The collapse of civil America

 Sam Smith – As I cover the horrors of Trumpism I’m repeatedly struck but how such terrible things are not remotely connected to the small village we where we live in Maine. One is surrounded here by respect, decency, kindness and understanding.

But it’s hard today to hear about the life style of small town America thanks in large part to the growing power of political figures, corporations, institutions, mass media and advertising. As I have noted before, humans are the only creatures on earth that have passed on the power to so few of who make so many decisions affecting so many people. There are no cow governors or presidents of fish. We are told what to do and think by this tiny number of  powerful and by a media that instructs us daily how to react.

Lately, I’ve been reading the extraordinarily fine book, Bowling Alone, that tells how  this was not always the case. Instead we had large organizations that provided a home in which we could comfortably act and which gave a strong definition to our land. For example:

Political scientist Theda Skocpol and her colleagues have shown that half of all the largest mass membership organizations in two centuries of American history—associations that ever enrolled at least 1 percent of the adult male or female population—were founded in the decades between 1870 and 1920. The number of such large membership associations grew dramatically in the late nineteenth century, reaching a plateau in the 1920s from which it hardly budged during the rest of the twentieth century. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that most major, broad-gauged civic institutions of American life today were founded in several decades of exceptional social creativity around the turn of the twentieth century. From the Red Cross to the NAACP, from the Knights of Columbus to Hadassah, from Boy Scouts to the Rotary club, from the PTA to the Sierra Club, from the Gideon Society to the Audubon Society, from the American Bar Association to the Farm Bureau Federation, from Big Brothers to the League of Women Voters, from the Teamsters Union to the Campfire Girls, it is hard to name a major mainline civic institution in American life today that was not invented in these few decades. Furthermore, organizations founded in that fecund period at the turn of the twentieth century have been unusually long-lived. For example, of all 506 contemporary national “societies and associations” listed in the Encarta 2000 World Almanac—large and small; with chapters and without; religious, professional, social, political, and so on—almost twice as many were founded in the thirty years between 1890 and 1920 as in the thirty years between 1960 and 1990. To a remarkable extent American civil society at the close of the twentieth century still rested on organizational foundations laid at the beginning of the century.

Because our modern media has little interest in such matters, you won’t find this on the morning news. The civil society that once made American great has been increasingly replaced by one that ranges from the uncivil to the totally mean and corrupt, led by folk like Donald Trump.

We need to make the recovery of a civil America in which the collective virtue of its individuals – rather than the power of institutions  and those manipulating them - becomes a dominant force once again.