A Regenerative Conservatism
Conservatives in the United States have long fought zealously to preserve our nation's founding institutions, traditions, and values. Throughout much of the 20th century, this meant fending off state encroachment on civil society in ways that ensured the continued stability and strength of our social institutions. It meant resisting a movement that sought to refashion society along rational or idealistic lines from the top down. As Russell Kirk summarized, conservatives "respect the wisdom of their ancestors" and "are dubious of wholesale alteration"; they see society as "a spiritual reality" that "cannot be scrapped and recast as if it were a machine."
We now live in an age of scrapping, marked by rapid change and social breakdown. Since Kirk published The Conservative Mind in 1953, our nation's social institutions have withered, leaving many individuals to fend largely for themselves. This development has begotten a slew of societal ills, from unstable families, school shootings, and skyrocketing rates of depression to deaths of despair from alcoholism, drug abuse, and loneliness. As Americans have lost sight of one another and their capacity to work together through institutions, they've increasingly come to see government as the answer to what ails them.
Conservative ideas are surely needed to tackle these challenges. But conservative thought seems stuck in a different era. Most conservatives still believe — or at least act as if they believe — that to solve America's problems, we simply need to shrink government and develop more persuasive policy arguments. These solutions may be suited to a country where social structures are strong enough to need only preservation, but America's structures have already weakened significantly. And while debates over the size of government and the shape of public policy have their place, they don't reach the core of the challenges facing the country today.
Social disintegration has prompted soul-searching among conservatives, and rightly so. But there has been too little attention paid to how conservatism might be truly restorative. Conservatives today must champion not only preservation, but regeneration. And we can only regenerate society with a proper understanding of the role of local institutions in shaping relationships and improving the likelihood that any individual will aspire to and achieve the good life.
DETACHMENT AND ISOLATION
What has made social conditions so poor in so many places?
In answering this question, experts and pundits have long cited Americans' increasing detachment from social institutions — including marriage, associational life, work, and organized religion — as a primary culprit. But they tend to look at these dynamics in silos rather than as part of an overarching pattern within society itself. As a consequence, there has been limited effort to develop a unifying explanation for the social decline affecting Americans across socioeconomic strata.
When considering these various problems separately, everything from government expansion to the economy to technology has received blame. Each has likely played a part, but none comprehensively explain America's plight. Government programs may have weakened once flourishing social institutions, but government involvement can't explain why disconnection and loneliness pervade social life. Changes in the economy have certainly disadvantaged many less-skilled workers, but on the whole, Americans — including groups heavily affected by societal ills — are much wealthier than they were in the past. Advances in technology surely matter, but they are affecting all developed countries, none of which has witnessed the scale of social despair that characterizes American society today.
Rather than focusing on each problem individually, a better strategy would look to the broader patterns of change that have occurred in our relationships to one another and the institutions that underpin them.
In America, social institutions once provided an abundance of opportunities for everyone to participate, contribute, take ownership, and find meaning in their daily lives. We see this throughout our history, starting with villages and towns, then in colonial and state governments, and finally with the establishment of the federal system. These institutions acted as our society's heartwood — the tough, durable center of a tree trunk that solidifies over time. Dramatic changes in the way we relate to one another, and in the nature of the organizations that dominate society, have infected and weakened this heartwood, with enormous implications for our social health.
Over the past two generations, America has transformed from a "townshipped" society, in which neighbors regularly communicated and collaborated with each other, to a networked one, where we communicate with each other impersonally and transactionally — that is, when we need something — often from a distance through group texts and social-media posts. We are less likely to have personal connections with neighbors on our street, teachers in our children's schools, pastors at our local houses of worship, or leaders in our community. "The very concept of belonging to a place, a neighborhood, a locality — somewhere we belong and call home," writes Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, "has all but disappeared."
Meanwhile, service organizations — which not only assist those in need and resolve communal problems, but bring people together to address those problems — have struggled to maintain memberships. The mighty cross-class voluntary federations whose chapters once dominated American life — the Knights of Columbus, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Freemasons — have faded. Instead of looking locally for practical ways to boost social cohesion, Americans generally look to government policy and national campaigns for change.
This attitude has undervalued the kind of hard, bottom-up work required to build strongly rooted, socially embedded institutions. While it is especially obvious among progressives, this outlook also predominates among conservatives, whose think tanks and other intellectual homes habitually look to government policy rather than social entrepreneurs and community leaders for answers.
As a result, according to sociologist Theda Skocpol, our civic world is "less participatory and more oligarchicly managed" than it was in the past. Where we once regularly volunteered to work with fellow citizens to build up our communities, volunteer work today typically involves working for others — executing one-off efforts under the direction of professional managers and organizations that are often far removed from where people live. Neighborhood-based charities once promoted volunteerism, taught civic virtues, helped bind classes together, and reformed government so as to improve local living and working conditions. Today's professionally managed non-profits, often located in Washington, D.C., are backed by a string of Ivy League experts and national donors, and tend to pursue advocacy rather than genuine local restoration.
Thanks to these trends, many Americans now live in institutional deserts, performing most tasks of daily life — from working to learning to playing to shopping — either alone or in a transactional fashion. This isolates people from one another in ways that were not characteristic of Americans in the past. Wherever disconnection and isolation prevail, they usher in rising depression, loneliness, mistrust, and death. These conditions are most prominent in our poorest communities, but well-off neighborhoods are not immune.
Absent strong communities and local institutions, school systems cannot improve educational results, housing authorities cannot increase affordable housing, health-care agencies cannot improve health outcomes, and police cannot ensure the streets are safe. It is also much harder to launch new institutions in these circumstances; the ground in which they must lay roots is far less fertile than it once was.
What's more, youths raised in these communities tend not to be socialized through the institutional attachments and embodied service that previous generations took for granted. Without these attachments, children fail to imbibe norms once seen as fundamental to human and societal flourishing. This not only puts them at risk of suffering from the same maladies as the previous generation, it also makes it more difficult for them to renew the habits and norms that might bring them relief.
Some claim that the benefits from the greater variety, convenience, and creature comforts available to a broader swath of the population outweigh what has been lost. But such benefits are insufficient bases for a flourishing society. Our fixation on maximizing choice has created conditions that now encourage us to choose isolation in how we use our time, develop our careers, engage (if at all) with our family and neighbors, and use technology. To catalyze regeneration, we must look beyond individual preferences.
THE IMPORTANCE OF PLACE
The conservative tradition offers a rich, historically rooted understanding of human relationships and institutions from which today's conservatives might draw to reverse societal disintegration. To get a sense of that tradition and how it can guide us today, it helps to begin by becoming familiar with its opposite: progressivism.
Progressives believe that socially beneficial institutions exist primarily to provide measurable, tangible benefits to individuals, and that they can be established on a rational, technocratic basis. The progressive approach privileges expert opinion and top-down, government-led efforts that apply abstract ideals to individuals as "units" of society rather than members of it. We can see these precepts at work in federal programs like Social Security, Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and Head Start, as well as proposals like universal pre-K. Localized place-based institutions are thought to be less important, or less capable, than their distant, centralized, expert-led cousins.
The late Roger Scruton understood that this approach is doomed to fail. "[O]ur identities and values," he asserted,
are formed through our relations with other people, and not through our relation with the state. The state is not an end but a means. Civil society is the end, and the state is the means to protect it. The social world emerges through free association, rooted in friendship and community life.
The concept of place is crucial to this kind of socialization. Place fosters the recurring interactions and overlapping institutions necessary for community life to emerge. Repeated embodied interactions build dense social networks, cohesion, and trust, which lubricate cooperative activity and facilitate individual, communal, and societal flourishing. These interactions enable people to solve common problems, thereby expanding the community's capacity for self-governance. If allowed to develop organically, this process of institutional growth eventually works its way to the national level.
The American frontier offers a prime example. While often portrayed as full of rugged individualists, historian Lacy Ford argues that the frontier is better understood as the product of "pious 'joiners.'" Indeed, the practical difficulties of traveling across a dangerous terrain and settling in an unfamiliar place far from home proved a great incubator of cooperation and institution building. As Daniel Boorstin observed in The Americans: The National Experience, migrants to the American West "commonly moved and settled in clusters, drawn together by the perils of the unknown land." People banded together to defend themselves, raise houses, clear land, plant crops, trade, share information, build schools, gain companionship, and pray. From these cooperative activities soon emerged extensive social networks, voluntary associations, social institutions, and communities.
Of course, conflicts among settlers inevitably arose — over such matters as religion, politics, slavery, and trade. Sometimes violence broke out. But people had to work together to survive, so they created mechanisms to do so. In the absence of formal laws or government, they developed a set of informal, unwritten, yet widely accepted social norms for self-governance at the individual and community levels.
When structures and norms emerge spontaneously from within strong local groupings of people and survive the test of time, they become more resilient, better fit to their purpose, and more successful in achieving their goals. Distant organizations' practical goals and inattention to connectivity do not nurture the meaning and sense of agency that participation and leadership in local institutions provide. They miss the moments of joy that daily interaction with neighbors brings — moments that are essential to the good life.
Many on the right may pay homage to the notions of place and heritage, but they tend to be just as mobile, just as cosmopolitan, just as individualistic as those on the left. They emphasize autonomy and market solutions to such an extent that they've damaged the social structures and norms that used to support healthy neighborhoods. In The Social Animal, David Brooks pointed out that both parties promote "policies designed to expand individual choice. Neither [pays] much attention to social and communal bonds, to local associations, or invisible norms." This is because "no matter who was in power, the prevailing winds [have] been blowing in the direction of autonomy, individualism, and personal freedom" for decades.
Where conservatives have preserved a place-based lens, they have been much more successful at maintaining societal strength in the face of rapid technological change and ideological onslaught. Place-based religious groups, to take one example, are not only thriving where their secular counterparts are flailing, they've also proven more successful than faith-based organizations that lack a strong place component. While other religious groups are in decline, the Amish, Mormons, and Orthodox Jews are all maintaining or increasing their numbers. Utah, a state whose social structures are preserved in large part due to its inhabitants' religious heritage, consistently outpaces other states on a slew of social-health indicators. It has more stable families, a lower percentage of poor children, more upward mobility, and lower income inequality than any other state in the country. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the state consistently ranks the highest in the country on social-capital indices.
The importance of local connectivity and trust was made clear during the pandemic, when communities and countries with higher levels of trust and social capital fared better. While the United States fared far worse than might be expected because of its weak social dynamics, the people in places with a strong social fabric, such as Utah, were able to act collectively when necessary, making the right decisions in difficult situations and providing the support people needed to withstand the negative side effects of pandemic measures such as lockdowns. Throughout the pandemic, the state had one of the lowest fatality-per-capita rates in the country and among the strongest economies and job markets.
Generative conservatism should start by focusing on places every American can steward. As we tend neighborhoods well, we'll create momentum that will branch out sideways and upward. As Charles Marohn, Jr., put it: "Successful blocks beget successful neighborhoods. Prosperous neighborhoods make up a prosperous city. [And] a strong and stable state is an assembly of strong and stable cities."
BOUNDED NEIGHBORHOODS
While we cannot restore the conditions that made townships central to our lives the way they were in the past, we can recreate many of the enabling conditions that nurture and sustain a rich repertoire of social institutions. To do so, we must focus our attention on neighborhoods and other social settings of human scale. These levels of community offer the best enabling conditions for the kind of organic, bottom-up institutional generation that Scruton and other conservatives have long championed.
Civic and social leaders, policymakers, and philanthropists alike will need to reenvision our nation's physical and institutional landscape as made up of clearly demarcated neighborhoods, with a renewed emphasis on developing organizational life. This means taking steps to ensure that residents in each area have a sense of collective identity and mutual responsibility, if not a shared feeling of common community (a much higher bar). Practical efforts are required on four levels to achieve this.
First, every place should be part of a bounded community with a clear start and end, as well as a commercial center, primary schools, parks, civic associations, non-profits, small businesses, and other physical assets and institutions that promote bonding relationships. The goal should be to foster closer associations among residents, build greater allegiance to a place, and develop the neighborhood-specific and overlapping institutions essential to communal flourishing. Adjusting the tax system to favor local volunteerism and reforming local zoning laws to enable mixed-use development would contribute to this dynamic.
Second, for institutions to play a constructive role in relationships, they need to be local. If we understand the neighborhood as the primary arena in which social institutions arise and flourish, we can see how decentralization — also known as "subsidiarity" — is critical. Decentralizing government such that it serves and is responsible to specific neighborhoods would embed public authorities in specific places while giving local residents more say in how funds are spent. Public servants would gain a better understanding of the neighborhood's social contexts, as well as the incentives and opportunities to improve them — especially if they are committed to a particular geography for an extended time and evaluated on its performance rather than metrics like the number of permits issued or housing units built.
To catalyze this process, civic leaders should place a far greater emphasis on establishing community schools, which are excellent incubators of social relationships, as well as "third places" — the churches, coffee shops, gyms, hair salons, bars, bookstores, parks, and community centers that host regular, informal gatherings of residents — neighborhood by neighborhood. Whereas we all once lived near such places, many residential areas today purposely exclude them by how they are designed and zoned. Ray Oldenburg, who popularized the concept of third places, wrote in The Great Good Place that a "habitat that discourages association, one in which people withdraw to privacy as turtles into their shells, denies community and leaves people lonely in the midst of many." An environment that encourages association, by contrast, gives people the social connections and responsibilities that bring meaning to their lives.
More institutional innovation would help as well — a point Robert Nisbet repeatedly emphasized. In The Quest for Community, he wrote that it is "not the revival of old communities that the book in a sense pleads for; it is the establishment of new forms: forms which are relevant to contemporary life and thought." The Manhattan Institute's Andy Smarick concurs: "Our desire to feel connected to one another need not be addressed solely by enduring bodies; fresh, newly relevant organizations can and should do the same." Institutional innovation is the only kind likely to address the relational problems that lie at the heart of today's most pressing social ills. That process must proceed, as Theda Skocpol writes, "by trial and error — and the more experimenters, the better." This will require real stewardship from a critical mass of people situated in the same locale.
Third, while houses of worship are essential to social flourishing, many must become more community oriented to promote this end. Too often, churches and other religious organizations act as if they are only dealing with consumers, organizing themselves around sermons and services and making few demands on their congregants. The result is a set of faith-based networks assisting people with a particular need or in a given phase of life — just like many other institutions in America today. This greatly reduces their capacity to halt social decay and contribute to communal regeneration.
Religious institutions used to cultivate the pre-political social fabric on which so much depends. But today, some are just as likely to see their missions in political terms. This denies members of society what is essential to their own well-being and distorts the public square. Instead, religious institutions should restore the original vision of their faith, and build close-knit church communities oriented around specific neighborhoods or parishes, with all the demands this entails. Churches may lose some people in the short term, and they might require members to relocate. But it would make them stronger over time.
Lastly, political and civic leaders should stop focusing on improving economic gains based on national metrics, which do not capture how individual neighborhoods, cities, and regions are struggling. Instead, they should boost locally owned businesses, local wealth accumulation, and localized growth, with the understanding that these are more likely to contribute to the place-based institution building that is both socially and economically regenerative.
The federal government has adopted more place-based policies over the last two administrations, with the goal of increasing the incentives for investment and catalyzing broader action aimed at boosting the economic dynamics of specific places. But more experimentation is needed. A broader variety of policies will be more likely to reach America's diverse regions (both rural and metropolitan) as well as the neighborhoods that struggle the most. Local and state policymakers should adapt mechanisms like neighborhood-improvement districts, social-impact bonds, and population-health management to support such efforts.
RESTORING COMMUNAL BONDS
Contrary to what revisionist histories might have us believe, our success as a nation is not rooted in centuries of individual economic transactions based on each person's self-interest. Rather, it is the product of dense social bonds embedded within robust, place-based social structures. Alexis de Tocqueville explained why this is the case: "Sentiments and ideas renew themselves, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal action of men upon one another." In an age of disintegration, conservatives should take the lead as citizens with enlarged hearts and minds, stewarding vibrant communities into being and maintaining them across generations.