The Misdirected Quest for Community

Why Neighborhood Ties Remain Elusive

Bruce Frohnen

When sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote his classic Quest for Community in 1953, he detailed the decline of extended family, guild, church, and village. In calling attention to the need to reinvigorate these fundamental institutions of community life, Nisbet was a lonely voice. Today, however, virtually everyone is lamenting the decline of strong communities and the values they teach. From left to right on the political spectrum, politicians, pundits, and people on the street agree that Americans have lost touch with their neighbors, that towns and cities lack public spirit, and that American life and character have been impoverished by an increasing lack of common action and feeling. The breakdown of institutions of local life and culture is too obvious for dispute, as are its disastrous consequences. Whatever their political or religious views, most Americans now recognize that high rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births, along with a general decline of participation in public life, have produced a generation increasingly prone to crime, violence, and alienation.

The new consensus embracing the importance of community raises a simple but revealing question. If everyone now recognizes the consequences of a loss of community, why is so little being done to rebuild communities or even to stop them from being destroyed? Why do Americans allow the government at various levels to continue tearing down neighborhoods, promoting family breakup, and enforcing a public morality hostile to the very habits necessary for community life? The answer begins with the recognition that while Americans agree about the need for community, they disagree about the nature of community and how they should rebuild it. Further, to the extent that they remain confused as to the intentions of the various community boosters that have appeared on the scene a generation after Nisbet, Americans remain vulnerable to manipulations that can entice them into supporting policies hostile to their most cherished beliefs, attachments, and affections.

The leading spokesmen who praise community as an abstract idea vary widely in their understanding of what makes a community good or desirable. The self-described communitarians, for example, do not even seek to rebuild concrete communities at all. Instead they merely uphold the language of community to cloak their attempt to politicize American life by submitting every important question to the machinery of politics. Another school of community boosters, who might be called the civic renewers, seek to rebuild communities, but only as a necessary means to reinvigorate the public and political life they believe once flourished in the United States. Civic renewers wish to reinvigorate the institutions that can transform children and adults into good citizens; their goal: a nation better able to maintain and increase its power and vitality rather than strong and virtuous local communities. A third school is composed of civil renewers who add a plea for moral regeneration as the root of free and vital public life. Recognizing that virtue is necessary for a vibrant civic life, these “moral regenerators” include religious institutions among the civic associations they seek to reinvigorate.

Each school of community boosters demands some form of political revitalization. None has heeded Robert Nisbet’s warning that the modern preoccupation with politics is a self-defeating attempt to recreate the shared rituals, practices, and comradeship once produced spontaneously by local communities.1 None recognizes the primary role of religion and tradition as shapers of public life. Nor does any value religion, tradition, or community for its own sake. All represent attempts to harness local communities to some other end, generally a better-ordered political life. As such, community boosters of all stripes ignore two important realities. First, no matter how well fine tuned, a better-ordered political life cannot stand on its own. Second, when community and religious life is valued simply as a means, rather than fostered for their own sake, it can never flourish, let alone support the political life the community boosters envision. A fuller examination of these three major schools, coupled with an understanding of the American tradition of faith-centered communities, explains why the community life Americans seek today remains out of reach. At the same time, this examination will highlight the factors that have contributed to the decline of communities and what is needed to rebuild them in the face of government hostility to the very concept of a moral or traditional community.

The Collective Communitarian State

Communitarians have gained visibility from their association with President Clinton, who proudly displayed a communitarian manifesto by Amitai Etzioni in the Oval Office, and the First Lady, who adapted the thought of communitarian Michael Lerner in her 1993 speech at the University of Texas calling for a “politics of meaning.” The concerns of communitarians are in some cases genuine, but coming as they do from the political left, tend to be hostile to American traditions. Etzioni dismisses any traditional vision of community — including intact families and public expressions of faith — as an expression of nostalgia for a “Leave it to Beaver” world divorced from reality.2

Robert Bellah goes further in indicting the morality of traditional communities, warning that “a dangerously narrow conception of social justice can result from committing oneself to small town values.”3 Bellah wants to transform American towns into instruments of social justice, a “moral grid” channeling “the energies of its enterprising citizens and their families into collective well being.” Economic democracy — collective political control over the distribution of wealth and economic decision-making — is needed to form good communities.4

The assumption that Americans can rebuild vital communities only by making political action the center of their lives represents the heart of the communitarian agenda. Bellah, for example, praises political movements such as union socialism because they have promoted a political understanding of community. “Suspicious both of the massive private power that was undercutting the basis for independent citizenship and of government without popular control, these movements sought to use government at all levels to bring a degree of public responsibility to the new technologies and the wealth they generated.”5 Even moral values must be determined through political action. Bellah dismisses talk of a crisis in family values on the grounds that those who divorce or fail to marry are “unemployed and thus unable to get married or [do not have] enough income to support an existing family.” Moral arguments, he believes, are useless, even counterproductive, unless a social democracy has been established. Rhetoric of a renewed commitment to traditional family loyalties not “only increases the level of individual guilt, it also distracts attention from larger failures of collective responsibilities.” Not personal morals, but collective economics that are subjected to democratic political controls are the answer to family and community decline.6

In essence, communitarians do not seek to reverse the decline of families and communities, they instead intend to replace them with ones more to their liking. According to Bellah, Americans must recognize “innovations” such as oxymoronic homosexual marriage and the elimination of sex roles to form good communities. Americans must also transform religion. Bellah sees religion’s proper role as aiding the process of “communal recreation through public worship.” He insists that only a public church calling “for sweeping cultural and institutional transformation” toward social democracy can foster community and spiritual fulfillment. From Zen Buddhism to New Ageism to feminist theology, all proper religions, according to Bellah, share hostility toward America’s economic individualism and cultural prejudice.7 Thus communitarians seek a radical transformation of every aspect of life. Americans, in their view, must be transformed by liberal experts with the proper values before good communities can be built.

The Community of Democratic Citizenship

The call for community renewal certainly does not come exclusively from the left. Indeed, many prominent figures on the conservative end of the political spectrum have sought civic renewal based in a reinvigoration of local institutions and the virtues they teach. William Kristol and William Bennett have called for a return to national greatness and to the virtues of democratic citizenship. They have joined with advocates of democratic community on the left, including academics like Benjamin Barber, to serve on the National Commission on Civic Renewal, a project funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Civic renewers take much of their rhetoric from Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America has influenced American self-understanding perhaps more than any other book. They place special emphasis on the Frenchman’s praise of local associations and his insistence that Americans learned the habits necessary for a free and vital public life in these associations. According to Tocqueville, American “self-reliance” was, in fact, communal:

The beginnings of this attitude first appear at school, where the children, even in their games, submit to rules settled by themselves and punish offenses which they have defined themselves. The same attitude turns up again in all the affairs of social life. If some obstacle blocks the public road halting the circulation of traffic, the neighbors at once form a deliberative body; this improvised assembly produces an executive authority which remedies the trouble before anyone has thought of the possibility of some previously constituted authority beyond that of those concerned.8

Rather than an absence of authority, Tocqueville saw in America a healthy participation in authority on the part of the people. This participation was made possible by the plethora of local civic associations promoting everything from temperance to music appreciation. As Tocqueville put it, such local, civic associations “are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they put it within the people’s reach; they teach people to appreciate its peaceful enjoyment and accustom them to make use of it.”9

Tocqueville’s vision of America also contained a moral dimension, understanding democracy as the best system under contemporary conditions by which men could develop proper moral characters.10 While William Bennett has lamented Americans’ distressing inability to feel or express outrage at the debilitating immorality of President Clinton,11 the morality with which most civic renewers are concerned is political; they seek a functional morality that has ability to command and respect democratic authority. As critic Don Eberly notes, the goal is to “temper the public’s recent repudiation of government activism by splicing in an emphasis on civic localism. The overriding objective, in any event, is promoting civic works, not inspiring a moral or cultural renewal.”12 Therefore, civic renewers do not value local institutions for themselves, but rather for their effects on the democratic nation. William Kristol has delivered repeated calls for a new national greatness based on a common democratic ideology and national power in the global arena. In the same vein, Bennett has pursued his vision of a properly, civically educated American people through national standards seeking to require uniform content in all schools.

The goal, for civic renewers, is a citizenry dedicated to democracy, with the virtues necessary to support it and spread it across the globe. The problem, as identified by Irving Kristol, William’s father, is that men cannot “live in a free society if they have no reason to believe it is also a just society.”13 Hence, a creed of democratic nationalism must be instilled in the young from an early age in order to convince citizens that their society is in fact just, and that — by recognizing individual rights and promoting political participation — it is ennobling. Yet the construct provides no reason why citizens should value freedom and political participation.