‘Associational Life’ Not Gone - Yet

Something’s missing.

Something’s missing from contemporary society. The details vary from person to person; the feeling tugs universally.

Parents miss time with their children because of work. Employees miss feeling loyalty to their employer. Inner-city residents miss the sociability of urban life because crime keeps them indoors.

Suburban residents miss the sociability, too; their lives are too compartmentalized to embrace spontaneity, too mobile to set down deep roots.

This sense is eloquently described by columnist and author E.J. Dionne Jr. in the latest issue of the Brookings Review. Dionne writes that the desire for a civil society stems from this sense that something’s missing, from the belief that there’s more to contemporary American life than the purely personal and political.

Liberals, if they’re honest, have come to realize that the federal government alone can’t glue together broken communities. Conservatives, if they’re honest, acknowledge that unbridled capitalism by itself isn’t going to do it, either.

Civil society American-style is supposed to help fill in the gap, provide the missing something, not only mend fences but also build citizens. It’s a vehicle to enhance the public sector that isn’t governmental, and to balance the individualism of the private sector.

There was much hand-wringing when Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” was published in 1995, in which he divined the decline of civic society in, among other things, the disappearance of bowling leagues. Americans were too busy working or too lazy watching TV to participate in the nation’s once-heralded “associational life.”

From this decline could be traced all sorts of worrisome trends, from low voter turnout to the drop in PTA membership to the increased polarization of society.

I’ve always had trouble with that argument; it seemed corrupted by nostalgia. I wondered whether Putnam was looking in the right places. Is America doomed because kids aren’t bowling - when instead, girls and boys are playing soccer in record numbers? What if cyberspace has replaced the town hall as the forum for community discussion?

Now, thanks to the aforementioned Brookings Review, there’s some balm for stubborn optimists like me. William A. Galston and Peter Levine - big thinkers on civic renewal - show that associational life in America is far from dead. In fact, 82 percent of Americans belong to at least one voluntary association; only Iceland, Sweden and the Netherlands boast a higher rate.

But, just as many suspected, the nature of those associations is changing. Union membership is down and, from the civic perspective, that’s unfortunate, because union members are more likely to vote and give to charity than the nonunionized.

Membership in all-male and all-female organizations also has dipped dramatically, most often because women are now joining professional associations. That’s a good thing for egalitarianism in the workplace, but may not bode well for civic renewal. Fraternizing only with folks who share your job and career interests puts you in a more homogeneous, like-minded milieu than the old-fashioned, classless women’s auxiliary or men’s club.

Church groups? Holding steady.

Mailing-list groups like the Children’s Defense Fund? Zooming forward. Here, too, there’s room for worry, if check-writing becomes the central form of civic participation - especially for national groups that don’t have local chapters encouraging involvement and growing leaders.

So the volunteering is there; the question remains whether acts of service themselves will lead to better citizenship. Here, Galston and Levine offer a challenging idea: “Citizens, particularly the youngest, seem to be shifting their preferred civic involvement from official politics to the voluntary sector.”

In other words, civic life may be transformed, from a training ground for wider political involvement to a way of helping without messing with politicians.

There’s a way to test this hypothesis on the ground, in Philadelphia. The local follow-up to the President’s Summit for America’s Future, which was held in Philadelphia in April, took place this past weekend. No doubt, interested observers will be checking to see what emerges, how many people volunteer, donate, clean up, mentor.

Let’s also see if it makes any difference in the city’s political life. Will fresh faces break up the drab predictability of party nominees for elected office? Will all this new energy affect the quality of political debate? Or will the new energy go elsewhere?

Will we find what’s missing?

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