A bitter divisiveness afflicts America. The rancor of news pundits, the incivility of social media, and the storm of opposition to free speech on college campuses are symptoms of a fraying social fabric. Explanations of this discord have been offered from many quarters, but have failed to get at its roots. With Primal Screams, Mary Eberstadt does just that. With impeccable logic and evidence from many fields, she argues that the rise of identity politics is a direct result of the collapse of family and community.

Her logic—backed by startling new data—runs as follows: humans from time immemorial have forged their identities within elemental structures of kinship. Today, following decades of social shocks like family shrinkage and widespread breakdown, generations of people have been deprived of the building blocks of identity itself. This dispossession, argues Eberstadt, propels the increasingly frantic flight to membership in identitarian groups. The seemingly constant fury is, in fact, a primal scream for the familial root system of which many have been deprived.