There is a very famous conservative book called Quest for Community. Written during the 1950s by Berkeley academic Robert Nisbet, the book makes an assessment about why fascism and communism happened. Totalitarianism addressed the longing that all human beings have for community. As modern industrialism shook up the bonds that humans developed slowly over thousands of years, anxiety and fear settled in and dictators offered a relief.

Sound like our modern world? A big warning about this was made about this during the early 2000s, in the book Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam.

I found an article recently, The Nocturnals, about a class of Americans who live completely by night. They've worked alone or worked night shifts for some time, avoiding people as much as possible. Bowling Alone is cited in the article:

In his book Bowling Alone, the political scientist Robert Putnam argued that this urban boom initially spurred a flourishing of connection. But, in his view, the late 1960s and early ’70s saw those bonds begin to break down, as urban sprawl and new technologies led people to spend more time alone, watching television or driving. 

The article goes on to add:

In 2017, once and future U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned of a dangerous “loneliness epidemic.” As he wrote in the Harvard Business Review, “During my years caring for patients, the most common pathology I saw was not heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness.” In recent years, commentators have implicated loneliness in a wide swath of society’s ailments, including steep suicide rates and the opioid crisis. Twenty-first-century American culture is now often associated with profound isolation.

Bowling Alone basically postulates that urbanization failed. Conservatives tend to be people who avoid the urban center for whatever reason, and hince the book was heavily popular on the right. It is cited in the reprint edition of Quest for Community. Seeing it cited in The Atlantic probably isn't a total surprise but it at least was for me. The liberal class, when conservatism was dominated in the nation, was largely powered by people operating outside of mainstream social norms. The opposite is true now.

Somehow, during the process of the years following the housing crunch, conservatives rejected their intellectuals and therefore rejected their own philosophy in exchange for Trumpism. The process started before Trump himself even got started running for office. George Will and Jonah Goldberg defected. Joe Biden was elected on a promise of "a return to normalcy," an appeal quite a bit different than "hope and change." 

Whoever realizes the idea, the isolation of modern America is a choice that the society made some time ago. Unlike when it was pointed out by conservatives, progressives have actual ideas like tearing down the highways that literally separate Americans from one another. Remote work, which both puts people in isolation and also forces them to interact with their co-workers, has forced people to face how isolated they truly may have become.