Ben Sasse Is Right About Loneliness. Here's What He Misses.

When a U.S. senator sets pen to paper to explain the core problems of Washington and America as a whole, you don't expect the explanation to come down to “loneliness.” But that's the central message of Republican Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse's new book , Them.

The cruel irony is that Sasse is right, and there's nothing that he, as a federal lawmaker, can do about it.

Them, Sasse's title, invokes the tribalistic antagonism of today's politics. “Tribalism” is mostly uttered today as a derogatory word, but Sasse argues, aptly, that humans are meant to live in tribes. The problem is that more natural and healthy tribes have faded away, and that the sort of fake-tribes that replace them in the modern age are harmful.