Is it better to “bowl alone” than to join anything that smacks of a sect? Were the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps, which put millions to work rebuilding their country, just state-sanctioned “cults”? According to one prominent liberal: maybe!

In an article entitled “No, Senator Murphy, I don’t want to join your cult,” Jerusalem Demsas, the liberal publisher of The Argument magazine, goes after Democratic Senator Chris Murphy for daring to argue that we ought to have some shared social commitment to the public good. For Murphy, Americans — particularly young men — are living through an epidemic of loneliness that’s not only corroding our democracy but destroying the social bonds that hold our society together.

These men, particularly those without college degrees, are increasingly isolated and adrift post-COVID: they’ve fallen out of the labor force, they’re not having kids, they’re absent in their communities, and they’re basically going nowhere fast. Social scientists are starting to take note. Last spring, researchers at the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute of Democracy published a report entitled Nobody to Call, the product of dozens of interviews with young men without college degrees. The report is devastating. When asked if they participate in any kind of social or community activities, these young men’s responses are bleak: “No, I do not. Except for my family, I don’t regularly do anything with anybody,” as one interviewee puts it. Another: “No, I can’t say I do. I would like to get into some extracurricular activities, but work [takes] a lot of my time.” And another: “No, not really. I used to go fishing, but that’s it. . . .  I used to go to church a lot. I don’t do that no more, and I ain’t never been part of a club or anything like that.”