Alienated America audiobook

I liked this book much more than I expected to, especially after noticing that Timothy Carney's books include the delightfully titled Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses. But, with only a few unfortunate exceptions, such conservative hackery is basically absent from this book. Carney has a real thesis--not an original one by any means, but still, the exploration of the collapse of civil society in various places around America remains a rich topic to dive into, and what Carney comes up with in following his thesis is solid. He talks about the similarities between jobs and civil institutions and marriage prospects (all of which have disappeared in some impoverished communities around the United States), how all of them are essentially for cultivating the virtues of dependability, commitment, and determination, and how their disappearance leaves so many (particularly those without the resources, luck, or cognitive chops to jump into our economy's high-skilled meritocracy) people frustrated and alienated, victimized by a Gig Economy and social relations that are entirely transient. There are a lot of aspects to that bundle of arguments I take issue with, but overall, it's a solid and strong contribution to all the sociological research that has been done about the disappearance of blue-collar work and the collapse of community norms in America. Of course, given my priors, my primary beef with the book is simply: "So, why isn't this person a socialist? Why doesn't he recognize the necessity of restricting capitalism the way democratic socialists and egalitarians do?" I've explored that beef here to a degree, but I'm sure there's more than could be said. In any case, Carney's book doesn't provide much original research, and he doesn't put together his conclusions in a way that completely makes sense to me, but it's very well written, and genuinely poignant at places. It's definitely no hack work--on the contrary, it's worth reading.

I’ve been looking forward to reading this book for a long time as Carney is someone who I greatly respect as a writer and political observer. The book met my high expectations. Carney, citing social scientists, economists and other commentators from all sides of the political spectrum, makes a compelling case for the importance of declining civil society, and the resulting alienation, is the biggest challenge facing an America. He convincingly finds evidence of the rise of the early support for Trump in this alienation and he shows the important role that churches, synagogues and mosques must play in trying to rebuild our American Dream. Anyone who is sick of watching people from opposite sides scream at each other on Fox, CNN or MSNBC should read this book for its serious and sober look at the biggest problem facing America.I highly recommend it.

Let me start with a story.Back in 2001, I worked for the U.S. Census Bureau. Many people don't know that the Census Bureau does much more than simply count the number of people in the US every ten years. There are ongoing surveys that Americans are asked to participate in. During my years with the Census Bureau, I went to people's homes and asked a list of questions for various government surveys about employment, housing starts, income, health, and many other important topics. The specific data about each person is confidential and I took an oath to always keep the data confidential, and, of course, I will always do that.But the responses to one question on one health survey have always stuck with me. The question was:  "Outside my immediate family, I have few close friends. True or false?" I administered this survey to exactly one hundred people and ninety-five said that statement was true.Let me restate this to clarify: Ninety-five percent of the people I interviewed said they have few close friends. This was astounding to me. I grew up in a small town, and, after I married, I raised my children in the same small town where my parents and in-laws and siblings and all of their extended families lived. I still live in this town. Over the years, I have met many, many people through my volunteer activities and work and church and my love of books outside my town as well, and I talk often to these people and I try to get together whenever I can. In short, I feel like I have many, many close friends.But most people do not feel this way. Most people in America feel alienated, friendless, lonely, alone. This continued to stick in my mind. In 2002, I read a book called Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam. Putnam gathered data from all across America and came to the same conclusions I'd come to after my stint with the Census Bureau: Most people in America feel alienated, friendless, lonely, alone. In more recent years I've become deeply disturbed by the climate here in America. During and after the last national election for president, I've been dismayed at the behavior of our leaders, especially our elected president. I was shocked when Donald Trump was elected as our president, and I've been horrified by the words he has spoken to others during his time as president. I don't watch television, but the bits of public life that have filtered down to me fill me with sadness and trepidation. What is going on in my America? I picked up three books at the recent library conference in Austin that I've been reading in tandem over the past weeks. These books have helped me understand the malaise of the American people. They have helped me think through ways that we can work to change the mood and behavior of the people of our country.  The three books I read are: Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse by Timothy P. Carney Our Towns: A 100,000 Journey Into the Heart of America by James M. and Deborah Fallows Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt by Arthur C. Brooks What have I learned from reading these books?  Timothy P. Carney looks at the hard, cold facts about America today, especially those who brought Trump into power. The places where Trump scored big are key to understanding why he was elected, Carney tells us. What are those places like? "Employment is far worse (in these places).... Death rates, especially death by suicide and overdose, correlated with Trump's best counties....Educational attainment is lower in Trump Country. More people are on unemployment. More people are on disability. These economic indicators are devastating, and crucial. But more telling are the social indicators. More men have dropped out of the workforce. Marriage rates are lower. Illegitimacy is higher. Divorce is higher....(Members of this group) said religion was very important to them, but...they were the least likely to go to church." I found this absolutely fascinating stuff. Trump scores well in places where people are unhappy and communities are weak.  To add to the problems, the right, Carney tells us, has steadily worked for big businesses over small businesses, deeply weakening community bonds.  On the other side, according to Carney, the left has been promoting ideas for years that also build community alienation, stressing overcentralized government programs that provide for the poor at the expense of individuals and local efforts to help the poor, and emphasizing individual freedoms at the expense of the stabilizing effects of marriage and family and church and community on each person. Arthur C. Brooks, in Love Your Enemies, shares the destructive power of contempt by citing the work of social psychologist and relationship expert John Gottman. Gottman, Brooks tells us, has studied thousands of married couples. After watching a couple interact for just one hour, Gottman can predict with 94 percent accuracy whether a couple will divorce within three years. What is this based on? It isn't the amount of anger a couple expresses, but, instead, it is the amount of contempt one member shows for another. And it is this contempt for one another in political matters that is currently making it impossible for opposing political parties to work together. So where are we now? Yelling and screaming at each other from positions far to the left or right of our common ground. Cutting off friendships and family connections based on these extreme political positions.  In short, a mess. Here is where Arthur C. Brooks takes up the struggle. In his book, Love Your Enemies, Brooks writes: "Deep down, we all know that the polarization we are experiencing in our politics today is toxic. We hate the fighting, the insults, the violence and disrespect." Brooks shares a powerful story of the rare coming together of political opponents. Black Lives Matter protesters were confronting a group of Trump supporters in Washington, DC. Confrontation was rapidly accelerating into possible violence.  But then the organizer of the rally unexpectedly offered two minutes of time to the leader of Black Lives Matter. And everything changed. See for yourself what happened: https://youtu.be/xoXwgfYAJFU.Wow, I thought. Wow. There is hope. Brooks shares four rules Gottman offered for bringing people back together. Because we are in such a desperate situation, and because these rules can have a dramatic effect on changing things, I'm sharing them here:  "1. When others are upset about politics, listen to them respectfully. Try to understand their point of view before offering your own. Never listen only to rebut. 2. In your interactions with others, particularly in areas of disagreement, adopt the 'five-to-one rule,' which he gives couples. Make sure you offer five positive comments for every criticism. 3. No contempt is ever justified, even if, in the heat of the moment, you think someone deserves it. It is unjustified more often than you know, it is always bad for you, and it will never convince anyone that she is wrong. 4. Go where people disagree with you and learn from them. That means making new friends and seeing out opinions you know you don't agree with. How to act when you get there? See rules 1 to 3!" Brooks uses the rest of the book to expand upon these rules and share oodles of great advice for our world, and I'd encourage you to get the book and read it carefully for yourself.How does Our Towns fit into my study of America? James Fallows and Deborah Fallows spend four years and travel 100,000 miles to visit towns and cities across America to see what is going on in our country. Their book is also a book of hope. In every town and city where they find good things going on, they first see people working together for common goals, both economic and social, building up local businesses, building up local communities, building up schools, rethinking the whats and hows but keeping the whys, and taking pride in what is happening. The two Fallowses offer "10 1/2 Signs of Civic Success" as their takeaway from this adventure. Key to a local community's success is that "people work together on practical local possibilities, rather than allowing bitter disagreements to keep them apart...." So I've ranted long enough, I think, and it's time for me to start working in my local community to make things better. I feel like I have some solid ideas to work from after reading these three books.I welcome any thoughts you have about my thoughts here; I'd love to open this into a conversation. Let's move forward, shall we? And can we please move forward together?

William Graham Sumner was a Yale professor in the 1880s who coined the phrase “the forgotten man”. It came from an essay he wrote about the costs of government - the forgotten man was the guy who has to pay for the largesse of politicians; i.e. the taxpayer. When FDR came into office he perverted the meaning by talking about all the people who were suffering during the depression and who he was going to save. Move forward 60 years and Hillary Clinton appropriated an odd meaning of civil society - the support network in the US which DeTocqueville and other marveled at. In the new meaning the “village” that HRC suggested was mostly a series of government programs. A decade later the DNC presented a video of a young woman who from cradle to grave lived off government support and assistance. Timothy Carney’s book examines the costs of declining social capital and its effects on all of us, but most specifically the alienated.There is no wonder why the topic of restoring civil society is a hot one. Beginning in 2000 (with Robert Putnam’s Bowling Along) and continuing with Charles Murray’s Coming Apart (2012); Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic (2016); and J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Eligy (2016) - a group of writers has explored the decreasing cohesiveness of American society. Timothy Carney’s book would be another on the pile, were it not for a pretty compelling presentation of the numbers around alienation. He starts the story as almost anyone from DC would do - wondering how we got our current president. But his book is a lot more than a postmortem on the 2016 election.Carney’s book does three things which I think are very useful in this discussion. First, he presents some data on who the Trump voters are and who they are not. It turns out that elite Republicans don’t like Trump (duh!) but Carney does some great dissecting of who these people are. For example, voters of Dutch heritage and Mormons (regardless of economic class) don’t like Trump. Second, he offers a realistic confirmation of the nostrum that when government grows the individual shrinks. He presents evidence that a good part of the decline in civil institutions can be laid on the steps of government. If your local government provides a food kitchen - why bother trying to repeat? He also asserts, I think correctly, that government is either clumsy or malevolent in relation to charities. The Little Sisters of the Poor case, where the Obama Administration argued vociferously for requiring a Catholic Order of Nuns to provide birth control in its health care formulary is but one example. Finally, at the end of the book he offers some credible suggestions about small steps to restore the elements of civil society and thus social cohesion.

“Alienated America” is the kind of book I read as an eBook but am buying a physical copy of because it’s so incredibly good. I’ve spent about the last 4 years reading all sorts of books in an attempt to understand the phenomenon of right-wing populism. Over time, I began to believe that this populist surge arises from a lack of trust in institutions. Carney’s book sums this up in a brilliant way and puts a voice to a lot of what I’ve been thinking for the past few years. He manages to explain so many things in one work that I had wondered about. Frankly, I recommend this to anybody and everybody and I know that I’ll be talking to friends about it in depth. Carney posits that the rise of Trump is due to alienation, particularly felt by the working class, whose institutions of social capital have been eroded, from unions to the military to bars to churches. Carney focuses especially on the role that social capital plays in social mobility, underlining the importance of religious practice and churches as institutions. Those in the upper class have the means to access social capital and a sense of community through organizations, clubs, etc. However, due to economic and social shifts, these outlets have been closed off to blue-collar America, and churches suffer from both a culture of wholesale secularization and state centralization that crowds out the middle institutions between family and government. The lack of stable jobs, stable marriages, and stable communities causes a turn towards populism and feeling that the American dream is dead. Carney relies heavily on outside research by folks like Raj Chetty, incorporating a number of studies and articles. He also looks at specific communities where Trump did either very well or very poorly in primaries, effectively explaining his base vote. He also overturns both the “economic anxiety” and “racism” arguments that the left spends so much time debating in a nuanced way that acknowledges the legitimacy of some of those arguments. Carney does so by laying out what others propose and then deconstructing these ideas in a pretty non-partisan way. “Alienated America” worked well in conjunction with many of the other books I’ve read recently. To me, this seems like an argument for upholding it as an important piece of scholarship for understanding populism. Carney builds on Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart” (which I read 3 years ago) and his idea of divergence in things like marriage, divorce, etc between different classes. He also elaborates heavily on J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, which is a book I also recommend. Throughout, Carney seems to rebut Lasch’s notion of elites who have given up on traditional stations of life, especially because Carney notes that these elites tend to uphold the old way of living, even if they don’t politicize it. Moreover, his point on factories closing meaning so much more than job losses reminded me of a paragraph from Justin Gest’s “The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality”. Gest writes on page 10 that “post-traumatic cities were often so wholly dependent on a single company or sector that their sudden closure or downsizing undercut an entire social, political, and economic infrastructure, depriving their vast communities of a sense of stability, power, and certainty”, which dovetails well with Carney’s discussion of economics. Heck, Carney’s argument even reminds me of Dreher’s “Benedict Option” at times. Dreher’s argument for recentering Christian communities around parishes is based on the fundamental notion of the parish as central to community life, a claim Carney explores in some depth. This same claim in fact spurred a research paper I wrote about the Portuguese-American community in Montreal, so it held particular sway with me.Alienated America stands out to me for its explanatory power. An interesting thing Carney uncovers is why in the GOP primaries it was those who didn’t practice their faith who most backed Donald Trump. This was something I had wondered about for a long time because we saw the same trend in France with Marine Le Pen and lapsed Catholics. Carney's social capital-alienation explanation suggests a common causal node for many nationalistic right-wing populist movements. I’d be interested to see more research on this and if anybody has book suggestions about French populism, I’d love to see them. Alienated America, pushing back against both unbridled individualism and excessive centralization, is a powerful call for subsidiarity and government recognition of the importance of what Carney refers to as “little platoons”. However, a strength of the work is that it doesn’t just ask for government solutions, and in fact, notes that they may be insufficient. It also calls for those in the upper-middle and upper classes to take part in rebuilding social bonds across classes and in seeding social capital throughout society.

There are some interesting points made here, and some ideas I found underwhelming. Carney is a conservative writer who isn't at home with the Trump version of the GOP looking at the appeal of Trump. He wants to look at the appeal of Trump's rhetoric, where he declared the American dream to be dead. He looks at the groups that most strongly supported him in the early primaries - calling them Trump's core supporters. By and large he finds that there is a strong correlation for the most Trump-y places and all kinds of negative indicators on the quality of life: high suicide rates, drug problems, economic problems, closed churches. In these places, the American dream seemed dead, so Trump's words resonated the most. Carney argues that the central problem was the decline of American civic life. We used to have more close-knit communities, but that's gone away. At one point he argues that things like Little League and neighborhood organizations aren't just signs of the American dream - they are the actual dream itself. It isn't just economics, he says. Places that are downtrodden but had a vibrant community life were resistant to Trump in the primaries. This ranged from conservative Dutch towns in the Midwest to Mormon communities out west. Carney notes studies that show while the most economic studies show that Trump voters weren't worse off than most, geogrphically his support came from places poorly off. Carney argues that it wasn't the opiod addicts who went for Trump, it was their neighbors. People doing OK in places doing poorly were his strongest supporters. For Carney, the nation needs to revitalize its communities to get better. For him, that means revitalizing its churches. He keeps beating that drum all book long. He argues that rich communities can get by with vibrant secular institutions, but other areas can't. He also dismisses purely economic notions of improvement. Here we run into a serious problem with the book. He dismisses jobs as the way forward by picking one example: Williston, ND. This place is in the middle of an oil boom, but it hasn't created strong local communities. It's just created upheveal. Yeah, that's true of Williston - but Carney is too quick to write it off. How much of Williston's problems are true for all places undergoing an economic boom? For that matter, how much is its problems temporary? California must've had terrible community institutions during the gold rush. Right now, Willison's boom is just a few years old, there isn't much actual housing, and so guys go there temporarily without much family. The longer it lasts, the most roots should get settled, more will settle families, and a community can form from there.Basically, while a lot of info in this book is well-presented, his conclusions really minimize how central money is to people's lives. (And that's a little odd given how his own book notes that places with more money have less need for religious institutions). Minimizing the importance of economics is a theme in this book. For example, he has one chapter on how increased governmental and economic centralization has crippled local communities. He's got 20 pages on governmental centralization, but then three and a half pages on big business centralization. And frankly, his analysis doesn't really explain why 3 years into his presidency evangelicals are the people most strongly supportive of Trump. Yeah, they weren't his original core supporters and his book is on core supporters - but this shift needs to be explained better. At times, he'll too quickly assert points without providing enough evidence. He notes the decline of the traditional American family, bringing up all sorts of stats. Then he ponders why. Well, the women's lib movement - and he spends a few pages providing evidence - but he glosses over that too briefly.

Of all the "this is what went wrong with America" books, I like Carney's insight the best. We were made to live in community, but those bedrock institutions are fading. Families, neighborhoods, and churches. The older I get, the more I realize how dependent I am on others. Just as it should be. Notes:The book is about how Trump got elected. Trump did well in areas where "the American Dream" seems out of reach. He bombed where people had a sense it was attainable. Strong families are the precondition for the good life. Trump did better among those who didn't go to churchMost actions that require virtue are "inter-actions". Personal note: I like this insight.Virtue is easier to maintain in a supportive environment. Good response to "good ol' days". Those days weren't so good for women, blacks, etcCarney makes a good case that much of what ended "the good ol days" was progress! Inefficient processes replaced by efficient ones (5:34)Stagnation (6:11)Cultural resentment (6:21)The Left and Right agree with the statistics. Marriage is in decline. Progressives just don't think it's a problem (7:5)Statistically, the women who get married the "traditional" way are more successful (7:11)Broken families correlate against upward mobility (7:41)The erosion of community killed marriage (7:45)"You didn't build that" Is American individualism justified? (11:4)Secularism gave us Trump (12:50)The best reason to go to college and get a degree is to get into the networks (13:27)Elites today lack the courage to preach what they practice (13:8)What if what the working class need most is not a check from a government but inclusion in community. and what if the most accessible form of community, the church, is under constant assault by both culture and the government, and what if the elites refuse to include them because they're "deplorables"? (13:40)Utah has the highest upward mobility

Important look at our social and political malaise that treats it first and perhaps foremost as the consequence of the decline of civil society. Where Carney shines is his inclusion of church not merely as a spiritual salve (though he certainly highlights that role) but rather as an indispensable element of that civil society. Carney argues provocatively that secularization bears much responsibility for the decline of civil society and civic virtue. Carney wields a great deal of social science data in service of this and other points, and he occasionally wields that data awkwardly or in support of conclusions about which he is perhaps more enthusiastic than is the data. But I see his central insights as sound and important. His book is not expressly about Trumpism but of course no such book can avoid the Orange elephant in the room. But his quest for the alienated and the disaffected, and his insight into common threads both in Trump's appeal and in resistance to him, makes the book well worth the read. If we are to understand deaths of despair, polarization, and the seeming loss of cohesion in America, Carney's volume is a superb starting point.

Very interesting book, that addresses some of the major problems America faces. Clarifies what divides America today between strong robust communities and those communities that are failing.

Well-researched explanations of why failing social connections are responsible for the great divide in America.10-minute podcast with the author: https://www.nationalreview.com/podcas...Quotes:“But maybe the things we think ACCOMPANY the American Dream are the things that really ARE the American Dream. What if the T-ball game, the standing-room-only high school Christmas concert, the parish potluck, and decorating the community hall for a wedding- what if those activities are not the dressings around the American Dream, but what if they ARE the American Dream?” -p. Xiii“Alienation is the disease of working-class America. Its most important accompaniment is family collapse. Strong families are the necessary condition of the good life, of economic mobility, and of the American Dream.” -p. 13“Marriage is dying mostly among working-class women, undermining the idea that empowerment of women is behind its demise.” -p. 71“The best way to predict whether a child might end up better off than his parents is to look at his neighborhood and ask if most of the kids in his neighborhood were raised by single mothers or by two parents. In the communities with intact families, the American Dream was alive and well. In the communities where the single mom was the norm, economic mobility was absent.” -p. 74“The erosion of community is what killed the norm of marriage in the working class. Community strength and social capital are the roots of the good life...Family strength and economic well-being are the fruits...The norms promoted and supported by strong communities- finishing high school, getting married, and having babies, in that order- keep people out of poverty.” -pp. 86, 87“One special story we tell, particularly regarding our immigrants, is the story of social mobility. In school, we read our Jane Austen and George Eliot and roll our eyes at how stultified and regimented is the empire from which we broke. In America, more than anywhere else, you can become what you want to become regardless of where you started out.” -p. 89“As racial segregation has diminished, class-based segregation has increased in America. So, too, has assortive marriage: college-educated children of the college-educated marrying one another, while blue-collar boys pair up with blue-collar girls.” -p. 99“Looking over the election returns,...Trump’s support comes disproportionately from those with low social connectedness.” -p. 106“Cheering on secularization is an error. On the aggregate, the Americans who are turning away from religion, particularly among the working class, are doing worse than those maintaining their connection to religion. And secularization is harming the country as a whole.’ -pp. 124-5“Big Government and civil society are natural rivals, and the growth of one often means the diminution of the other.” -p. 155“Solidarity is taking the love of our neighbor to a collective level and seeing society’s good as our own good. Solidarity 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...Subsidiarity is, among other things, a recognition that people are really cared for only when they are cared for on the human level, and that the larger and more distant the entity administering care, the more loveless and thus less effective the care will be...It is anathema to the central planner, who wants things REGULATED. ” -pp. 162, 163“The stories we tell ourselves of the Progressive Era often portray Big Business and Big Government as rival forces pressing against each other. But that's misleading. Big business and big government were (and are) both conceptually the same and self-reinforcing. That is, as Levin makes clear, industrialization and economic consolidation are an instance of centralization just as the progressives reaction - a more robust regulatory state - is centralization.” -p. 168“American alienation is, in large part, due to a hyper-individualism that has taken hold.” -p. 175“Individualism doesn't always mean literal isolation - relationships can be part of this. But the relationships in an overly individualistic world are always contingent, and easily broken. Permanent relationships, this thinking goes, are not compatible with true freedom.” -p. 177“Capitalism tends to cast down the mighty and lifts up the lowly...There is no royalty in American capitalism.” -p. 180“Before the sexual revolution, women had less freedom, but men were expected to assume responsibility for their welfare. Today women are more free to choose, but men have afforded themselves the comparable option... By making the birth of the child the physical choice of the mother, the sexual revolution has made marriage and child support a social choice of the father.” -p. 190“And so in this discussion of the enemies of civil society in the United States, we've arrived at perhaps the most powerful enemy: secularization of American culture... this secular crusade is an effort to stick the state deep into the lives of religious people who venture into the public square. The Colorado case wasn't about a man who refused to serve gay clients. It was about whether government could force someone to participate in a ceremony and make expressions against his religious beliefs. If allowing the baker to live his life according to his own beliefs somehow violates this idea of secularism and separation, then there is no tolerance for personal expressions of- or even adherence to - religion or its teachings in public.” -p. 192, 193“This is the tendency of a large central state: when you strengthen the vertical bonds between the state and the individual, you tend to weaken the horizontal bonds between individuals. What's left is a whole that by some measures is more cohesive, but individuals who are individually all less connected to one another.” -p. 197“A progressive social philosophy, aimed at liberating individuals by means of a central state that provides their basic needs, can actually lead to a hyper-individualism... And when we see the state crowding out charity and pushing religious organizations back into the corner, it's easy to see how a more ambitious state leaves little oxygen for the middle institutions, thus suffocating everything between the state and the individual.” -p. 198 “Paternalism, and the transfer of responsibility from the individual to a bureaucracy of experts, fosters a narcissism among individuals... Children are inherently narcissistic, and a society that deprives adults of responsibility will keep them more childlike, and thus more self-obsessed.” -p. 199“The causality here goes both ways. In less trusting societies, people demand more regulation, and in more regulated societies, people trust each other less... The less trust in humanity there is, the more rules crop up. And the more rules, the less people treat one another like humans, and so on. Centralization of the state weakens the ties between individuals, leaving individuals more isolated, and that isolation yields more centralization.” -p. 200“Places that backed Trump skewed poor; voters who backed Trump skewed wealthier... The story of how we got Trump is the story of the collapse of community, which is also the story behind our opioid plague, our labor-force dropouts, our retreat from marriage, and our growing inequality.” -p. 205“If...church is the largest and most important institution of civil society, and it is the wellspring of most of the rest of civil society, then the retreat of churches in America is the erosion of civil society in America. The erosion of civil society in America means the collapse of community in America. The collapse of community in America is the collapse of family, and the death of the American dream. In this alienating wasteland, we get increased inequality, decreased mobility, and faded hope. Then we get even more broken families, even less church-going, and more deaths of despair.” -p. 235“This predicament is so self-reinforcing. As people don't see community around them, they put their hopes for help, their sense of purpose, and their sense of identity onto the state of national politics. Alienation begets centralization, which exacerbates alienation.” -p. 284-2285“Erosion of civil society, leaving individuals adrift and families isolated, is at the core of America's social, economic, and political tumult.” -p. 288