Anomic America

How an Emergent Post-C Trumpism Drives Normlessness, Despair, and Social Disintegration in Our Society...and What We Must Do About It.

Tribute to the newly-elevated (and celebrated) Dr. Omar T. Bird, out of the Department of Sociology, UH Mānoa, whose most-recently defended doctoral dissertation goes much deeper on this…

Emile Durkheim’s classic concept of anomie, meaning a breakdown or deregulation of social norms, provides an essential lens for understanding troubling trends in contemporary American society.

In an anomic state, individuals feel alienated, disoriented, and purposeless as shared values erode. Recent scholarship documents that Americans are indeed experiencing rising alienation, existential anxiety, and "deaths of despair," alongside profound social fractures and deviant beliefs.

Employing Durkheim’s framework, I was compelled to look at last year's and this year’s scholarly work across sociology, psychology, political science, public health, and cultural studies. It demonstrates how loss of trust, political polarization, and norm-debasement correlate with increases in suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, and social deviance; it also projects the implications for the nation as it approaches its 250th anniversary. Throughout, empirical studies are drawn upon to support each claim.