David French recently had an interesting audio opinion piece, “What Liberals Miss About the MAGA Movement.” Briefly put, what they miss about it is the joy.
If you’re on the outside, your experience with MAGA is all of the anger projected outward. So you see MAGA as almost entirely an angry movement.
MAGA likes inflicting pain on its political enemies. It likes and enjoys creating these ridiculous and absurd memes. It loves to provoke people who are on the outside. It’s part of the joy of this MAGA movement that can include this extreme aggression online.
He looks specifically at the outrageous lies — the self-admitted lies — about Springfield, Ohio, and says,
They have fun being outrageous. They have fun being provocative. They like to “trigger the libs.” What MAGA is very good at doing is turning around back to its own people and saying, “See, we struck a nerve.” They’ll use words like, “If you’re taking flack[sic], it means you’re over the target.” And so they use the backlash almost as proof that they’ve hit a nerve and all of this just creates an endless process of doubling down.
And one thing that I think that liberals tend to miss about the MAGA movement is they miss its underlying sense of community and its joy.
The idea of an underlying sense of community is interesting to me because it aligns with some things I’ve been thinking about for several years, ever since reading a 1989 book, The Great Good Place, by Ray Oldenburg. He writes half-academically and half-narratively, and he’s not great at either, so this isn’t the easiest book to sit down to, but what he has to say seems of fundamental importance when trying to understand what’s going on in American culture.
Oldenburg notes that we tend to know people — we gather, we commune, we communicate — at home, at work, and at what he calls third places: “cafes, coffee shops, bookstores, bars, hair salons, and other hangouts at the heart of a community.” And his basic idea is,
To comprehend the importance of the informal public life of our society is to become concerned for its future. Currently and for some time now, the course of urban growth and development in the United States has been hostile to an informal public life; we are failing to provide either suitable or sufficient gathering places necessary for it. The grass roots of our democracy are correspondingly weaker than in the past, and our individual lives are not as rich.
We tend to blame the Internet for letting people retreat from real life into their screens and social media, but this book was written half a decade before a graphical Web existed, at a time when few Americans even had an email address. (A second edition was released in 1996; at that time Netscape was all of a year old and Internet speeds were measured in kilobits.) Obviously things have gotten worse and not just because of the Internet; first there was the financial collapse of 2007-2009 and then a global once-in-a-century pandemic. What’s interesting is that these merely accelerated a trend that was long underway.
The connection between David French and Ray Oldenburg seems clear: Trump rallies, MAGA message boards, MAGA social media, groups like the Proud Boys and White Lives Matter, may be a way for some, especially white men, to find social connection and community in the absence of other outlets.
We’ve been losing third places for quite some time. VFW halls are closing; membership in the Masons has been declining for decades. (The Knights of Columbus claims to be growing, but there’s some evidence that its membership numbers are inflated. The numbers might also be distorted by a relatively new online membership option; if so, it’s not only not a counterexample to the decline of third places, it’s another instance of it.)
One of the first things that might strike you about Oldenburg’s list of third places is the absence of houses of worship. Oldenburg seems to think that churches foster social life only when a community is socially strong elsewise — that church social life is an aftereffect of, or co-temporal with, but not a big contributor to, our general sociability. He particularly notes the contrast between the way Germans, for example, used to spend time on Sunday — “picnic outings, concerts, schutzen fests [a traditional festival or fair], gymnastics, choral singing, and, above all, the rich and boisterous association afforded by the lager beer establishments” — and the “boredom and idleness” of Americans “keeping the Sabbath.”
My own impressions would suggest something of the opposite, in a way that ironically supports Oldenburg’s basic thesis: Churches used to form a backbone of social life for many people in a way that they less commonly do today.
Since the late 1940s, church attendance, as a fraction of the population, has dropped steadily from 76 percent to 47 percent, with most of that decline occurring in the past two decades, according to Gallup. And according to Pew Research, even within the Republican Party, “the ranks of religious nones and infrequent churchgoers also are growing.” Pew also found that the decline is greater for men than women regardless of political affiliation.
Two other things seem worth noting. Even if the rate of churchgoing overall has dropped to below half, black and Latino churchgoing, though also dropping, are still above 50 percent. As well, the decline in church membership is greater for the staid, traditional, “keeping the Sabbath” churches (Episcopal, Presbyterian, Lutheran, northern Methodist, etc.) than it is for the more socially engaging evangelical (Pentecostal, Southern Baptist, southern Methodist, Seventh-day Adventist, etc.) denominations (and perhaps also for the Restorationists — Latter Day Saints, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc.). So, declines in churchgoing seem to correlate with how strong or weak their sense of community is, and the decline in churchgoing seems greatest among white men.
The Great Good Place not only came before the commercial Internet, it also predated — by a decade! — Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. In fact, it’s notable that Putnam’s poster child activity was bowling. To be sure, bowling has been in a bit of decline for quite some time — what were once 12,000 bowling centers in the 1960s were already down to about 3,500 fifty years later. Still, it might be worth looking at what’s happened in recent years to what is still America’s most-actively-participated sport.
What’s happened, in short, is a hollowing out by investors of this beloved third place. According to a deep dive by journalist Amos Barshad in Jacobin,
Bowlero, the biggest bowling company in the world, has grown rapidly in recent years. Fueled by private equity groups, the firm’s expansion has ruined the beloved pastime for many while its executives pull in massive profits.
The company buys up existing bowling centers “and makes them over in the Bowlero style: dim lights, loud music, expensive cocktails. At Bowleros, bowling isn’t bowling. It’s ‘upscale entertainment’.”
Meanwhile, for bowlers, Barshad reports, “the lived experience of Bowlero’s rise has come with a marked deterioration in conditions.”
Bowlero lays off cleaning staff, so lanes are sticky and bathrooms are dirty. There are no staff mechanics to fix the Pinsetters when they inevitably break down. Centers are open fewer hours. “And they’ve raised the prices of everything.”
As shortsighted as that sounds, such negligence appears elemental to Bowlero’s business model. In a 2023 research report, a Wall Street analyst for the investment bank Stifel Financial wrote that Bowlero can “easily cut 30 percent of [expenses] while running a typical bowling center on a skeleton crew of a handful of staff . . . and minimal required maintenance.”
Businesses generally can reinvest in their businesses, or they can throw money at their executives and their stockholders. It’s not hard to guess which choice executives, shareholders, and private equity firms want a firm to make. Especially when the chief executive is a large shareholder. In the case of Bowlero, increasing the dividend benefits the CEO, Tom Shannon, directly and indirectly — not just in the form of the stock dividends and the increased value of the stock, but also in the form of salary bonuses tied to stock prices and dividends. Needless to say, Bowlero has also run up a lot of debt, and is in no hurry to pay it off.
If Wall Street sucks the fun out of bowling while they suck out all the money, then we lose some third places.
We see it in the restaurant realm as well. First, chain restaurants swoop in, sucking up discretionary dining dollars that used to go to locally-owned establishments. That doesn’t necessarily lose any third places — though it can. Step two, though, with the investors swooping in on the swoopers, it where things go from bad to very, very bad.
The collapse of Red Lobster is instructive. As Luke Goldstein reported earlier this year in The American Prospect, it “didn’t fail because of Endless Shrimp. Its problems date back to monopolist seafood conglomerates and a private equity play.” The details don’t matter — they’re not entirely different from what’s happening with Bowlero, the financiers are just further along in the parasitic process, but the story is interesting in its own right.
“Red Lobster was tremendously successful and at its height had over 700 locations, becoming one of the biggest casual dining businesses in the U.S,” says Goldstein. In 2013, the cost of fish and seafood rose, for several reasons, one of them being a consolidation of what were once independent fisheries and seafood processors. In 2014, the company parent sold Red Lobster to Golden Gate Capital, which financed the purchase by having it sell the real estate the restaurants sat on to a subsidiary created for that purpose. That saddled the restaurants with a new rent expense they never had, in addition to the high seafood prices they were already struggling with.
This maneuver, called a sale-leaseback, “has become common in private equity purchases of other retailers and even hospitals, because it gives the private equity owners a quick injection of cash from the get-go.” The next step, of course, is to slash costs, by, among other things, cutting staff. We’ve all been to restaurants where we had to wait too long to order, wait too long for our food, and even wait to pay the check. What do we do? Not go back. Bye-bye to another third place. (Goldstein notes longstanding antitrust lawsuits against the seafood conglomerates, but they haven’t saved Red Lobster.)
Chain restaurants and shops have been replacing diners, coffee shops, and bars for a very long while now. And of course there are plenty of instances of Walmart or another big box gut downtowns and Main Streets. Suburban malls — a third place for adults as well as teenagers — which themselves had done their own damage to Main Streets, are failing left and right.
Which brings us back to the lack of third places, and how, for nine years now, MAGA’s rallys, hats, and social media have perhaps filled a void.
There may be a second, twin factor as well — the lack of third places is, not by coincidence, coincident with what Cory Doctorow has astutely called “enshittification.” He wrote about it in the context of how crappy Google’s search has become. But it occurs to me that many of our interactions at restaurants, pharmacies, clothing stores, and other everyday locales have become enshittified.
It could easily lead one to think that there’s yet another, less obvious, evil to income and wealth inequality. Sure, it kills the already suffering bottom economic quartile and eviscerates the middle class. But that’s not all. All that free-floating money near the top has to go somewhere, and it has been carried on a tidal wave destroying many of the industries in its path. (To call out just one more, recently, Sen. Chris Murphy has been giving speeches that describe how “we've allowed private equity to financialize our health care system.”)
One final point, related to the last, comes from an article in The Atlantic earlier this month (The Friendship Paradox: We all want more time with our friends, but we’re spending more time alone) by Olga Khazan.
Khazan notes that
Pennington’s research fits with past findings that Americans now spend less than three hours a week with friends, compared with more than six hours a decade ago. Instead, we’re spending ever more time alone … This difficulty arises, in part, from a shortage of free time.
It’s not obvious why we would have less free time than we used to. We have dishwashers and washing machines and Roombas and Amazon Prime. We should be swimming in free time. But no, we’re on a merry-go-round of two or more part-time jobs, or desk jobs for which there’s no closing the inbox at 5 pm (or ever), vacations untaken, shuttling kids to “extracurriculars,” careerism in college (and even filtering down to high school), and so on, largely brought on by our fear of unemployment on the one hand, and employers cutting staff, leaving more work for the remaining workers, on the other. In other words, end-stage capitalism and a threadbare social safety net.
But Khazan sees another reason as well. Quoting Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute, Khazan says,
Another big hurdle is the time and effort it takes to schedule a gathering. In recent decades, participation in groups that allow friends to meet up easily—such as unions, civic clubs, and religious congregations—has dwindled. “One of the really great things about these institutions is they regularize contact,” Cox told me. “You’re there at the same time or for the same kind of meetings … with shared values and expectations for behavior. So it really takes a lot of the work off the plate of the individual.”
That sounds like a disease for which the prescription is, let’s bring back the third places. In the meantime, there are a couple of people out there looking to bring back the joy for the rest of us. Five weeks to go.