Polling Alone

Jesse Walker from the August/September 1999 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

On a national scale, the measurement problem gets worse: Neither anecdotal nor statistical evidence seems capable of creating a complete map of community life, especially since the civil society that really counts takes place on a level so local as to be almost invisible to outsiders. Changes, too, can be hard to observe; when an institution fades, it's not always obvious where to look for its successors. The best Ladd can do is gather all the relevant evidence he can: telephone surveys, membership rolls, census reports, government files. The result is a wall of data, and if it's patchier than one might prefer, it's still pretty overwhelming--not a knock-down argument, but an impressive stack of counterevidence nonetheless.

There are, however, a few holes in Ladd's analysis--places where, unmoored from the data, he starts to get a little too speculative for his own good. I'm not nearly as sure as he is that it's "easier to be an engaged citizen in the Information Economy than in an Industrial Economy," partly because I'm suspicious of such sweeping categories and partly because his basic argument--that industrial jobs leave less time for civic life--forgets that routine, labor-intensive work is hardly limited to rust-belt factories. Nor is his defense of American exceptionalism very convincing, mostly because he essentially redefines it as the belief that there is anything at all distinctive about American history and culture.

Ladd's section on "social trust" is especially disappointing. Against Putnam's citation of a survey showing that Americans have less faith in each other, Ladd simply posits a poll that came to different conclusions. And he buries that datum in a chapter on Americans' trust in social institutions, swamping us with information that may be interesting but doesn't really address the issue.

Despite all that, The Ladd Report is enough to change the terms of the debate, to force the civil socialites to consider more than the declining fortunes of a few fetishized institutions. The issue now is not why civil society is dissolving, but why it's changing--and why so many people have been so quick to assume it's simply fading away.

In some libertarian quarters, the alleged decline of community was read as a sign that the state was crowding out voluntary associations. Why, the argument went, would people affiliate for mutual gain if the same advantages could be had through the state? Ladd's reply is that democratic governments are different from totalitarian states. The latter have to make war on independent institutions. The former, he claims, do not.

This isn't much of a reply, if only because so many democratic governments have made war on any association that stands in the way of public policy. "Urban renewal" and "redevelopment" schemes, for instance, have wiped out entire neighborhoods, and with them the little civic ties that kept those places alive. Cops and principals across America have targeted teenage subcultures, harassing kids in goth makeup or trench coats out of misplaced fear that their chosen means of mutual engagement will lead them to mass murder. And anyone who thinks it takes a totalitarian to crush a community group hasn't paid much attention to the nation's zoning boards, whose inflexible rules have often made it impossible for neighborhood churches, among other groups, to set down roots.

The mechanistic argument against the welfare state--the idea that every dollar the government spends reduces Americans' ability to cooperate on their own--is insulting and wrong. But it's also true, as Ladd admits, that when nonprofit groups get hooked on government grants, they tend to lose both their independence and their roots in the communities they're supposed to serve, adopting a more centralized and "professional" style. This has happened to charities, to art centers, to community radio stations; it may be a reason why several of the groups Putnam tracks are in decline. (The same fate, of course, can befall groups that depend on private foundations. Conversely, many civic groups have enjoyed close relations with ultra-local levels of government without losing their civic base.)

A better answer is simply that people are creative and sociable, that affiliation is in our nature, and--thank goodness--that we don't take our cues from Washington. Who'd have guessed it? It turns out that we don't need any brow-furling pundit-talk about "civil society" to keep civil society alive.

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