Never judge a magazine article by its title.

It's a dramatic headline, to be sure. It clearly caught my attention.

The author of the piece, Joshua Coleman, has a book coming out on the same subject, so you can consider this piece the equivalent of a movie trailer.

He is a psychologist and his forthcoming book is titled, "Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict."

Not exactly the kind of thing that gets the blood pumping or makes someone want to smash that hyperlink, so like a movie trailer, you try to gin up excitement with a hook.

And what better hook to catch the attention of Atlantic readers than hating on "individualism," a bedrock of Western culture and so naturally an object of derision and contempt.

The only problem is, the article says just about nothing about individualism.

While the title promised a treatise on the evils of individualism and the central role it plays in family estrangement, the word (and its various forms) appears only three times. Twice early in the piece:

Of course, not all individuals base their ideas of family on these more individualized principles.

Which is immediately followed by,

However, in recent decades the majority of American families have experienced weakening [extended] kin ties and high rates of mobility and dispersion. I would argue that these factors have made the opportunities for familial alienation greater than in the past.

"I would argue that these factors have made the opportunities for familial alienation greater than in the past."

So, weakening of kin ties, high rates of mobility and dispersion are what are creating "opportunities for familial alienation."

I guess that means it's not individualism?

Oh, wait, of course it's individualism, the title said so, and we hate individualism.

I lost track.

Which brings us to the one other time the word "individual" appears, towards the end.

Yet in less grave scenarios our American love affair with the needs and rights of the individual conceals how much sorrow we create for those we leave behind.

Um, what?

The problem the left has with individualism is that it gets in the way of their agenda.

From a piece in HuffPost, of all places:

All the enemies of American-European civilization in the last century - the communists, the Nazis, Imperial Japan, and extreme Islamic groups - have hated Western individualism with utter passion and conviction.

This was from 2013, the title, "Is Individualism Good or Bad."

But individualism has also been attacked by those within the West who have doubts about their own culture.

Who are "those within the West," who have doubts?

From The Heritage Foundation last December in a piece titled, "Critical Race Theory, the New Intolerance, and Its Grip on America:"

Harvard's Berkman Klein Center's entry on Critical Legal Theory neatly teases out the link between the legal analysis of power relations with the emerging identity-based politics. It writes that CLT scholars:

focused from the start on the ways that law contributed to illegitimate social hierarchies, producing domination of women by men, nonwhites by whites, and the poor by the wealthy. They claim that apparently neutral language and institutions, operated through law, mask relationships of power and control. The emphasis on individualism within the law similarly hides patterns of power relationships while making it more difficult to summon up a sense of community and human interconnection.

From there it is a short step to Critical Race Theory. Unsurprisingly, given its name, CRT makes everything about race the prism through which its proponents analyze all aspects of American life—and do so with a degree of persistence that has helped CRT impact all aspects of American life.

In short, individualism is the antithesis of collectivism, and must be discredited at every turn.

By making it all about race, they are even more empowered to demonize it.

This, from The National Museum of African American History and Culture, a part of the Smithsonian Institution, in which they specifically identify "individualism" as a part of "white culture."

They swiftly apologized and pulled it from their website.

Individualism has been a foundational value of America since there was an America. Back to the HuffPost piece:

If there is one defining quality of the West, it is individualism. Western individualism has no similar roots in any other civilization. Even cultures permeated by Western ideas and business, such as those of Japan, Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong, have not become individualistic in the Western way.

And yet now it's being blamed for family estrangement? Two hundred-plus years of history it's suddenly a problem?

Back to the Atlantic piece.

In The Marriage-Go-Round, the Johns Hopkins University sociologist Andrew Cherlin wrote that starting in the late 19th century, traditional sources of identity such as class, religion, and community slowly began to be replaced with an emphasis on personal growth and happiness. By the second half of the 20th century, American families had gone through changes that, Cherlin said, were "unlike anything that previous generations of Americans have ever seen.

It's not about the Western notion of individualism. That's been around for centuries. It's about social forces that have been brought on in recent decades by industrialization, technology, mobility, and perhaps even the kind of narcissism that is aided and abetted by growing affluence.

I know that because I read beyond the headline.

I'm not sure The Atlantic expects that. It's become more of a prop for socially anxious white liberals to leave on their coffee tables, next to Architectural Digest and The Economist, both of which are also not meant to be read but rather displayed like intellectual knick-knacks

They are the ceramic cupid figurines and souvenir beer steins of the upper middle class.

I could edit The Atlantic piece in a few minutes, remove the three-odd references to individualism, and it would lose nothing.

If anything, it would gain clarity.

These off-handed smears should be challenged at every turn. This branding of basic American tenets as "problematic" is incredibly destructive and poisons the culture instead of enriching it.

Not white culture, whatever that is, Western culture.