Civil society, not government is what country needs more of

B ARNEY Frank, the former Democratic congressman, was fond of saying “‘government’ is the word for the things we do together.” It’s a perverse notion, eerily authoritarian and socially insidious. Conservatives too often lend credence to this view, however, by granting Frank’s premise, and trying to counter the left’s “collectivism” with fierce individualism. But the individual, the man standing alone, is not the counterweight to the Leviathan state. Community is. Civil society is. So it was welcome when the Joint Economic Committee, under Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, published a paper and held a hearing titled “What We Do Together: The State of Associational Life in America.”

Lee’s report was based on the crucial premise that “what happens in the middle layers of our society — what we do together in the space between the individual and the state — is vital to sustaining a free, prosperous, democratic, and pluralistic country.”

The report found many signs that the institutions of civil society are withering, and that the horizontal bonds that tie neighbors and countrymen together are fraying. The report is chock-full of data; church attendance is down, as are measures of family strength and neighborliness.

Robert Putnam, author of “Bowling Alone,” spelled out a real consequence, measurable in dollars, of the dissolution of civil society.

In four crucial categories of social capital, according to Putnam, baby boomers lag their parents in consequential ways: spouses, children, close friends and community involvement.

Putnam highlighted the boomers’ declining number of close friends. “The birth cohort of 1950–59 had an average of 2.1 close friends in 2004, when they were about 50,” he testified, “compared to 3.0 close friends for the birth cohort of 1930–39 in 1985, when they were about 50, i.e., about 30 percent fewer close friends.”

Boomers lag their parents’ generation in community involvement, says the renowned social scientist. This is a personal problem for boomers and a fiscal problem for the country.

Given boomers’ comparative lack of social capital, Putnam testified, “current estimates substantially underestimate the amount of paid/institutional care that will be required in the next 20 years.”

Rising divorce rates mean “12 percent fewer of the mid-boomer birth cohort of 1955 will be living with spouses when they reach age 65 than was true of the birth cohort of 1930.” And children? Putnam observed, “Assuming similar midlife mortality rates among those children, the birth cohort of 1955 will reach retirement age with roughly 36 percent fewer children than the birth cohort of 1930 had.”

The consequences will burden the government in ways society does not adequately understand.

This is one example of many. It is a symptom of a weakening civil society. Another is the view that the American Dream is dead, and thus the triumph of politicians who promise that Washington can fix all our problems.

Washington cannot, of course, fix them. That’s the point. You can’t replace 50 thousand parishes, 10 thousand town halls, or 100 million families with a federal program.

Civil society is what America needs more of. We need less of government, which can’t rebuild civil society for us. It’s something we need to do together, without Washington.