Alienated America

Timothy P. Carney, “Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse,” Harper Collins, 2019, 299 pp.

This author, utilizing his own research and building on the research of Robert Putnam, William Julius Wilson, and Charles Murray, three contemporary writers who have done the most scholarship on social capital, demonstrates that the “localized erosion of civil society (community) is the fundamental problem in our country today”.  It’s well-documented that civil society — the local, voluntary associations that knit together America’s communities — has been in retreat for decades. It is from these resulting alienated communities where the “American Dream is really dead,” that brought Trump his victory in the primaries and then with nothing but Clinton or him to choose from, prevailed in the electoral college when Republicans that did not support him in the primaries, mostly fell in line.  More importantly these local alienated communities will remain alienated when he is gone as they were there before he came on the scene.

Carney, a conservative journalist and commentator, argues that Trump’s core supporters, especially those who backed him in the early primaries, have much to teach us about the consequences of eroding community institutions and the impact this erosion of community has on politics. His analysis shows that Trump’s backing came disproportionately from places where the institutions of civic life had eroded badly. The disappearance of constructive, stabilizing connections in these locales has untethered individuals, making them susceptible to Trump’s apocalyptic “the American Dream is dead” refrain and demagogic “I alone can fix it” promise. By contrast, Carney observes, other reliably conservative areas of the country — rich with civic life — were immune to Trump’s message and puzzled by his attraction to others.

While American conservatism generally favors free-market economics and limited government, it is also animated by its devotion to a constellation of local organizations such as community-based charities, parent-teacher groups, and fraternal organizations that sit between individuals and the giant entities of public life. Conservatives believe that these diverse associations help protect our many faiths and cultures, possess the wisdom of prior generations, and protect us from the overbearing influence of the federal government. When these groups thrive, Carney argues, they contribute mightily to our nation’s character and success. “America is the land of opportunity,” he writes, “because America is the land of civil society.”

“Alienated America” relies on election results, demographic data, and social-science findings to buttress its arguments about the deterioration of civil society. Carney deepens the perspective through interviews in diners and bars and at rallies and job sites from Pennsylvania and Michigan to Utah and North Dakota. The tales about shuttered steel mills, “heroin and pills” deaths and community centers with broken windows prepare the reader to understand the book’s most telling anecdote: Trump supporters arrive at an Iowa caucus not knowing one another and without a precinct captain or agreed-upon speaker; they win the vote, then leave separately. “There were no signs of cohesion,” Carney writes. “It was just that the unattached, unconnected, and dispossessed that outnumbered the involved, optimistic, idealistic Cruz and Rubio supporters.”

Carney focuses on the role of faith-based organizations in helping to strengthen neighborhoods. But he additionally discusses hot-button issues such as birth control, marriage, and the “success sequence” (finish high school, get married, stay employed, then have kids) primarily as secular influences on the bonds between individuals in a community. Carney understands that each person’s success, though earned, is also attributable to a web of supportive institutions. “Almost every business will need investors or partners or employees,” he writes. “Almost every successful businessman or businesswoman learned from a mentor, a teacher, or an old boss.”

But Carney also dedicates a chapter to the dangers of over-centralization, noting that economic and governmental consolidation “dovetail efficiently to bring about a less human place.” He describes how Walmart, Home Depot and Amazon (whose CEO, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Washington Post) can threaten the small businesses that help tie communities together. But he also highlights the progressive political philosophy behind state efforts to centralize power. With a strong government and smart central planning, the thinking goes, we could get rid of the redundancies and inconsistencies caused by so many mediating bodies.

Carney might have done more, though, to discuss international, historical examples of how those who aspired to centralize power, whether monarchs, authoritarians, revolutionaries or even social reformers, often purposely undermined institutions of civil society. That is, the weakening of voluntary associations isn’t always accidental or in pursuit of efficiency. Civil institutions preserve customs, foster local loyalties and disperse power, inhibiting greater state control. A robust civil society thwarts the consolidation of power that would-be reformers need to carry out their plans.

At a minimum, then, we should be attuned to our public leaders’ explicit or implicit efforts to strengthen the state by weakening voluntary bodies. Carney appropriately cites ­then-Burlington, Vt., Mayor Bernie Sanders’s public statement that he didn’t believe in private charities; the Obama administration’s battle against the Little Sisters of the Poor over the Affordable Care Act; and former congressman Barney Frank’s line that “government is simply the name we give to the things we chose to do together.”

Carney accurately notes that government often disrupts civic organizations by its meddling and that citizen action is needed at such times. Carney prefers modest private efforts such as communities teaming up to develop walkable neighborhoods, build support for churches, and organize sports teams.

My Notes: 

Pg. xii:  Rather than a book about Trump, this is a book about Trump voters.  More specifically, it’s about Trump’s core supporters, who voted for him in the Republican primaries in 2016.  The Republicans’ nomination of Trump is best understood as a referendum on whether America is currently great or in need of being made great again.  The 2016 election was a referendum on whether or not the American Dream was still alive. (It’s not alive in flyover country)

Pg. 9:  The anti-Trump places in the early primaries are covered by two categories: (1) the highly educated elites and (2) the tight-knit religious communities.  These communities have a common thread:  They have strong institutions of civil society—local governments, churches, country clubs, garden clubs, good public schools, friendly cafes, and bars where people meet.  People enmeshed in strong communities rejected Trump in the early primaries while people alienated, abandoned, lacking social ties and community rushed to him immediately.

Pg. 26:  The US economy was $2.1 trillion larger in 2016 thanks to the expansion of global trade since 1950 (that’s more than $7,000 per person in 2016).  The 1960s and 1970s saw the US economy open up to many more immigrants and much more international trade.  The 2000s and early 2010s saw even more—the economy has actually flourished. 

Pg. 31: There are plenty of people, however, who can’t look back at 1955 or 1960 as the good old days.  Professional-minded women, for one, are far better off today.  In 1960, less than 35 percent of women were in the workforce—it’s now nearly 60 percent.  Women have gone from unwelcome at many colleges to comprising the majority at both college and grad school.  In the olden golden days, African Americans still were segregated.  So the view of 1955 as a Golden Age might be true for the white, non-college-educated Christian male.  What has happened since then could be seen as the opening of the American Dream to other sorts of people.

Pg. 36:  Fifty thousand factories across America have shut their doors since 2000.  Yet, America manufactures more stuff every year, keeping the same percentage relative to the American economy as always.  Output per hour for all workers in the manufacturing sector has increased by more than 2.5 times since 1987, so less people are needed, a lot less (from 25% American workers in 1970 to just below 10% today).  There has been no general rise in wages (for mfg. workers) since the late 1960s, with only short periods of modest improvement.  In other words, the typical male today earns less than the typical male did in 1969, after inflation.

Pg. 53f:  In 2015, more Americans died from drug overdoses (largely but not wholly opioid abuse) than from either traffic fatalities or guns.  Also, in 2002 5.5 million people were taking Social Security Disability Insurance payments, in 2016 that number had climbed to 8.8 million, although the unemployment rate went below 4 percent in 2018.  There have always been dropouts but not like now—Among men in the prime years of working (ages twenty-five to fifty-four), only about 3.4 percent were neither working nor looking for work back in 1964; by 2015, that number stood at 11.8 percent and in 2014 the economy grew at its fastest rate since the recession. 

Pg. 60:  The important inequality story in America is not unequal wealth or income, but unequal opportunity and hope.

 Pg. 61:  The average American can expect to live 79.1 years.  But that life expectancy varies massively by geography: the worst counties have a life expectancy of about 66, while in a few counties, the expected life span is 87.  The worst counties are mainly Indian reservations in South Dakota, poor black counties along the Mississippi, and some Appalachian counties in West Virginia and Kentucky.

Pg. 65f:  The most profound social change in America over the past two generations has been the retreat from marriage among the working class— elites continue to marry just as they did two generations ago.  Yet, in many parts of the (alienated) country, the child raised by both biological parents is a rarity.  The fragile, often fatherless family that used to be associated with the deepest urban poverty is increasingly becoming the norm for everyone except the educated: urban and rural, black and white, Northern and Southern.

Pg. 70:  The gap is growing.  In 1990, about two-thirds of all adults over 25 were married, with only a slight advantage (6 percentage points) for the higher educated.  By 2017, only half of those who never went to college were married, and the gap between the highly educated and the less educated had more than doubled.

Pg. 83ff:  Raj Chetty’s research and study determined that where a kid grows up determines his chances of climbing the ladder.  “The US is better described as a collection of societies,” Chetty wrote, “some of which are lands of opportunity’ with high rates of mobility across generations, and others in which few children escape poverty.”  His study found that places with more civic activity, regardless of income, have more upward mobility.  The single strongest factor, though, was “the fraction of children living in single-parent households.”  If you grow up amid intact families, the American Dream is alive and well.  The single most important factor in the upward mobility of a child is the strength of families in the community.  The norms promoted and supported by strong communities—finishing high school, getting married, and having babies, in that order—keep people out of poverty (P. 87).

Pg. 88:  Fewer reliable jobs, less marriage, and less civil society are all manifestations of the same phenomenon: Life for the working class is becoming deinstitutionalized.

Pg. 91:  Civil society (institutions smaller than the central government) and local community are the beating heart of the American Dream.  A poverty of social capital (community institutions) defines those who believe the American Dream is dead.  The recession of social capital (civic institutions) began sometime in the 1960s.

Pg. 95:  The states with the highest per capita suicide rates are Wyoming, Alaska, and Montana, suggesting that physical isolation is behind many suicides.

Pg. 97:  Hillbilly Elegy became a bestseller in 2016 because, in part, Americans in the elite bubble were struggling to understand what they were seeing.  Hillbilly Elegy explains the phenomena of death rates rising as men dropped out of the labor force even as the economy improved.  It tells the story of displaced persons.  It’s a story of a family trying to be a family without the support structure that is a community. Because the author, Vance, did not posit some outside villain who had ruined these communities, and he refused to settle for a bare economic explanation, he had to conclude that something was wrong in working communities.  He concluded that the problem was a lack of a working-class community.  (I reported on this book some time ago.)

Pg. 105:  Roger Nisbet’s definition of alienation: individuals who not only are without community but fail to see the draw or usefulness of community anymore.  Another good description is Michael Chalmers: social vacancy.  There are people around, and there are buildings.  But when it comes to connecting to other humans, the place is empty.

  Pg. 106:  Michael Barone is one of America’s most seasoned and renowned political observers.  He claimed to be able to distinguish where Trump won and where he lost.  His answer is the absence of social connectedness or Robert Putnam’s term in Bowling Alone, lack of social capital.  Socially connected people have strong family ties and wide circles of friends, are active in churches and voluntary organizations and work steadily. 

Pg. 122:  Economic woe, social dysfunction, family collapse, and community erosion all characterized the places where Trump was strongest in primary contests.  So did empty pews.  This suggests something very important and far bigger than the 2016 election.  The unchurching of America is at the root of America’s economic and social problems.  Putnam found that nearly half of all associational memberships in America were church-related, half of all personal philanthropy is religious in character, and half of all volunteering occurs in a religious context. (P. 134).

Pg. 124:  Starting in the 1970s, the mainline white Protestant churches began fading from their preeminent position in American life.  Today they are almost irrelevantly small.  The Catholic Church saw a huge drop-off in attendance starting in the late 1960s, and a disastrous emptying out of its seminaries at the same time.  Only immigrants filling the pews at mass kept the numbers respectable, but even there, second-generation immigrants were secularizing. 

Pg. 140:  Put another way the two entrances into the crucial networks that provide meaning and support in life are (a) to be part of the elite, and (b) to go to church.  Either one will do. A crucial difference though: Joining the elite isn’t something available to everyone.  It never has been.  Joining a church, on the other hand, has much lower barriers to entry.

Pg. 144:  Catholic schools are closing at a ferocious rate across America.  Half of them have closed since 1960.  Disorder, distrust, and fear all rise up when a Catholic school leaves an urban neighborhood.  In a wealthy neighborhood, full of highly educated people, there are other institutions to take the place of church, perhaps—a country club, a public school crawling with involved parents, yoga for mom, and travel basketball for Sean.

Pg. 147:  Deaths of despair, such as suicide, overdose, and alcohol poisoning; men dropping out of work, out of the entire labor force, and out of society altogether; a retreat from marriage, and births out of wedlock becoming the norm; Life spans shortening; Inequality skyrocketing; Economic mobility fading; These are the symptoms of an American Dream that is dead in much of the country: social capital is scarce in those places.  What many assign as problems of poverty are problems of eroded civil society.  This is a plague of alienation.

Pg. 148:  Conservatives will blame the welfare state for the alienation; Liberals may blame capitalism.  Neither is totally wrong though they will miss half the culprits.  They miss the absence of middle institutions as a cause: churches, bowling leagues, swim clubs, neighborhood schools, etc.  That is, the institutions between the individual and society, between the central government and the citizen.

Pg. 149ff:  Over the last century, in fits and starts, America has seen a great centralization of government, culture, and economics.  Small and local businesses have been replaced from Main Street with large national chains corralled into shopping centers.  Governments have taken over what churches and voluntary groups used to do.  State governments have taken over what towns and counties used to do.  Most of all, the federal government has taken over what everyone else used to do.  The government centralization has been at the heart of American progressivism.  “We know what works,” President Obama said in 2015 in arguing for more federal spending on programs to prop up the industries of the future.  Yet, big government and civil society are natural rivals, and the growth of one often means the diminution of the other.  The Great Society’s “Unconditional War on poverty”—a barrage of legislation that expanded federal food stamps and disability insurance, crafted new welfare programs, and birthed Medicare and Medicaid—helped reduce poverty rates in the US.  The big war on poverty was a declaration that it fell to central government to care for the poor, the sick, and the elderly.  Often, this meant relieving churches (and families) of these duties. 

Pg. 156f:  Of course in the 60s Uncle Sam was the only one really willing and able to take a pickax to Jim Crow and institutionalized segregation.  “States’ Rights,” a decentralization argument at heart was deployed in those days to defend ‘Whites Only’ diner counters and schools. 

Pg. 157:  Government programs often create incentives that pull people away from other crucial institutions.  Disability benefits, and the strings attached, keep some people from joining the workforce.  Welfare, historically, has broken up families.  And the impersonal nature of these benefits often creates a personal alienation.

Pg. 162:  Solidarity as Pope Benedict XVI described it, is taking the love of our neighbor to a collective level and seeing society’s good as our own good.  It is often used as a guard against the excesses of individualism or dog-eat-dog capitalism.  Subsidiarity is the other side of that same coin.  It is the notion that for every social problem or need, there is an appropriate level of society or government to address it—an appropriate scale on which each duty should be executed.

Pg. 178:  Robert Putnam measured the decline of social capital in the US and spotted a pattern of individualism eroding civil society involvement; the Cooperative, organized, political, or community activities were at the center of the decline.  Free-market capitalism, the sexual revolution, the isolated suburban home, the ability to escape into technology, the retreat from marriage, the retreat from organized religion—these are all expressions of individuals’ total freedom to go their own way and do their own thing.  Individualism taken to an extreme can be a vice. 

Pg. 180:  Dynamism and creative destruction are two descriptions of the free market’s tendency to upend the current order.  The four largest companies in the US in 2007 were, in order, Exxon, GE, Microsoft, and ATT.  In 2017 they were Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. 

Pg. 182f:  The Gig Economy is the perfect capitalist microcosm of our age of individualism and erosion of society: no entangling alliances or permanent commitments.  Over the past two decades, the US labor market has undergone a quiet transformation as companies increasingly forgo full-time employees and fill positions with independent contractors, on-call workers or temps, a contingent workforce that could account for the entire growth of the job market from 2005 to 2015.  Work is no longer a place, a company or colleagues—it’s a series of gigs.

Pg. 187:  In the late 1940s, 90 percent of beer and liquor was consumed at bars or restaurants or other public place—by 1990, the portion had fallen to 30 percent.  (Neighborhood bars had served as community centers for many).

Pg. 187:  College-educated and higher-income families increasingly live among other college-educated and high-income families, and these suburbs just have more civic engagement.  Their PTAs are overflowing with involved mothers and fathers.  The local libraries have more events and better attendance.  And even the church pews are more crowded. 

Pg. 203:  Trump supporters in the white working-class were 3.5 times more likely to feel like a stranger in their own land than were working-class whites who didn’t support Trump.  That’s the strongest correlation pollsters could find.  Trump’s election was driven by cultural concerns.  More precisely though, Trump's support was about cultural alienation.  People turned to him to fill a void left by the erosion of civil society.  Trump rallies resembled religious revivals, endowing certain Americans with a sense of solidarity and support that were once found in institutions like the church (or marriage).

Pg. 205:  The story of how we got Trump is the story of the collapse of community, which is also the story behind our opioid plague, or labor-force dropouts, our retreat from marriage, and our growing inequality. Trump’s wins in the early primaries is best explained by his support in places where communities are in disarray.

Pg. 222:  Immigration was the most important single policy matter catapulting Trump to the Republican nomination.  His description of immigrants from Mexico: “They bring drugs.  They’re bringing crime.  They’re rapists.  And some, I assume, are good people” attracted many.  His central campaign promise was a wall along the US Mexico border.  His most notorious policy proposal was a moratorium on Muslim immigrants.  This anti-immigration stance distinguished Trump from the elites of both parties. 

Pg. 239:  In only thirty-four counties in the entire country did Trump score below 20 percent in Republican primaries or caucuses.  Most of those were Dutch or Mormon counties.  The remaining were university-dominated towns or very wealthy counties or independent cities in northern Virginia.

Pg. 251:  Today’s segregation is powered by the college sorting machine, assortive mating, and the existence of local public schools and their effect on home prices.

Pg. 283:  Since the recession ended in 2009, manufacturing output, adjusted for inflation, has risen by more than 20 percent, because of a combination of ‘reshoring’ (bringing mfg. back) and increased domestic demand.  But manufacturing employment is up just 5 percent.  In short, robots rather than blue-collar workers are getting the new jobs at the US factories.  So slapping tariffs on goods imported from China will not create jobs.  Protectionism will make jobs for robots. 

Addenda: a view of the town I came from, then and now:

Community Hall (no longer open day and night to play basketball)

Small 180 acre farms (now all gone, replaced by large farms)

Five Taverns (living rooms for some) (now two taverns)

Country schools (all gone)

Town grade school and high school moved to neighboring town.

Two restaurants town of 600 (now none; one tavern has some food)

Three grocery stores and two hardware stores (all gone)

Pharmacy and soda counter (gone)

Feedmill (farmers met there, now gone)

Three gas stations (now one)

Bowling Alley (still there)

Two Barbers (gone)

Hotel (gone)

Dentist (gone)

Cattle sale-barn (gone)

Local paper (now covers at least three towns)

Train station (now a bike trail)

Three churches (Catholic priest used to be always present, now he has three towns)

No locks on houses or cars (never heard of a theft of any sort; now everything locked)

Networking and available role models (gone)
Very poor internet service now available, many go to the library to connect.

Still have a bank and a volunteer fire dept.

After HS many men went to the auto assembly plants in Janesville, Milwaukee, and Kenosha (all are now closed as are Caterpillar and A.O. Smith where I worked).  Many attended college, some while working.  I don’t know anyone that didn’t finish HS in those days.

Link: In the land of self-defeat