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Alone for the Holidays? Blame Late Stage Capitalism
Loneliness is not an individual pathology. It is a failure of how we have designed our economy, our politics, and our shared spaces.
Dec 29, 2025
The holidays can be the loneliest time of year, when isolation, family fractures, and economic strain become especially hard to bear. The shopping frenzy and glittery lights don’t substitute for real belonging—they often make its absence more painful.
Worse, many people blame themselves for not feeling the cheer. Scroll through Instagram or watch a holiday film, and it appears as though everyone else is finding love, meaning, and connection this holiday season. If you’re not, it’s easy to believe you’ve done something wrong.
But loneliness is not an individual pathology. It is a failure of how we have designed our economy, our politics, and our shared spaces.
Self-help culture offers some useful advice about boundaries, rest, and self-care. But it rarely acknowledges the larger truth: Loneliness is not something most people can solve on their own. The answer isn’t “retail therapy” or a vacation in Maui. It’s building belonging into our collective experience.
We were expected to move for work, losing contact with extended family and friends, and compete our way to the top.
That means addressing an economic system that systematically excludes growing numbers of people from security, dignity, and meaning. It means reclaiming political system that have been captured by moneyed insiders. And it’s creating the shared spaces—especially in-person spaces—where people are welcomed to contribute, be known, and find support.
How Did Isolation Get so Widespread?
For decades, we were told that rugged individualism was the path to success. We were expected to move for work, losing contact with extended family and friends, and compete our way to the top. Relationships were treated as less important rather than necessities. Capitalism required a flexible labor force, and we reorganized our lives accordingly.
At the same time, political participation has increasingly been reduced to fundraising. Those without wealth are invited to donate or volunteer, but many sense—accurately—that real power belongs to those who can write big checks. The rest of us have little influence over the decisions shaping our lives.
The places that once supported everyday connection have also eroded. Public squares, community centers, and informal gathering places have been replaced by commercial spaces designed for efficiency and extraction, not belonging. And the economy that once supported a middle class has been hollowed out by big corporations with little use for Midwest steel mills or family farms, leaving behind empty downtowns, shuttered factories, and frayed social ties.
During the road trip across the United States that led to my book, The Revolution Where You Live, I encountered small towns and urban neighborhoods that were quiet, even desolate. That experience stayed with me during a visit to Tübingen, a town in Germany, where I asked a friend about a strange noise drifting through the streets. She laughed. “That is the sound of people talking,” she said. The town square had been closed to traffic and was filled with market stalls, laughter, and neighbors greeting each other as they shopped for holiday gifts.
Design Matters
Today’s loneliness epidemic creates vulnerability. When people lack meaningful connection, they are more susceptible to groups that promise belonging, identity, and purpose—whether at political rallies or in online spaces. For some, belonging is created by excluding other identities and even spewing hate. Research suggests isolation can contribute to radicalization, though it does not determine it. Belonging can be mobilized toward many ends.
Isolation also takes a toll on physical and mental health, contributing to higher rates of heart disease, strokes, diabetes, depression and even dementia, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
What Would It Look Like to Design for Belonging Instead?
At a time of impending war, political extremism, climate crisis, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, this may seem like the least urgent question to ask. But moments of upheaval are also moments of reinvention. The direction we take depends in part on whether people feel they have a place, a voice, and something to offer.
Designing for belonging starts with economic participation. Workplaces and businesses can be designed to offer participation, dignity, and a shared stake through cooperatives, employee ownership, and models that reward contribution rather than extraction. We can stop giving tax breaks and head starts to corporations that drain communities, and leave behind pollution and unemployment. Instead we can support enterprises with long-term commitments to place: those that make food, housing, healthcare, and childcare affordable and rooted.
People power grows out of connection—the some force that carries us through disasters and makes collective change possible.
It also means rebuilding shared spaces—places where people can simply be, or sing, talk, trade, make art, share food, teach, and support one another. Inviting places where people come to get to know those of different races, generations, ways of life—and where fear and prejudice lose their grip simply because people are no longer strangers.
Political and social movements can use language that invites people in as collaborators, not just donors or spectators. Belonging that is at the center of our work can counter the burnout that plagues so much civic and social change work. When people experience the dignity of having something to offer, the sense of community and mutual support can make participation as joyful as a good party
Belonging may feel like a squishy topic at a time of authoritarianism, war, and corporate dominance. But people power grows out of connection—the some force that carries us through disasters and makes collective change possible. Connection and belonging are easy to overlook when they are present, but when they are missing, our health, sense of purpose, and optimism suffer. Authentic connections are sources not only of well being but of power—and together they form the foundations for a better, more inclusive world.
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Whatever Happened to Trump’s 'Golden Age' for American Workers?
Trump administration policies have lowered wages, reduced employment, and made work less safe.
Dec 29, 2025
Although President Donald Trump’s Department of Labor announced in April 2025 that “Trump’s Golden Age puts American workers first,” that contention is contradicted by the facts.
Indeed, Trump has taken the lead in reducing workers’ incomes. One of his key actions along these lines occurred on March 14, 2025, when he issued an executive order that scrapped a Biden-era regulation raising the minimum wage for employees of private companies with federal contracts. Some 327,300 workers had benefited from former President Joe Biden’s measure, which produced an average wage increase of $5,228 per year. With Trump’s reversal of policy, they became ripe for pay cuts of up to 25%.
America’s farmworkers, too―many of them desperately poor―are now experiencing pay cuts caused by the Trump administration’s H-2A visa program, which is bringing hundreds of thousands of foreign agricultural workers to the United States under new, lower-wage federal guidelines. The United Farm Workers estimates that this will cost US farm workers $2.64 billion in wages per year.
As in the past, Trump and his Republican Party have blocked any increase in the federal minimum wage―a paltry $7.25 per hour―despite the fact that it has not been raised since 2009 and, thanks to inflation, has lost 30% of its purchasing power. By 2025, this wage had fallen below the official US government poverty level.
“Since Inauguration Day... the fever dreams of America’s corporate billionaires have come to life with a relentless assault on working people."
Furthermore, the Trump administration is promoting subminimum wages for millions of American workers. Although the Biden administration had abolished the previous subminimum wage floor for workers with disabilities by bringing them up to the federal minimum wage level, the Trump Labor Department has restored the subminimum wage. In addition, the Trump administration is proposing to strip 3.7 million home-care workers of their current federal minimum wage guarantee.
Trump’s Labor Department has also scrapped the Biden plan to expand overtime pay rights to 4.3 million workers who had previously lost eligibility for it thanks to inflation. And it is promoting plans to classify many workers as independent contractors, thereby depriving such workers of key labor rights, including minimum wages and overtime pay.
Not surprisingly, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on December 18, 2025 that, from November 2024 to November 2025, the annual growth of the real wages (wages adjusted for inflation) of American workers had fallen to 0.8%.
Trump’s policies have also fostered unemployment.
Probably the best-known example of this is the Trump administration’s chaotic purge, led by billionaire Elon Musk, of 317,000 federal workers without any sort of clear rationale or due process. On top of this, however, it has shut down massive construction projects, especially in the renewable energy industry. Trump’s recent order to halt the huge wind farms off the East Coast is predicted to cause the firing of thousands of workers.
Ironically, as two economic analysts reported in mid-December 2025, “key sectors of the economy that are central to Trump’s agenda have contracted, with payrolls in manufacturing, mining, logging, and professional business services all falling over the last year.” Despite Trump’s repeated claims to be reviving US manufacturing through tariffs, 58,000 US manufacturing jobs were lost between April (when the administration announced its “Liberation Day” tariffs) and September 2025.
Consequently, US unemployment, which, during the Biden presidency, had bottomed out at 3.4%, had by November 2025 (the last month for which government statistics are available) risen to 4.6%. This is the highest unemployment level in four years, leaving 7.8 million workers unemployed―700,000 more than a year before.
Worker safety and health have also been seriously undermined by the Trump administration. According to the latest AFL-CIO study, workplace hazards kill approximately 140,000 workers each year, with millions more injured or sickened. Although the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is supposed to enforce health and safety standards, the Trump administration cut its workplace inspections by 30%, thereby reducing inspections of each site to one every 266 years.
Similarly, Trump has nearly destroyed the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which provides research on workplace safety standards, by reducing its staffing from 1,400 employees to 150 and slashing its budget by 80%.
Through executive action, the Trump administration eliminated specific measures taken to protect workers. This process included blocking a Biden rule to control heat conditions in workplaces, where 600 workers die from heat-related causes and nearly 25,000 others are injured every year. Moreover, in the spring of 2025, the Trump administration announced that it would not enforce a Biden rule to protect miners from dangerous silica exposure and moved to close 34 Mine Safety and Health Administration district offices. Although a public uproar led to a reversal of the office closures, the administration then proposed weakening those offices’ ability to impose mine safety requirements and, also, weakened workplace safety penalties for businesses.
In addition, Trump appointed corporate executives to head relevant federal agencies, gutted Equal Employment Opportunity guidelines, and, in March 2025, issued an executive order that terminated collective bargaining rights for more than a million federal government workers. This last measure, the largest single union-busting action in American history, ended union representation and protections for 1 out of every 14 unionized workers in the United States.
In a special AFL-CIO report, issued on December 22, 2025, the labor federation’s president, Liz Shuler, and secretary-treasurer, Fred Redmond, declared: “Since Inauguration Day... the fever dreams of America’s corporate billionaires have come to life with a relentless assault on working people,” and “every day has brought a new challenge and attack: On federal workers. On our unions and collective bargaining rights. On the agencies that stand up for us and the essential services we rely on... On our democracy itself.”
Although Trump’s second term in office might have provided a “Golden Age” for the president and his fellow billionaires, it has produced harsh and challenging times for American workers.
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As Americans Face Affordability Crisis, Two-Thirds Say Trump Policies Mainly Favor the Rich
Sen. Tammy Baldwin said that when Trump gives his economy high marks, "it is so clear that he's talking about the economy for him, his billionaire friends, his billionaire Cabinet members."
Dec 22, 2025
As Americans increasingly struggle with the cost of living, nearly two-thirds now say President Donald Trump's policies favor the wealthy over everyone else, according to poll results published Sunday.
When respondents were asked by a CBS News/YouGov poll back in March who they felt the president's policies were most geared toward, already a majority, 55%, said the wealthy were benefiting the most, while 33% said his policies benefited everyone equally. Just 1% said his policies would most benefit the poor.
Since then, Trump has imposed a series of regressive tariffs that have driven inflation up, costing the average family an extra $1,200 this year, according to an estimate by Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee in Congress.
He also passed what has often been described as the largest upward transfer of wealth in US history. After July's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the top 1% of earners are poised to pay over $1 trillion less in taxes over the next decade.
Meanwhile, its cuts to Medicaid and Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies are expected to result in around 15 million people losing health insurance, while roughly 4 million—including 1 million children—will see cuts to their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.
When CBS/YouGov asked the same question nine months later, the number who said Trump's policies favored the wealthy had shot up by 10 points to 65%. The number who said they'd benefit everyone equally has dropped by about the same amount, and Trump convinced no one that he was primarily looking out for the poor.
Trump's approval ratings have hit record lows in 2025, with the economy—once the area where Americans had the greatest faith in him—now serving as one of the biggest sources of backlash.
Last week, after months of delay, a Labor Department report showed that unemployment had climbed to 4.6% in November, the highest rate since 2021—nearly 50,000 manufacturing jobs, which Trump's tariffs are supposedly meant to protect, were shed between February and September. At the same time, wage growth has decelerated to 3.5% year-over-year, the department said.
Just 18% told CBS News/YouGov they felt as if they were financially better off since Trump took office, while 50% said they were worse off. Thirty-two percent said they were about the same.
When not simply pretending that the economy has improved under his watch—as he did in his primetime address last week—Trump and his allies have blamed economic sluggishness on his predecessor, former President Joe Biden.
But Americans largely do not buy this framing: 47% say Trump's policies are more responsible for the state of the US economy today, while just 22% still predominantly blame Biden, and another 22% say both are equally to blame.
Last week, Trump said his economic performance deserves an "A++++." But just 5% of voters gave him an A. Instead, 24% gave him an F, another 25% gave him a D, and 26% gave him a C.
In a post on social media, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) said that when Trump gives his economy high marks, "it is so clear that he's talking about the economy for him, his billionaire friends, his billionaire Cabinet members."
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