Book Review

Them: Why We Hate Each Other—and How To Heal

By Ben Sasse
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018
Pp. 272. $28.99 cloth

“America has always been an angry nation,” writes journalist Charles Duhigg under twin
banners in the January/February 2019 issue of The Atlantic: “Why Are We So Angry?”
and “The Real Roots of American Rage” (online at
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/01/charles-duhigg-american-
anger/576424/). “Recently, however, the tenor of our anger has shifted. It has become
less episodic and more persistent, a constant drumbeat in our lives. It is directed less
often at people we know and more often at distant groups that are easy to demonize. […]
Without the release of catharsis, our anger has built within us, exerting an unwanted
pressure that can have a dark consequence: the desire not merely to be heard, but to hurt
those we believe have wronged us.” A little anger is a useful thing according to Duhigg,
who draws from recent research: “expressing anger result[s] in all parties becoming more
willing to listen, more inclined to speak honestly, more accommodating of each other’s
complaints. [… Anger] does an excellent job of forcing us to listen to and confront
problems we might otherwise avoid.” But anger also can be destructive: “Ordinary anger
can deepen, under the right circumstances, into moral indignation—a more combustible
form of the emotion, though one that can still be a powerful force for good. If moral
indignation persists, however—and if the indignant lose faith that their anger is being
heard—it can produce a third type of anger: a desire for revenge against our enemies that
privileges inflicting punishment over reaching accord.” In other words, anger can
degenerate into hatred, self-hatred, and violence.
Political scientists, retired intelligence officials, historians, journalists, and other
members of the public commentariat argue that anger and hatred in America have grown
to destructive levels. The editor of the Claremont Review of Books, Charles Kessler,
characterizes the present situation as a “cold civil war” that has real potential for turning
hot. The former U.S. intelligence chief Michael Hayden, in his recent book The Assault
on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies (Penguin Press, 2018),
quotes the chief of Russia’s general staff regarding the potential for a mischievous nation
to tip another, essentially healthy nations into solitary, nasty, and brutish, neo-Hobbesian
warfare simply by using social media to pick at scabrous social blemishes (193).
A recent book by Nebraska’s stylized “conservative” Senator Ben Sasse, Them:
Why We Hate Each Other—and How to Heal, asks “[w]hy are we so angry?” (9). The
author claims to write, not as a politician, but instead as a concerned individual and
pedigreed historian with earned academic stripes from Harvard, Oxford, and Yale. The
book draws its perspective from the author’s shining home town on the great Nebraskan
plain. Its tenor is apocalyptic: “We are in crisis” (4); “Something is really wrong here”
(6); “We’re literally dying of despair” (4); “We are doubling down on division” (246);
“We really don’t like each other, do we?” (8); “[…] our contempt unites us with other
Americans who think like we do” (9). The only apparent consolation, which also reflects
the book’s title, is that “[a]t least we are not like them” (9).
 Sasse claims that more politics alone can’t ease the present situation: “Most
policymakers don’t seem to understand the problem—and they certainly don’t have any
grand answers. […] I am not indifferent on policy. [However,] I’m an opponent of
political progressivism, because I don’t think it works” (11; 249). Accordingly, the book
speaks mostly about virtues and values; it “is not about politics […] or legislative failures
in Washington, D.C.” (8; 13), although “it is at least tangentially about the question ‘Why
can’t you guys in D.C. get anything done?’” (8). Although the book is not about policy
alternatives and normatively first-best prescriptions, it nevertheless embodies a noticeable
political undercurrent, reading in places like campaign literature published conveniently
ahead of the 2020 senatorial and presidential elections.
The book illuminates Sasse’s stated beliefs and accomplishments, as well as his
erudite, cooperative, and family-oriented nature. He distinguishes his “conservative”
political philosophy from his Republican party’s hard-right, noting that “[t]hree years
after endorsing me, [Fox News commentator Sean] Hannity went on the air to announce
that he was rescinding his endorsement. He called supporting me ‘one of the biggest
mistakes’ of his career” (122). Sasse’s use of the pronoun “we” often feels politically
ambiguous. In places he clearly is referring either to himself (the “royal we”) or to his
family. Elsewhere he seems to join himself variously with the reader, with his
Congressional cohort, and with Americans generally. His encompassing references to
“America”—as in “America believes in big and grand things about human nature and
human potential. America believes in poetry” (139)—wrongly implies that “America” is
a living entity with a mind of its own. The economics Nobelist F.A. Hayek famously
cautioned against this way of thinking; philosophers of neuroscience dismiss is as
“homunculus fallacy.” Readers might ask themselves whom they should telephone in
order to speak with “America.”
The book is divided into three parts. The first part addresses perceived problems
that are attributed to social- and work-related anxieties. Sasse cites research by Robert
Putnam, Charles Murray, and others for the proposition that America’s social capital has
depreciated significantly since the 1960s, thereby lessening social trust and cooperation
to disturbingly low levels. Work, as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and other observed long
ago, continues to be a disorienting, mind numbing, and anxious experience for many
individuals. The upshot, Sasse’s argues, is an overwhelming sense of social isolation,
crippling loneliness, and perpetual fear that degrades public spiritedness, and adversely
affects public health via drug addiction, suicide, violence, and declining average life
expectancy. Accordingly, “this book is an urgent call to name the problem that’s ripping
us apart. […] Our world is nudging us toward rootlessness, when only the recovery of
rootedness can heal us” (15).
The book’s second part addresses the perceived origin of today’s social and
political disfunction. Sasse criticizes the creation myth advanced by the political
journalist Jim VanderHei (founder of Politico and Axios), which grounds today’s toxic
political environment upon the 1984 advent of House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s
Republican majority. By VanderHei’s lights, Gingrich’s Manichaean view of politics
gave rise to the aggressively “conservative” journalistic style of Fox News, and
correlatively to the aggressively “progressive” journalistic style of MSNBC and CNN. It
culminated in the “celebritized rage politics” personified by Sarah Palin and Donald
Trump, among others. Sasse argues in reply that political disfunction actually began two
years later, in the wake of Senator Ted Kennedy’s ferocious, indefensible, and ultimately
successful attack against the 1986 Supreme Court nomination of the conservative jurist
Robert Bork (89–92). This attack, Sasse notes, was aided and abetted by the Senate’s
Judiciary Committee Chairman, and stealth presidential aspirant, Joe Biden. A similar,
albeit unsuccessful, attack followed in 1991 against the conservative Court nominee
Clarence Thomas. Sasse notes that VanderHei’s explanatory theory conveniently omits
mention of these later assaults by progressive Democrats against legislative comity. Sasse
argues that such selective journalism is part and parcel of the “fake news” phenomenon.
Pragmatic fake news, like the Gospel of John (as theologians noted long ago), is often
wrong on the accepted facts, but always is right on the spirit. Fake political rhetoric and
junk science take similar form.
The book’s third part purports to explore “ways to better live out the American
idea against the forces that, in recent years, have weakened it” (135). These chapters
touch upon such familiar social concerns as deteriorating family structure, social and
economic inequality, middle class stress, limitations imposed by being born to the wrong
parents, the rise of digital communications technology, disruptions caused by automation
and artificial intelligence, and America’s flawed education system. Sasse is especially
critical of social and political assaults against deliberative speech, which political
activists characterize reflexively as “offensive” because it is potentially hurtful, hateful,
threatening, patriarchal, evil, immoral, etc. He notes that 40 percent of colleges recently
surveyed “maintain severely restrictive, ‘red light’ speech codes that clearly and
substantially prohibit constitutionally protected speech” (158); he does not explain that
constitutional protection arguably constrains public education policies and institutions,
but not necessarily private alternatives. Worse still, Sasse notes, Americans increasingly
believe that government should regulate normatively “offensive” speech. He notes in
passing that the FBI presently tracks incidents of “hate speech.”
Overall, the book is interesting, informative, and appropriately documented. It
nevertheless falls short of fulfilling its title’s promise: to establish that Americans truly
hate each other, and to chart achievable paths forward. Instead, Sasse urges that “America
would be a healthier and happier place if we all agreed to set aside [our] superficial
differences more of the time, and instead struggled together” (241), as if to reify the
“general will.” His vision is unobjectionable, despite failing to identify the incentives that
must be either reformed or imposed in order to reverse the nation’s social trajectory.
The inference that Americans “hate” each other is encouraged by an incident in
Sasse’s life that occurred along a marathon route where he and others offered cups of
water to passing runners. An activist group assembled across the street from his position
and yelled that the water was poisoned: “He [Sasse] wants you to die” (5–6); the group’s
underlying grievance regrettably is not identified. Was this really a manifestation of
hatred, or even of conventional anger? Sasse notes elsewhere in the book that “[a]bsent
real conversation, antagonism can masquerade as a pretty satisfying experience” (155).
Perhaps this episode was merely a round of antagonism. Alternatively, it might have
manifested the politics of grievance and shame, albeit as conducted by wildly uncivilized
means—an attempt perhaps to tar “conservative” politicians generally, and Sasse in
particular, in the hope of adding to an accretion of political distrust and resentment that
would increase the likelihood that he and other “conservatives” subsequently would be
ousted by “progressive” Democratic challengers.
 Sasse’s book opens with a lengthy epigraph drawn from Alexis de Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America. The familiar passage comments on the penchant of “Americans
of all ages, conditions, and all dispositions consistently to form associations. […] From
that moment they are no longer isolated men, but a power seen from afar […].”
Tocqueville observed Americans associating spontaneously to build hospitals and
schools, and for other socially productive purposes. Sasse comments on the evident shift
in public spiritedness that occurred during the 1950s and 1960s: away from the
productive spirit of trust and cooperation that Tocqueville observed, and toward a
nonproductive spirit of distrust and cynicism. Rising national prosperity undoubtedly
contributed to this shift by reducing the earlier need for spontaneous cooperation between
and among individuals. Yet rising prosperity alone cannot explain the corresponding
increase in cynicism, which often is dismissed as an ineluctable result of a deepening
commercial culture.
Sasse’s narrative supports the inference that anger and hatred reflect social
cynicism, frustration, and anxiety. However, anger and hatred also are inherent and
rational human behaviors. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes noted in Leviathan (1651)
that individuals willingly fight over “trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and
any other sign of Undervalue” (Chap. XIII). The sociologists Richard Nisbett and Dov
Cohen offer a sharper observation in Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in
the South (Westview Press, 1966): “sensitivity to insult is secondary: it’s purpose is to
preserve the individual’s reputation for being willing and able to carry out violence if
needed” (89). Mankind evidently is hard-wired to respond aggressively—to raise the cost
for aggressors—whenever survival and prosperity are challenged.
A somewhat different interpretation is offered by the political theorist Francis
Fukuyama, in Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2018). Fukuyama affirms the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel’s claim that
human history is the result of individuals’ “struggle for recognition,” in particular the
struggle to be recognized as superior to others—never mind that this “struggle” was
muted for centuries by medieval Church doctrine. Fukuyama adds other psychological
factors, including pride, status, dignity, self-respect, and equality of respect. He notes the
sense of humiliation and resentment that follows when these struggles are frustrated.
Frustration entails “far more emotional weight than people simply pursuing their
economic advantage.” […] A great deal of what we conventionally take to be economic
motivation driven by material needs or desires is in fact a thymotic [an allusion to a
philosophical aspect of the ancient Greek soul] desire for recognition of one’s dignity or
status” (7; 81). Fukuyama writes that “[m]uch of what passes for economic motivation is,
I will argue, actually rooted in the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be
satisfied by economic means” (xv). Nevertheless, much of his narrative points toward
motivations that are broadly economic; for example, “Resentment over lost status starts
with real economic distress, and one way of muting the resentment is to mitigate
concerns over jobs, income, and security” (179). Failures to mitigate “has created
demands for recognition on the part of groups who were previously invisible to the
mainstream society” (165, italics added).
The struggle for recognition of course can be analyzed as well as being an
instrumental means to economic ends, rather than as an end-in-itself. By this light, the
Hegel/Fukuyama thesis confuses ends (final causes) and means (efficient causes). Social
invisibility begets economic failure where trust and cooperation rule, hence the
willingness of individuals to fight against it. Human individuals, as social animals,
inherently and rationally combine into “identity groups” in order to enhance their
visibility in ways that are expected to yield economic payoffs; the American labor
movement is an early example. Identity groups arise where prosperity and flourishing
(the ability to live a philosophically “authentic” life) flow to individuals and groups that
are best able to compete. Competition entails staying abreast, if not ahead of others in
what amounts to an “arms race” for status and influence. Progressive government has
become the weapon of choice for finishing ahead in this race.
Writing in Exit Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations,
and States (Harvard, 1970), the noted economist Albert Hirschman commented on the
tactics and methods by which disadvantaged individuals and groups acted in concert
during the 1950s and 1960s to improve their social and economic situations. Hirschman
noted that identity-group political action historically arose “at intermediate stages, and
there is a special need for it when social cleavages have been protracted and when
economic disparities are reinforced by religious, ethnic, or color barriers. In the United
States, in fact, reality has often been different from ideology: as is well recognized, ethic
minorities have risen in influence and status not only through the cumulative effect of
individual success stories, but also because they formed interest groups, turned into
outright majorities in some political subdivisions, and became pivotal in national politics”
(111–112). The civil rights movement of the 1950s culminated in the Civil Rights Act of
1964, which promised social and political equality across the board by sheltering
individuals and groups from discrimination due to their race, color, religion, sex, or
national origin. Congress and the Administration also created “affirmative action” social
entitlements that reified President Lyndon Johnson’s famous assertion that the policy
goal was to foster “not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and
equality as a result.” The ensuing competition for scarce social entitlements created
identity politics. Similar phenomena occurred in other countries when governments
legislated social entitlements, as for Australian aborigines, and for Brazilian descendents
of African slaves.
The dust jacked synopsis of Fukuyama’s book (2018) aptly notes that the ground
“on which liberal democracy is founded has increasingly been challenged by restrictive
forms of recognition and resentment based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, and
gender […].” This resentment is manifested partly by the language of anger and hatred.
The Google Books Ngram Viewer (online at http://books.google.com/ngrams) reveals the
increased use of such resentful attack words as “racism,” “anti-Semitism,” and “rape,”
whose published usage grew in frequency coincident with passage of the 1964 Civil
Rights Act. Such words have strategic value for entitlement-seeking factions: they soften
the hearts and minds of target audiences, thereby making individuals less resistant to the
idea of social entitlements. The words not only highlight grievances and provoke shame,
but also cause individuals to fear becoming targets of directed anger, hatred, and
violence, which nowadays is apt to occur in response to any adverse comment regarding
entitlement policy. Free and open policy discussions bid away windfall entitlement rents,
hence the concerted efforts by factions to quash legitimate discussion, a point largely
overlooked by the thick First Amendment literature.
 By the 1980s, notes humanities professor Mark Lilla in The Once and Future
Liberal: After Identity Politics (Harper, 2017), identity politics “had given way to a
pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow and exclusionary self-definition
that is now cultivated in our colleges and universities. […] The paradox of identity
liberalism is that it paralyzes the capacity to think and act in a way that would actually
accomplish the things it professes to want. […] As soon as you cast an issue exclusively
in terms of identity you invite your adversary to do the same” (9;14;129–130). Identity
politics, as the Financial Times journalist Edward Luce notes, is a zero- and often
negative-sum game of absolutes; it is the polar opposite of positive-sum social tradeoffs.
Absolutes ground non-negotiable demands (and the occasional government shutdown)
that are not amenable to open discussion.
Entitlement-seeking behavior is outwardly angry and hateful by its nature. The
biologist and evolutionist Richard Alexander explains in The Biology of Moral Systems
(Aldine de Gruyter, 1987) that anger and hatefulness project a purposeful tone of
righteousness: “We gain by thinking we’re right, and by convincing our allies and our
enemies, because of the motivation it gives us. People often seem to like this aspect of
self-deception: it provides an excuse or a rationale for sinking deeper into otherwise self-
deception about motives and for justifying acts that could not otherwise be justified. […]
no other species has accomplished this peculiar evolutionary feat, which has led to an
unprecedented level of group-against-group within-species competition. It is this
competition that draws us toward strange and ominous consequences” (123; 228). The
economist Paul Rubin, in Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom
(Rutgers University Press, 2002), extends Alexander’s argument into political economy:
“One relevant implication for political analysis of this self-deception is that humans
(acting as individuals or as members of interest groups) wanting [seeking] special favors
[entitlements] from the government can easily convince themselves that these favors are
actually in the public interest. They convince themselves that the benefits are not just for
the private benefit of the interest group” (171). Entitlement-seeking thus becomes a moral
endeavor that self-justifies righteous indignation and intimidation, anger and hatred. As
Shakespeare wrote of Hamlet’s delicate condition, “Though this be madness, yet there is
method in’t.”
Sasse’s “healing” proposal amounts to a plea that “we” can and should
voluntarily—i.e., altruistically—alter certain aspects of our natural human behavior in
order to create a “healthier and happier” nation. This plea tacitly presupposes a high
degree of individual free will—a Platonistic indifference among competing alternatives—
that modern neuroscience has shown to be chimerical. The noted neuroscientist Michael
Gazzaniga, writing in Who’s in Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain
(HarperCollins Publishers, 2011), notes that “free will is a miscast concept [that is not]
borne out and/or [is] at odds with modern scientific knowledge” (219). The philosopher
and neuroscientist Sam Harris, writing in Free Will (Free Press, 2012), argues that “[f]ree
will is an illusion. […] Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which
we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the
freedom we think we have. […] You can do what you decide to do—but you cannot
decide what you will decide to do” (5; 38). In short, human individuals are wired to
respond directly to the incentives and constraints extant within their environment. Neither
altruism nor coercive politics can eradicate these behavioral phenomena so long as the
“economic problem” of scarcity prevails. Accordingly, altering human behavior in order
to produce a “healthier and happier” society necessarily would entail either changing
behavioral incentives, or else applying more political coercion than Sasse realizes, or
otherwise is prepared to admit.
History and science richly suggest that the route to social healing requires, at least
in part, an end to the identity politics that progressive entitlement policies enable. Doing
so regrettably would pose a painful remedy in the short run. Among other things, it would
foster intense anger and hatred within individuals who experience the loss of “property
rights” in existing entitlements; behavioral economics teaches that the threat of economic
loss engenders a stronger emotional response than the prospect of economic gain.
Politically, anger and hatred would gush from progressives, who “see the world as a
battle between victims and oppressors” (Sasse 2018, 162), and for whom entitlement
reform would be regarded as tantamount to physical violence. Reform also might be
opposed by political conservatives, who “see the world as a battle between civilization
and barbarism” (163). Conversely, it would be welcomed by libertarians, who “see the
world as a battle between freedom and coercion” (163). (Sasse cites writings by Arnold
King and Russ Roberts for these capsule characterizations.)
At bottom, Sasse’s book overlooks the natural and political forces that foster
social anger and hatred, and which cause individuals to distinguish sharply between us
and them. Having missed the relevant connections, the book fails to draw illuminating
and useful conclusions regarding causes and remedies.

James A. Montanye
Falls Church, Virginia