The share of national income that went to the top 1 percent declined steadily from 1925 to about 1975, but has risen steadily since. We are a less economically cohesive nation.
The share of Americans who were born abroad dropped steadily from 1910 to 1970. But the share of immigrants has risen steadily ever since, from 4.7 percent of the population to nearly 14 percent. We are a more diverse and less demographically cohesive nation.
In case after case, we’ve replaced attachments to large established institutions with commitments to looser and more flexible networks. Levin argues that the internet did not cause this shift but embodies today’s individualistic, diffuse society.
Church attendance has declined twice as fast among people without high school diplomas as among people with college degrees. With each additional year of education, the likelihood of attending religious services rises 15 percent.
We’re also less embedded in tight, soul-forming institutions. Levin makes another distinction between community – being part of a congregation – and identity – being, say, Jewish. Being part of community takes time and involves restrictions. Merely having an identity doesn’t.
Our politicians try to find someone to blame for these problems: banks, immigrants or, for Donald Trump, morons generally. But that older consolidated life could not have survived modernity and is never coming back. It couldn’t have survived globalization, feminism and the sexual revolution, the rising tide of immigration and the greater freedom consumers now enjoy.
Our fundamental problems are the downsides of transitions we have made for good reasons: to enjoy more flexibility, creativity and individual choice.
Levin says the answer is not to dwell in confusing, frustrating nostalgia. It’s through devolving choice and power down to the local face-to-face community level, and thus avoiding the excesses both of rigid centralization and alienating individualism. Experiments happen, and information about how to solve problems flows from the bottom up.
I’d say Levin’s emphasis on subsidiarity and local community is important but insufficient. We live within a golden chain, connecting self, family, village, nation and world. The bonds of that chain have to be repaired at every point, not just the local one.
As in ancient Greece and Rome, local communities won’t survive if the national project disintegrates. Our structural problems are national and global, and require big as well as little reforms.