel, I thought. This is how America might once have been.

Ometepe Volcano near Altagracia, Nicaragua

I was there only a night or two, but I left with the sense that the people of Altagracia knew more about the good life than we do, here in our suburbs where TVs flicker behind drawn blinds or on our countryside roads, where “No Trespassing” signs guard our double-wides.

When it comes to explaining Trump’s appeal, I don’t know if anyone has found the right words. Too much attention goes to the loss of status or jobs. I think the roots go deeper—into our relationship with the very soil—and have yet to be properly articulated. This problem should have a name, but it can only be broken down into seemingly disconnected elements badly in need of synthesis:

• Too many American homes and neighborhoods were not designed to promote social cohesion.

• With the decline of religious life, people drift without the social glue of a church community.

• Deindustrialization has destroyed livelihoods and hollowed out communities, forcing many of us into dreary sales or service positions in the soulless chain stores that encircle and creep into our towns’ hearts.

• Agricultural automation has disconnected us from both soil and neighbors.

• Without small, coherent communities, most people have no role in local democracy. National democracy (a joke in many ways) then gets used as a way to vent frustrations felt at the local level.

• Centuries of dispossession, displacement, and transience have prevented our family lineages from forming lasting relationships with place and community.

• Though America’s landscape is beautiful, much of it remains inaccessible; in many areas, our infrastructure and architecture are ugly.

Add up these components, plus another twenty I can’t think of, and you create the zombie apocalypse I saw at that Pennsylvanian Walmart. What you get is an America that’s profoundly sick and holistically unwell, from the biological fat cell up to the infrastructural interstate.

In search of my theory of everything

The articulation of a new concept helps us name a problem, understand the problem, and give us a chance to solve the problem.

I’m no good at creating terms, so I fed AI the first part of this essay and asked for it to come up with a word or two to encapsulate all of the above. Its best ideas were “Rootrift,” “anomiscape”  (combining "anomie" with “landscape”), and holistic dissonance. Good try, but… eh. Perhaps we need the help of another culture that has already condensed these thoughts into a good word or term.

The German word — Heimat — does a good job. Heimat, according to the German Brockhaus encyclopedia, refers to an imaginarily developed, or actual landscape or location, with which a person associates an immediate sense of familiarity. This experience is imparted across generations, through family and other institutions, or through political ideologies. In common usage, Heimat also refers to the place or landscape that a person is born into, where they experience early socialization that largely shapes identity, character, mentality, and worldviews.

Perhaps we can call the problem I’m referring to as “loss of Heimat,” or heimatlos. Or we could go with my clunkier phrase: eco-demo-socio-spiritual dissolution.

The point is, our collective well-being can’t be measured by average incomes, unemployment rates, or longevity statistics. Heimatlos needs to be understood, quantified, and studied (“heimatology”)—even addressed by a president someday.

The appeal of Trump

One of the mysteries of Trump is why he can both appeal to the down-and-out rustbelt voter (like the Pennsylvania Walmart shoppers) and the comfortable suburban voter, who isn’t materially affected by immigration, automation, or DEI scolds. But perhaps what each voter shares is a sense of heimatlos, a feeling of disconnection and an unmet need for belonging.

Among the recent presidential candidates, Trump has come closest to recognizing heimatlos—a state he calls “American carnage.”

In therapy, most counselors are taught to reflect back clients’ feelings to establish a strong, trusting relationship. When people feel seen, their pain is validated in a non-judgmental environment.

Trump does this. His 2017 inaugural address was actually pretty good (when you merely read the text and forget about him inflating the crowd size afterwards). He reflected what many voters feel:

• “But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.”

• “You will never be ignored again.”

• “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.”

• “Everyone is listening to you now.”

• “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

• “We are one nation – and their pain is our pain.”

Trump has a knack for acknowledging pain and absorbing voters’ anger. (Feeling heard is all many people want, it appears.) The issue is, he only uses their pain for his bottomless need for approval and power.

On the other side, Biden and Harris don’t focus on America’s heimatlos or American carnage. But they do pass policies aimed at uplifting everyone, like environmental protections and investment bills to create jobs. Where Trump uses rhetoric, Biden and Harris use policy.

Yet no candidate has articulated the problem of heimatlos directly or made it their central focus.

Take a look at Harris’s campaign page. You won’t find plans to help root people in communities, establish intergenerational relationships with land, promote eco-spirituality, or design infrastructure with community in mind. I don’t blame her; these changes may be both too big and too local for a president to make. But like those Trump voters, we might someday reward a future candidate simply for naming the problem.

Content that is helping me understand the political moment

Keen On: Arlie Russell Hochschild on How to Listen to America. This interview with author Arlie Russell Hochschild is a must-listen. Arlie talks about how Trump is tapping into the abundant resource of American shame. Shame of lower wages, crappy jobs, loss of pride, shame of poor health, shame of loss of status, shame of family disintegration, etc. Right wingers are the worst at processing shame or anger in a way that is something other than toxic and self-defeating. Rather than creating a positive movement that calls attention to their plight, they merely express their anger by trying to vote in a wrecking ball.

Ezra Klein, in this audio essay, talks about the magnetic nature of Trump’s disinhibition. It is no surprise that Trump’s disinhibition is so appealing in an age when our discourse landscapes are filled with landmines.

On the Commons Substack by Antonia Malchik — Malchik does a great job talking about the land, our relationship with it, and the impediments that keep us from those lands and relationships.     

Soil and Soul by Alastair McIntosh — This a quietly profound book that does a lot of things. It’s half autobiography about his Isle of Lewis upbringing (Lewis is a Scottish island) and half history/philosophy about our need for a new relationship with the land. He calls for a retrieval of our lost indigenous cultures—our stories, our songs, our lineages, our customs.

The Progressive Moment is Over by Ruy Teixeira — It says something our political moment that I, a progressive, mostly enjoyed Teixeira essay about how a few progressive issues are fading from view due to their unpopularity among voters. I’m especially happy to see his #3 (identity politics) die a slow death, but count me among the zealots who get excited about his #4 (Green New Deal.) I suppose what the essay is missing is some acknowledgement that the progressive mind is always in search of improvement and reform, and that the Democratic Party would be sucked of its energy and bankrupt of its ideas without our progressive zeal.

Kamala Harris on the Howard Stern Show — Stern and Harris came across as two sane people who are worried about their country. I thought Harris came across as someone who has, as they’d say in Victorian novels, great “understanding.” Great charisma and intelligence, too.

Alice Evans: Beyond Brawn: Reimagining Masculinity — Lots of interesting graphs in here, a reference to the above-mentioned Arlie Russell Hochschild, and a call for culture to help men navigate modernity better.

Heimat by Nora Krug (2019). This is a delightful book that's admirably researched. Krug reflects on her Germanness, and how she grapples with the complicated history of her wartime family. Also, lots of thoughts on “Heimat.” (Above, I used the Heimat definition that Krug translated.)

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