The insidious way violence is changing American politics — and shaping the 2024 election.
Stephen Richer should have been safe.
In early 2021, Richer was an Arizona Republican official who regularly attended local party events. At the time, he was the newly elected county recorder of Maricopa County. The job was a new level of prominence — he was now the most important election supervisory official in the state’s largest county — but going to Arizona Republican events was routine: the kind of thing that Richer, like any state politician, had done hundreds of times before.
But at one event, the crowd heckled and harassed him. When he tried to leave, they dragged him back in, yanking on his arms and shoulders, to berate him about the allegedly stolen 2020 election. He started to worry: Would his own people, fellow Republican Party members, seriously hurt him?
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Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
There was a clear reason for the madness. Many of the Republican faithful had recently decided that Maricopa County had been the epicenter of “the steal,” Joe Biden’s theft of Arizona from Donald Trump — and the entire presidential election with it. This wasn’t true, obviously. Richer tried to tell them it wasn’t true, hoping his long track record in the state Republican party would give him some credibility.
It did not. What happened instead reveals a pattern that is quietly reshaping American politics: Across the board and around the country, data reveals that threats against public officials have risen to unprecedented numbers — to the point where 83 percent of Americans are now concerned about risks of political violence in their country. The threats are coming from across the political spectrum, but the most important ones in this regard emanate from the MAGA faithful.
Trump’s most fanatical followers have created a situation where challenging him carries not only political risks but also personal ones. Elected officials who dare defy the former president face serious threats to their well-being and to that of their families — raising the cost of taking an already difficult stand.
As a result, the threat of violence is now a part of the American political system, to the point where Republican officials are — by their own admissions — changing the way they behave because they fear it. For Richer, the price back in 2021 was high — and enough to prevent him from safely participating in his own party’s politics.
The more he tried to convince people that the 2020 results were legitimate, the more hostile the audience became — and not just at this one event. He recalls people at Republican meetings getting in his face, grabbing him, and even banging on his car windshield in the parking lot. Richer kept attending party meetings for three months, hoping that the attendees’ behavior would go back to normal.
But they didn’t. The once-friendly events were emotionally exhausting — and, worse, potentially even dangerous.
“I was a Republican activist. That’s what you do: show up to events,” Richer recalls. But eventually, “you don’t feel comfortable.”
By 2022, when Richer was presiding over the November election’s ballot tally, his office was fortified like a military base: surrounded by armed police deployed to protect him and his staff from threats. He recalls numerous staff members quitting on the spot after heated confrontations — and he was personally targeted by credible threats. When we spoke, he was about to testify in one of three federal cases against people who had vowed to kill him.
“You need to do your fucking job right because other people from other states are watching your ass,” the man allegedly said in a voicemail. “You fucking renege on this deal or give them any more troubles, your ass will never make it to your next little board meeting.”
It’s been well over two years since Richer attended the kinds of Arizona GOP grassroots events where he was once welcome. Today, the institutional Arizona Republican party is dominated by politicians who have embraced Trump’s lies about the election — people like Kari Lake, Blake Masters, and Mark Finchem. The harassment and threats from the MAGA faithful was one weapon in the extremist takeover’s arsenal, working to push voices of sanity out of key party events — breaking even determined ones like Richer.
In Arizona, the Trumpist threat of violence worked. And it worked for reasons that should worry all of us at the beginning of an election year that could decide the fate of American democracy.
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Matt York/AP Photo
Brave Republicans at all levels of government, from local officials like Richer to Sen. Mitt Romney (UT), have been warning us of the dangers going into 2024. They have seen the recent rise in right-wing political violence, most notably on January 6, and seen how comfortable Trump is with openly directing his supporters to hurt people.
“Violence and threats against elected leaders are suppressing the emergence of a pro-democracy faction of the GOP,” writes Rachel Kleinfeld, an expert on political violence at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Absent threats, Kleinfeld argues, a move to Trump from inside the party — perhaps a more serious challenge in the presidential primary — might have had a better chance of getting off the ground.
In her paper, Kleinfeld notes a striking example of this effect at work — a comment by Kim Ward, the Trump-supporting Republican leader of the Pennsylvania state Senate, on what would happen if she spoke out against the former president.
“I’d get my house bombed tonight,” Ward said.
Our politics have gotten more violent
Bob Inglis, a South Carolina Congressman for 12 years who left office in 2011, remembers getting in some fairly bitter brawls with his Democratic rivals. In his later years as a Congress member, after making a more moderate turn, he recalled receiving some real vitriol from the base — even facing a crowd in his hometown that seemed so volatile that he refused to introduce his family on stage.
But that was the exception, not the rule.
“Now,” Inglis says, “members of Congress face that [level of hostility] routinely.”
In 2016, the Capitol Police recorded fewer than 900 threats against members of Congress. In 2017, that figure more than quadrupled, per data provided by the Capitol Police.
The numbers continued to increase in every year of the Trump presidency, peaking at 9,700 in 2021. In 2022, the first full year of Biden’s term, the numbers went down to a still-high 7,500. The 2023 data has not yet been released, but a spike in threats against legislators during the House Republican speaker fight and Israel-Hamas conflict suggests an increase over the 2022 numbers is plausible.
Members of Congress are taking these threats seriously. In September, three journalists at the Washington Post reviewed FEC filings to assess how much candidates for the House and Senate were spending on security. They found an overall increase of 500 percent between 2020 and 2022.
The death threats aren’t just directed at politicians in Washington. Data has shown extraordinary levels of threats against mayors, federal judges, election administrators, public health officials, and even school board members. It’s hard to know how large the increase is for many of these local positions because no one has been keeping records for all that long. In the past, there was simply no need.
“It’s not even accurate to say [threatening election workers] was rare prior to 2020. It was so rare as to be virtually nonexistent,” David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told me in 2021. “This is beyond anything that we’ve ever seen.”
While this level of threat is unfamiliar in modern America, political violence is far from unprecedented in the long arc of the country’s history. We’ve seen a civil war, the assassinations of multiple presidents, and a senator beaten unconscious on the Senate floor
“American politics has always been violent. The question is how violent,” says Joanne Freeman, a historian at Yale and author of a book on violence in Congress before the Civil War.
Freeman and other scholars see rising political violence as a reflection of deeper political tensions. Research suggests it tends to be perpetrated by angry, aggressive people with poor impulse control. Systematic increases in violent threats would thus happen at moments of heightened political emotion — meaning those times when the stakes of politics seem especially high and personal.
That’s clearly the case now.
Some of the recent increase in American violence (both political and otherwise) might be attributable to the pandemic. But the spike in threats began well before Covid-19. Something else is going on — something that’s raising the temperature of American politics, making people feel more angry, afraid, and feeling like they need to take political matters into their own hands.
That “something” is Donald Trump. No figure in American politics commands Trump’s devoted following; no figure is as capable of heightening the stakes of American politics to the breaking point.
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Evan Vucci/AP Photo
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Evan Vucci/AP Photo
Trump’s hardcore base is motivated by social grievances that are known to give rise to violence. Political scientists have repeatedly found that ethnic violence is particularly likely when a privileged portion of society sees power slipping into the hands of a group that hadn’t previously held it — as has been happening in the United States for years. A backlash to social change is probably the single biggest reason behind both Trump’s political rise and the rash of white supremacist terrorism starting in the late 2010s, like the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018, the attack on an El Paso Walmart frequented by Latinos in 2019, or the 2022 massacre of supermarket shoppers in a Black area of Buffalo.
The former president’s rhetoric has often directly encouraged violence. At a 2016 rally in Iowa, Trump instructed his supporters to “knock the crap out of” disruptive protesters. “I promise you I will pay for the legal fees,” he added. During the 2020 protests over George Floyd’s murder, Trump implied that any rioters should be shot by tweeting an old white supremacist slogan: “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
And, at the fateful rally on January 6, 2021, he told his assembled supporters that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” That day, and ones immediately to follow, dramatize just how profoundly threats of violence have come to shape Republican politics.
How the threat of violence cemented Trump’s control over the GOP when it looked most vulnerable
On January 6, a crowd chanting “hang Mike Pence” rampaged through the Capitol’s halls. Members of Congress on both sides legitimately feared for their lives, leading many Republicans to privately support Democrats’ impeachment push afterward. Trump, they believe, needed to be held accountable for what they had been through.
But the fear of physical harm, of someone killing them or their families, held some of these Republicans back from voting to impeach him. The threat even became a tool of peer pressure — Republicans citing the danger of speaking out to keep each other in line. Sen. Romney recounted stories to this effect to the Atlantic’s McKay Coppins:
When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, Romney recalled someone saying. Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right.
Romney personally refused to bow to this intimidation and voted to impeach, just as he did during Trump’s first impeachment. But not every Republican displayed this level of bravery in the face of serious threats to both their political and personal future.
Just before the House vote on impeachment, Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) has said he heard firsthand from Republicans that fear was holding at least two of them back.
“I had a lot of conversations with my Republican colleagues last night, and a couple of them broke down in tears — saying that they are afraid for their lives if they vote for this impeachment,” he said in an MSNBC appearance.
Former Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI) recalls one of his House colleagues privately condemning Trump’s claims of election fraud, but voting to overturn the election results on the evening of January 6 — just hours after the assault.
“My colleague feared for family members, and the danger the vote would put them in,” Meijer wrote in a Detroit News op-ed. This fear wasn’t idle: After voting to impeach Trump, Meijer himself faced so many threats that felt the need to purchase body armor.
And reporters confirmed these accounts.
“I know for a fact several members want to impeach but fear casting that vote could get them or their families murdered,” journalist Tim Alberta tweeted before the House impeachment vote.
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Shay Horse/NurPhoto via Getty Images
While the January 6 riot failed to crown Trump president, it had a clear and undeniable secondary effect: intimidating Republicans who might otherwise have voted to impeach him. Absent these threats, it’s possible that Republicans like Romney could have mustered up additional GOP votes in the Senate to convict Trump.
If these threats could so powerfully shape the behavior of some of America’s wealthiest and most powerful legislators, how much might they affect state and local officials with far fewer resources?
The unique importance of Republican-on-Republican violence
The increase in threats of late is bipartisan. Ordinary Democrats and Republicans feel like politics have taken on an existential cast in the Trump era, and there are angry people with poor impulse control from all factions in both parties. In 2017, a left-wing extremist opened fire on Republican members of Congress practicing for the Congressional Baseball Game, nearly killing Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA).
Since then, staunch Trump-aligned Republicans like Rep. Matt Gaetz (FL) have said they’d experienced significant levels of threat. Jewish and Muslim Democrats with differing positions on the Israel-Palestine conflict have reported significant increases in death threats during the Israel-Hamas war. All of this is consistent with data showing partisans of both sides issuing threats at higher rates than they did in the pre-Trump era.
But this does not mean the threats are evenly distributed, or that the effects are symmetrical across officials of both parties.
The simplest way to think about it is that threats on the right are more credible than threats on the left. Statistics regularly show that far-right political violence is not only more common than other forms in today’s America but also far more deadly and impactful. In recent years, far-right killers have been responsible for the largest mass murders of Jews and Latinos in American history and the only riot ever to breach the US Capitol.
Moreover, the physical realities of political life make one uniquely exposed to radicals on one’s own side. Stephen Richer wasn’t attending Democratic rallies back when Arizona Democrats hated his guts; he had no reason to. But putting himself in front of Republican crowds made him uniquely exposed, especially in places where people bring their firearms everywhere they go.
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Lynsey Addario/Getty Images Reportage
Romney recalls feeling this kind of fear when he went to Utah after the Trump impeachment fight. Facing crowds full of Mormon Republicans who had long been his base, he received such a hostile reaction that he was beginning to fear for his life. “It only takes one really disturbed person,” he told Coppins, adding that he began paying $5,000 a day out of pocket for personal security.
The special impact of right-on-right violent threats isn’t just about means and opportunity; it’s also about motive.
Broadly speaking, Democrats have safety in numbers from the far right: Because the party in general opposes Trump and Trumpism, individual members’ anti-Trump positioning is less likely to attract ire from his supporters. By contrast, individual Republicans who dissent from the Trumpist line immediately get singled out in conservative and far-right media — attracting the sort of attention reserved for a handful of “most hated” Democrats such as Reps. Nancy Pelosi (CA) or Ilhan Omar (MN).
For all these reasons, threats of violence are likely to be uniquely effective on Republicans when issued from their own base. The threats work, more than anything else, to discipline elected Republicans — to force them to toe whatever line the Trumpists want them to walk, or else.
That said, the power of this disciplining effect will likely vary from case to case. During October’s battle to decide the next speaker of the House, supporters of the Trumpy Rep. Jim Jordan (OH) directed a large number of death threats at House Republicans who refused to vote for him. But this time, the wavering Republicans refused to cave — even citing the threats as a reason for opposing Jordan, who was ultimately forced out of the race.
But we have no reason to believe the threat of violence has lost its disciplining power entirely.
For one, the danger simply hasn’t gone away: Data on threats to local officials released in September, from Civic Pulse and Princeton’s Bridging Divides Institute, shows that the level of threat has remained constant over the past year.
“The threat against [Trump-skeptical Republicans] is real and continuing,” writes the Council on Foreign Relations’ Jacob Ware. “Trump today retains an overwhelming power to deploy vitriol and violence against his political rivals.”
For another, the Jordan speakership fight was missing several crucial features that make threats appear more serious. Unlike the 2020 election, which forced Republicans in the House and Senate to pick between siding with Trump or the Democrats, this was an internal fight between conservative Republicans. And it’s one where Trump’s personal future wasn’t directly at stake — unlike, say, this year’s election.
Threats and the 2024 election
As Trump returned to the campaign trail in 2023, he became increasingly willing to employ naked authoritarian rhetoric and physical threats.
He encouraged people to “go after” New York Attorney General Leticia James, suggested shoplifters should be shot, and intimated that former Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Mark Milley deserves to be executed. Perhaps most ominously, he vowed to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”
According to Kleinfeld, people around the world are substantially more likely to engage in political violence when they feel like they have permission from their political representatives to do it. It’s a major part of the reason why, in the US data she’s examined, incidents of threats and actual violence are “three to five times higher” on the political right today than on the left.
This cannot be lost on Republican officials, and their behavior in the past few years suggests it in fact isn’t. The lockstep support for Trump even after four indictments, indicates they remain disciplined by the former president’s power — both electoral and physical. The lessons of January 6 and its aftermath have been fully internalized.
And we’re now entering an election season that’s especially likely to raise the threat level.
During the last presidential election cycle, threats against public officials tended to rise at pivotal moments in the campaign calendar. Threats against local election officials peaked around the November 2020 election itself, while threats against members of Congress (of course) spiked in the days around January 6. Thankfully, none were killed during either of those periods — but not for lack of trying.
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Paul Sancya/AP Photo
Then-Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, a Republican responsible for election oversight, became a lightning rod in 2020 when Trump singled him out by name in a tweet as someone who was “being used big time by the Fake News Media” as a cover for election fraud.
He received a wave of threats; a deputy commissioner, Seth Bluestein, was subjected to anti-Semitic abuse. Schmidt’s wife got emails with threats such as “ALBERT RINO SCHMIDT WILL BE FATALLY SHOT” and “HEADS ON SPIKES. TREASONOUS SCHMIDTS.” The family left their home for safety reasons after the election, and Schmidt did not run for reelection in 2023 (he was recently appointed to serve as secretary of state under Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro).
The 2024 election promises to be every bit as contentious. If anything, Trump’s ongoing legal woes make the stakes even higher — both for him and his movement. His rhetoric is already escalating, his followers at even higher alert for signs of betrayal from the “RINOs” in the “Republican establishment.”
Never before has it been more important for Republican officials to stand up for the integrity of the American electoral system. But they haven’t faced this level of threat in their political lives — in fact, no currently living elected official has.
“They say ‘it’s never been this bad before.’ Well, on the one hand, it has,” says Freeman, the Yale professor. “On the other hand … I’m talking about the lead-up to the Civil War.”
Ben Jacobs contributed reporting to this piece.
Here’s how to interpret your own feelings.
Despite having a network of friends and acquaintances, Rohit Singla, an MD-PhD student in Vancouver, knows no other existence than one of loneliness. “I think I associate myself with being baseline lonely,” the 31-year-old says. Beneath the exterior of a productive, competent scholar is a man who feels he is lacking deep, caring, reciprocal relationships. Seeing friends in long-term relationships only illuminates the distance that naturally grows when romance takes precedence over friendship. When the group chat is silent in response to his attempts at coordinating a hangout, Singla suspects he’s low on his friends’ lists of priorities.
There are times he feels appreciated, less alone: when a pal checks in just to see how he’s doing or when someone he hasn’t spoken to in awhile reconnects. But despite these respites of connection, the undercurrent of alienation persists. “Loneliness,” Singla says, “is this simmering, ongoing feeling.”
Over the last decade, loneliness has reached so-called epidemic levels, with public health officials and researchers alike quantifying the mental and physical health impacts of living in social isolation. Still, there is no one way to experience loneliness. It’s the isolating dread of not having found your place in the world. It’s the heaving weight of grief after losing a person, a place, a community. It’s the pang of anxiety when you remember how long it’s been since you saw your best friend. It’s a sense of foreignness despite being surrounded by familiar faces. For Singla, loneliness is a palpable burden (“My loneliness physically feels heavy,” he says) as well as an emotionally destabilizing one. “It feels unsteady. I almost feel like I just lose myself.”
Researchers have put names to this kaleidoscope of experiences in the hope that by distinguishing the root causes of loneliness, people can better understand how to address it. “The differentiation of the nature of loneliness is predicated, to some degree, on the fact that you can intervene and do something about it,” says Christina Victor, a professor of gerontology and public health at Brunel University London.
What is loneliness?
The state of isolation is not the same as loneliness. “People can still feel lonely when they’re around other people,” says Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University, ”and you can be isolated but not feel lonely.” Loneliness refers to the distressing feeling you have when your social desires don’t align with your reality. Someone may have a close confidant in their romantic partner but still feel lacking in social connection. Someone else could interact with people all day but crave deep conversation. Loneliness is a personal experience, Victor says, not an objective one. An outsider cannot diagnose a person as being lonely; only that person can admit loneliness to themselves and others.
Just like hunger or thirst, loneliness is a biological signal prompting people to satiate their need for social interaction, Holt-Lunstad says.
Within the overall scope of loneliness are distinct ways people can experience it. According to Chikako Ozawa-de Silva, a professor of Japanese studies and anthropology at Emory University, the breakdown is as simple as “ordinary” loneliness (sadness after a breakup or a move, homesickness), grief, and “afflictive” loneliness. The latter “is a deep, pervasive sense of disconnection,” says Ozawa-de Silva, who is the author of The Anatomy of Loneliness: Suicide, Social Connection, and the Search for Relational Meaning in Contemporary Japan. “Of not being accepted or acknowledged by others.” Victor distinguishes between transient loneliness — a period of heartache that comes and goes — and chronic loneliness.
Three common types of loneliness have been defined in the scientific literature, Victor and her colleagues found in a 2021 review of loneliness studies dating back to 1945. There, the experiences of loneliness fell into three categories: social, emotional, and existential. To be socially lonely is to lack social connection with those you know and love, Victor says. If you’re grieving the loss of a person, you’re experiencing emotional loneliness. Those who feel separated from others due to death, divorce, or physical or mental decline are said to endure existential loneliness. The lived experience of loneliness is less about feeling one of these three ways and more a Venn diagram of intersecting and overlapping social desires: a yearning for another community outside of the ones you already inhabit, desiring the intimate connection offered by a romantic partner.
Louise Hawkley, a principal research scientist at NORC, a nonpartisan research organization at the University of Chicago, isn’t totally satisfied with those descriptors. “Social loneliness, it’s also emotional,” she says. In her research, Hawkley focused on areas of connectedness that contribute to loneliness: intimate connectedness (deep relationships with, say, a spouse); relational connectedness (quantity of friends and how often you see them); and collective connectedness (feeling like you’re a part of a community). Like other frameworks of loneliness, these dimensions of connectedness are not independent of one another; people need to connect in all three domains in order to feel emotionally fulfilled. “We think of those three dimensions as critical that underlie loneliness,” Hawkley says. “People who tend to feel lonely on one of those dimensions tend to feel lonely [overall].”
While the signifiers may slightly differ, the experiences they describe are universal. The phrases “feeling alone in a crowd,” “lost at sea,” and “living in darkness” conjure vivid images for social, emotional, and existential loneliness or the lack of intimate, relational, and collective connectedness.
Experiences of loneliness change as life shifts
Loneliness takes different forms throughout a person’s lifespan. A child, for instance, can feel socially ostracized by their peers. Young adulthood can be alienating for teens who leave home for college. New parents often feel untethered from their communities, especially among childfree friends. Come retirement, relationships with colleagues can be strained without physical proximity. “People who are lonely because they’ve geographically relocated,” Hawkley says, “are going to feel something different than somebody who’s lonely because their spouse just died, or somebody who feels lonely because they’ve become immobile and they’re limited to staying in their house.”
For much of her career, loneliness was only thought to impact older people, Victor says. But young adults can feel social, emotional, and existential loneliness. “I hypothesize that one of the reasons that we see high levels of loneliness in young people is there probably is social loneliness: ‘People in my gang won’t talk to me anymore,’” she says. “There is the emotional loneliness of perhaps as a young person, losing your grandparent who might have been a very important part of your social group … And I’m quite taken with the idea that perhaps some of the loneliness that young adults experience is this existential bit, particularly if you think about the challenges confronting young people in terms of climate change and war.”
A more contemporary contributing factor, social media, shapes our expectations of relationships. Consuming the highlight reel of peers’ social lives fosters comparison among younger cohorts. Perhaps ironically, young people who spend more time on social media as a means of maintaining relationships feel lonelier than those who have differing motivations for using social media, according to a recent study. “Are we using it to supplement our friendship experience,” asks friendship coach Danielle Bayard Jackson, author of the forthcoming book Fighting for Our Friendships, “or are we using it to take the place of being with people?”
Social, health, and economic factors also make a person more prone to loneliness. Young adults under the age of 30 and those who make less than $24,000 per year report higher levels of loneliness compared to older and wealthier people, according to the Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index. Hispanic and Black Americans, parents, and those with physical or mental health challenges are also more likely to be lonely, according to a 2021 survey by Cigna and Morning Consult. “I wonder if that’s just a [lack of] group connectedness — the collective — because they’re often a peripheralized population,” Hawkley says. “They’re not made to feel like they belong. The same would be true [of] LGBTQ folks — [they] are definitely at a higher risk, immigrants at a higher risk.” Fostering meaningful connections can prove challenging when you’re working three jobs or don’t feel welcome in a community.
Multiple cross-country moves gave Emily Gonzales, 35, more clarity when it came to her own social needs. Upon relocating to Indianapolis, where she had grown up, she noticed a wedge between herself and her childhood friends. Their values didn’t align, she realized, and they didn’t have similar aspirations. “You’re around a bunch of people, but you don’t feel like anybody really gets you,” says Gonzales, who works in medical sales. “These people I’ve known for my entire life, but I don’t feel like they know me or I know them.”
Once Gonzales and her husband moved to their current home base of Scottsdale, Arizona, she was purposeful when forging new connections. She used Bumble For Friends to spend time with people with similar interests and life experiences, like being a stepmom. One of the first women she met was Ashlee Smith, a 36-year-old insurance broker who had also recently moved to the area from Portland, Maine.
Though Smith recently had a baby, she and Gonzales still make time for one another. Gonzales frequently checks in with Smith and even traveled with her and her infant to Portland. “Your world gets so much smaller,” Smith says of parenthood. “Emily and I even had a conversation about it because she could tell I was just a little off. So she checked in and she’s like, ‘What do you need? How can I help you?’”
How to address various dimensions of loneliness
Understanding the drivers of loneliness can help individuals — and societies — effectively resolve it. Because each dimension of loneliness and connection requires different solutions, one blanket suggestion may not work for every lonely individual. “Simply increasing social contact may not reduce someone’s loneliness,” Holt-Lunstad says.
Self-reflection can offer a few solutions. In one of her studies, Victor found 71 percent of older adults had felt lonely during their lives. She and her collaborators asked participants how they had addressed past loneliness. “People were referring to things that they did. One I really liked, but we’ve never published it,” she says. “A guy said, ‘If I feel lonely, I’d go to the church or the pub, depending upon what day of the week it is.’” To manage present loneliness, remember past bouts of alienation and mull over what made you feel more connected. Can you replicate the strategy in your current situation?
If you feel like you’re lacking a community, joining the first club that comes to mind may not be inherently satisfying. Instead, consider important aspects of your identity you’d like to explore, suggests Bayard Jackson. Complete the phrase “I am …” to help guide you. “I might say, ‘I am Black. I am a woman. I am a Christian. I am a mom,’” she says. “Then ask yourself for each one of these identifiers, ‘Am I in community for each one of these in spaces that are formed by this aspect of identity?’” If not, you might want to seek out connection with people who share one of these domains.
You don’t need to accomplish the modern feat of making new friends in adulthood to combat loneliness either. Deepening existing relationships is just as rewarding, but it also requires a shift in mindset: Strengthening these friendships must be a priority. Diversifying your social diet to include interactions with strangers and acquaintances is also socially fulfilling. “We often have to make time out of our busy schedules to be physically active,” Holt-Lunstad says, “and we need to make time in our busy schedules to be socially active.” Both Gonzales and Smith say they were strategic in identifying the types of people and friendships that would satiate their loneliness.
Connection can also be found absent other people. People form strong relationships to places (like a hometown or a hiking trail) and activities (like music or art), Ozawa-de Silva notes. Visiting these locales or engaging in these hobbies may curb loneliness.
But the responsibility to address loneliness can’t fall solely to the individual. Societies that value productivity and competition over the unique merits of its people breed loneliness, says Ozawa-de Silva. “An increasing number of individuals who are experiencing loneliness, anxiety, panic [disorders],” she says, “I think that’s a sign that something is really not right in our society.” To help address this crisis, Ozawa-de Silva says communities can instill values like compassion and empathy at an early age and encourage a teamwork-oriented goal structure for children. “We need to address it at the systemic level,” she says. “Maybe social education, different kinds of programs, something that would hopefully change a few priorities in contemporary societies to think about the limitations of hypervigilance and a hyperfocus on competition and productivity.”
Addressing any form of loneliness isn’t an overnight endeavor. Relationships of every variety require dedication and persistence to bloom. Consider your quest toward social harmony like tending to a garden, planting seeds for a variety of different types of connection — intimate, relational, and collective alike.
What does Broadway look like after Sondheim? A lot like how it looked before.
The current Broadway revival of the late Stephen Sondheim’s most notorious flop, 1981’s Merrily We Roll Along, has unquestionably reclaimed the show’s reputation, not only through the rave reviews of critics but by garnering the highest average ticket price of any show this season, with seats ranging up to $600.
With Merrily raking it in at the Hudson Theatre, last year’s acclaimed Sweeney Todd revival going strong at the Lunt-Fontanne, and the composer’s decidedly experimental show, Here We Are, garnering a mixed reception off-Broadway, it’s perhaps worth taking stock of what American musical theater has become in this era where Sondheim is both everywhere and nowhere. While Sondheim’s shows are currently playing all over New York, his influence over the modern musical itself has become somewhat harder to track.
“There’s a half-voiced fear among musical acolytes, understandable in a time in which theater itself is newly under siege,” former New York Times critic Ben Brantley recently wrote, “that on some level Stephen Sondheim represents the end of the line for a once-flourishing art form.” If that sounds dire, it’s because the stakes are high: It’s a common axiom that musicals are one of the few purely American art forms; they evolved within American pop culture to become a global export and one of our most popular, enduring forms of entertainment. But it’s also widely understood in the theater world that for all the composers like Sondheim who helped make the musical what it is, a show like Merrily — with unknown songs, a conceptual plot adapted from a little-known play, and a narrative told in reverse — could never make it to the Great White Way today. That’s because today’s successes tend to be jukebox musicals and shows based on very famous movies you already know.
This doesn’t mean, however, that musicals are doomed to wither on the vine as consumerism pushes us toward ever more derivative, watered-down franchise adaptations stacked with mediocre songs. It’s easy to assume this, and to cling to Sondheim as the last great theater composer. But perhaps there’s a different perspective on the current state of the musical: That it isn’t dying at all, that many potentially worrying aspects that seem unique to the modern landscape are as old as the medium itself, and that the artform is evolving into something new and equally interesting.
The new modern musical is arguably finding its way into a hybrid form that routinely plays with structure and genre expectations, pairs self-aware storytelling and innovative design with traditional crowd-pleasing elements, and deploys the mechanisms of social media and TikTok to bolster audience interactivity and unite shows with their core fanbases. No, it’s not Sondheim — but in a new era of storytelling, we don’t yet know what the next Sondheim will look or sound like.
Broadway shows have always relied on pop hits to drive their success
To understand exactly where we’re headed, it’s helpful to understand that the musical as we know it has been through all this before. First, think of the musical as a sum of its parts. There’s the story — the book or the libretto — and the songs that go along with the story. Regardless of whatever else you put onstage, how well these two elements mesh determines whether you’ve created something coherent.
That might sound like a foregone conclusion, but the history of the form begs to differ. The musical evolved from two totally opposite impulses: vaudeville, which paired popular songs of the day with entertaining skits and short sketches, and operettas, which had dense, sophisticated scores descended from operas. So, in one corner, shows whose songs were random and interchangeable — in the other, shows whose stories couldn’t be told without the music.
In the middle, you had Tin Pan Alley, where many of America’s most famous 20th-century songwriters churned out songs at a feverish pace. In this era, songwriters such as George and Ira Gershwin and Irving Berlin thrived, churning out still-popular hits that helped form the backbone of what’s referred to as the American Songbook. Often, those songs found their way into frothy shows whose plots were negligible and served as little more than marketing for the music — which rarely had anything to do with the story. Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies, which reigned over the 1920s, was even more vague, delivering conceptually innovative spectacle but functioning primarily as a fashion show with music.
In 1928, however, this started to change, when Ziegfeld produced Jerome Kern’s Showboat, a challenging drama steeped in the influence of operetta and teeming with social issues. Not only was Showboat’s score nearly continuous throughout, but the songs were designed to relay information and insight into the characters. In 1943, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II further codified these ingredients when they took a holistic approach to their first collaboration. In Oklahoma!, the music, lyrics, and choreography were all utilized to deepen characterization and advance the plot. But, crucially, while Rodgers’s lush score was influenced by operetta, the songs were all bangers. The songs from Oklahoma! were so popular that for the first time in Broadway history, the production made a recording to preserve the original cast, thereby turning the Original Broadway Cast Recording) into an indelible part of the musical theater experience.
For most theater lovers, the original cast recording is an introduction to the show itself, long before they ever get a chance to see it. But while these recordings are a vital marketing tool, it can decontextualize songs from the performance. Thus, ironically, at the same time Rodgers and Hammerstein were nailing home the ingredients for a fully constructed musical, their cast album was instigating the process for its deconstruction.
What even is a Broadway musical anymore? It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer
Most recent Broadway productions fall into one of two camps. In the first camp, we have musical revues — jukebox musicals — which are loosely plotted vehicles for previously written well-known songs from pop songwriters or performers. Think Jersey Boys, Moulin Rouge, or the recent Britney Spears musical, Once Upon a One More Time.
In the second camp, we have musicals written in the Disney vein, adding songs or other elements to a previously beloved, well-known franchise. Think Mean Girls, Legally Blonde, Back to the Future, or the upcoming musical adaptation of The Notebook.
Excluding revivals, the vast majority of recent Broadway musicals fall into either category, with varying degrees of success. An ever-dwindling third category is what we might think of as the “traditional” American musical — the Hamiltons and Hadestowns, built not around a previously existing juggernaut franchise or pop hitmaker, but around an original idea or story adaptation, with a fully original score.
There are obvious limitations to these categorizations. You can argue, perfectly correctly, that shows built around previously existing franchises are also “traditional” musicals — they tend to have fully or mostly original scores with a two-act plot structure. At the same time, these distinctions have become ever more blurry in a musical landscape where shows have to appeal to the tastes of both tourists and hardcore musical lovers with sophisticated palettes and tremendous fan power. It’s increasingly common for jukebox musicals like Jagged Little Pill and the recent Neil Diamond revue A Beautiful Noise to not only interpolate their pop hits but to deconstruct, interrogate, and recontextualize them. Is that still a revue? Meanwhile, shows based on movies like The Lion King and Matilda are straightforward story adaptations, but feel fresh and transformative based on their musical and theatrical strengths.
Still, there’s a clear distinction between shows that exist to further the art form and those that exist to further expand an existing IP. With the franchise and jukebox musicals dominating Broadway, it feels important to separate the “originals” from the ever-growing crop of shows that seem to fulfill the latter purpose. It’s hard to ignore that many of these latter types of shows are not only derivative but also sloppy and creatively vapid — and that since Broadway reopened, these shows have been turning profits even at their most muddled and cringe, as other, more artistic and innovative shows close up shop early.
Applying the whole Rent sellout debate to a crop of shows that are bringing Times Square back to life nearly four years into a pandemic that debilitated the American theater, however, seems at minimum ill-timed and misguided. It also isn’t entirely accurate to say that only the derivative musicals get all the attention. Of the 10 highest-grossing shows of the last decade, only two, Beautiful — The Carole King Musical and Jersey Boys, were jukebox musicals, and only two, The Lion King and Aladdin, could be said to fit under the “franchise musical” heading. However one feels about the rest of the musicals on the list, no one can say they aren’t innovative. This was a decade that saw a steady effusion of original musicals, from Fun Home and Dear Evan Hansen to Be More Chill, and Something Rotten, many of which found passionate fanbases. And even as Broadway limped along for most of last season, the three shows that recouped post-pandemic — so far including girl-powered history romp Six, the Michael Jackson musical MJ, and the revival of Funny Girl — arguably represented a range of ideas and creative concepts rather than a narrowing of the field.
Still, the idea that Broadway should be about more than just milking cash cows feels noble. It’s hard to let go of the 20th-century dream of an elevated musical form where every song feels inextricably linked to a unique character and story brought to us by consummate songwriters. It’s also hard not to resent the Mean Girls and the & Juliets for robbing the Strange Loops of their chance to find a mass audience.
The dictum that not even Sondheim could become Sondheim in the current environment of American theater is meant to underscore the fact that culturally, we’ve moved past the age of visionary composers driving what gets a Broadway production. The current glut of jukebox/franchise shows make it incredibly difficult for less-known and experimental shows to break through. While everybody still wants to be Sondheim, only a handful of today’s musical composers have the kind of fan following and name recognition that allows them to mount a Broadway show and recoup its investment on the strength of their score. It’s not easy, as Brantley observed for the Times, “to imagine any of them ascending to the unapproachable dominance of their profession that was Mr. Sondheim’s for roughly half a century.” A side factor is that many of them have moved away from the theatrical trenches after recruitment into the Disney fold — a less risky, more lucrative career path, but not one that leads to new shows.
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Bruce Glikas/WireImage
But this idea — that there will never be another Sondheim to innovate and push the musical forward — also obscures the reality that most of Sondheim’s musicals barely made it to Broadway to begin with. (Merrily only ran for 16 tortured performances.) For most of his career, Sondheim dealt with critical dismissal and audiences who didn’t know what to do with his work. It took decades for many of his shows, with their famously “unsingable” scores, to become the cultural icons that established him not only as one of America’s most important composers, but a pop culture mainstay.
In other words, even Sondheim often persevered despite, not because of, the modes and means of Broadway success. For all we laud “the American musical” as a pure art form, the truth is that Broadway has always been a commercial enterprise, first and foremost, more closely tied to Top 40 pop music than to high art. The Gershwins, Cole Porter, Lerner and Loewe, even Leonard Bernstein — most of the 20th century’s venerated musical composers were primarily hitmakers.
This is a hard pill for many theater lovers to swallow. Musical theater’s relationship to classical music and opera has historically been such an incendiary subject that every few decades someone drops an impassioned rant on the public about it. The ever-present tension between perceptions of “highbrow” and “lowbrow” art means that theater composers and critics frequently wage war over which realm the musical belongs to. It also means that critics have been handwringing that the modern musical is dead for roughly 20 years — no, make that 40 years. The modern musical has allegedly been in its death throes since before many of us were born, and yet somehow these death throes have produced most of Broadway’s longest-running and lucrative shows, from The Phantom of the Opera to Wicked.
The more I consider the era we’re in, the less I’m bothered by the state of things. The current Broadway season already holds promise beyond the remnants of Sondheim: The upcoming jukebox musical Hell’s Kitchen, loosely based on the life of Alicia Keys, promises to unite the standard jukebox biopic with the thematic complexity of Jagged Little Pill. Elton John’s Tammy Faye looks like it will inject a needed amount of satirical froth into the mix. Revivals of Cabaret and The Wiz already feel like they are arriving at exactly the moment we need them most. Meanwhile, audiences continue to return to theaters — and those audiences contain fewer tourists and more locals and a more diverse, young crowd overall. In other words, nature is healing, and it wants to sing show tunes.