Hillary Clinton can’t say she didn’t warn us.

In a new 3,500-word essay on “The Weaponization of Loneliness” in The Atlantic, the former secretary of state and presidential candidate says her jejune 1996 book, “It Takes a Village,” forecast the country’s current crisis of loneliness and offered still-relevant solutions.

And, oh yeah, hapless lonely people exploited by authoritarian right-wingers basically kept her from the White House in 2016 (and here you thought it was Russia).

Now, social isolation is a real social problem in America, as Hillary correctly recounts in her essay, and it has contributed to the Trump phenomenon. But that it has been uniquely weaponized against progressives, or that conventional progressive policies are the antidote to this deep-seated phenomenon is as absurd and self-serving as you’d expect from a woman who managed one of the more shocking losses in U.S. presidential history and has been offering excuses ever since.

In her telling, an army of so-called incels, or involuntarily celibate men, organized by Steve Bannon is part of a growing threat to U.S. democracy. You can see the appeal of this gloss on our politics to someone who has long warned of the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” and uses the phrase, once again, in an essay otherwise devoted to warning about the threats of conspiratorial thinking.

Rather than shadowy forces, from Russian hackers to Bannon’s a-socialized acolytes, determining the course of the country, it is the middle of the electorate that remains crucially important, and it is open to persuasion on the big questions. Donald Trump fought Hillary to a draw among independents in 2016 and eked out a narrow victory, and lost them to Biden and was defeated in 2020.

To read Hillary, you might think that no one who supports the Democrats is ever lonely.

As it happens, Republicans are the party of married people. As Conn Carroll pointed out at The Washington Examiner, in the 2022 House races, Republicans won married men by 20 points and unmarried men by 7, and won married women by 14 points. The GOP, on the other hand, got wiped out with unmarried women by nearly 40 points.

This marriage gap has a connection to loneliness. According to a Gallup survey in 2020, 41% of single people reported being lonely the day before, whereas only 16% of people who were married or in a domestic partnership said the same thing. (This was in the midst of the pandemic, by the way — overall loneliness has declined since.) By region, New England has the highest rate of loneliness, and big cities are significantly more lonely than rural areas.

This means that Hillary forged a coalition of the lonely (or at least the more lonely) in 2016, and the worst thing that could happen to her party is more people getting married and living in small places with a stronger sense of community.

Of course, Hillary doesn’t offer either of those as potential solutions to the crisis of loneliness. No, but Joe Biden’s infrastructure program might help — as if people are disconnected because they can’t take high-speed rail to go see friends. She’s heartened, too, by parents protesting “book bans” and workers engaged in union organizing. Left-wing activism, apparently, is what can knit us all back together.

She invokes “the wisdom and power of the American village,” and says, “we have more in common than we think,” without ever giving any sense that she acknowledges the values of the other side, or even its legitimacy. If she doesn’t use her infamous word from 2016, “deplorables,” to describe her opponents, that’s clearly what she still thinks about them.

Hillary may not be lonely, but she’s a case study in the myopic self-righteousness of the left that is unjustified, high-handed and off-putting. It’s no wonder that if Hillary’s “village” is the community on offer, millions of rational, well-adjusted, happy Americans want nothing to do with it.

© 2023 by King Features Syndicate