We’re all familiar with the notion of psychological trauma — damage to an individual’s psyche caused by an extremely distressing event. But there’s also another kind of trauma: a collective disturbance that happens to a group of people when their world is suddenly upended.
Consider the Buffalo Creek flood of 1972. In Buffalo Creek, a mountain hollow in West Virginia, a coal-mining company had deposited more than a million gallons of wastewater and sludge, checked by a rudimentary dam. Rain caused water levels to rise, and on Feb. 26, the dam burst. An enormous wall of thick black waste came barreling down the hollow, destroying one mining hamlet after another. Homes, churches, roads — everything was swept away. One hundred and twenty-five people were killed.
Visiting the area the following year, the sociologist Kai Erikson found the survivors psychologically traumatized. Residents grieved for lost family members and friends. Many relived the event in flashbacks.
But Mr. Erikson noticed “collective trauma” as well. As he documented in his 1976 book about Buffalo Creek, “Everything in Its Path,” the floodwaters carried away not just physical objects but also relationships and routines that had defined life there for generations. Without these social anchors, residents struggled to find meaning and purpose. They were disoriented and disconnected in ways that could outlast even the effects of their individual psychological traumas. Socially, they were in a permanent state of shock.
The concept of collective trauma was rooted in the thought of Émile Durkheim, a turn-of-the-20th-century French sociologist and an architect of the field. Durkheim argued that norms, values and rituals were the linchpins of social order; they provided the basis for solidarity and social cohesion. Collective trauma occurs when an unexpected event severs the ties that bind community members to one another.
It’s easy to see why a town-leveling flood might have this effect, and in a recent book that builds on Mr. Erikson’s ideas, the sociologist Ron Eyerman suggests that the damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina might be viewed through a similar lens. But environmental catastrophes aren’t the only source of collective trauma. Wars, genocide, financial crises, even large-scale movements of population can radically challenge established ways of living together.
In a paper on the Polish transition out of Communism, the sociologist Piotr Sztompka has shown that changes in labor market conditions are ripe for producing collective trauma. Although the revolution of 1989 was a liberation, Polish workers were used to a planned economy. Many were unprepared for the spikes in unemployment, price shocks and heightened competition in the workplace that accompanied market reforms. Family life and friendships suffered. The trauma was registered in anxiety about the future, a nostalgic yearning for the Communist past and a decline in social trust.
As we’re seeing in the United States, mass job loss itself can be damaging to a collectivity. In 1960, 24 percent of American workers held jobs in manufacturing. Today that number stands at 8 percent. Manufacturing jobs offered workers without college degrees — men especially — wages high enough that they could support their families. But factories and mills were more than sources of income. They were local institutions. People built relationships and organized their lives around them.
As factories closed or were automated, the social structure of working-class towns and neighborhoods was undercut. Men who used to be role models found themselves out of work. Many took low-wage service sector jobs they perceived as demeaning. Drug and alcohol use rose. There was talk about how things had changed for the worse. This was the realization that a social world was gone.
Last month’s presidential election has collective trauma written all over it. For working-class white people whose communities had been hollowed out by the decline of manufacturing, the rhetoric and promises of Donald J. Trump’s campaign offered a salve. He vowed to restore the world they had lost.
But those who voted for Hillary Clinton may now be experiencing collective trauma of their own. In the aftermath of the election, they have been walking around in a daze. Some of this is because forecasts based on problematic polling strongly predicted a Democratic win. Some is fear or uncertainty about the future. But there’s more to it than that: For progressives, moderates and “Never Trump” Republicans, the political order they long took for granted — defined by polarization, yes, but also by a commitment to basic principles of democracy and decency — is suddenly gone.
In recent decades, Democrats and Republicans rarely agreed on substance, but all candidates for major office were expected to adhere to fundamental ethical norms, like “don’t threaten to jail your opponent” and “don’t celebrate sexual assault.” Mr. Trump’s victory signals that that world, with the assurances it offered that there were some lines those seeking power wouldn’t cross (or that the American electorate wouldn’t let them cross), is no longer. Rightly or wrongly, memories have been activated of historical traumas linked with anti-democratic politics, such as the emergence of fascism in interwar Europe and the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.