Civic Decline and the Dying American Ideology

Bowling Alone and Recalling Reagan's Warning

I have been worried about the health of the American Ideology since the topic itself captured my imagination thirty years ago. At the time, Robert Putnam was working on his groundbreaking book, Bowling Alone, and I was helping compile some of the data that would be used in the book. Bowling Alone would become a chillingly prescient warning about the decline in America's social capital, with enormous implications for my own academic interest (never mind the nation). After all, the American Ideology would be unrecognizable in the absence of America's unique commitment to community and civic engagement.

In 1995, I was a graduate student under the tutelage of my mentor—the inspiration of this project to whom it is dedicated—Dr. Everett Carll Ladd. In addition to being among the last remaining scholars focused on the American Ideology (along with his friend Seymour Martin Lipset), Dr. Ladd was also the Executive Director of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, where I worked as a research assistant. The Roper Center served as the nation's archive of polling data, tracing its lineage directly to the original pioneers themselves, Elmo Roper and George Gallup.

I spent countless nights poring through dusty codebooks and microfilm, searching for relevant polling questions asked different ways, by different pollsters, across several decades in an effort to discover trends in attitudes and behavior that would shed light on Dr. Putnam's hypothesis. The truth uncovered by Bowling Alone seems so obvious to us now, but it was quite controversial at the time. In fact, one of the most vocal critics of the book was none other than my advisor, mentor, and employer.

Dr. Ladd had spent his entire career swimming against the tide of doubt about the existence of this ideology—an ideology he knew was not only real but essential to the continued survival of the bold experiment that was our Republic. He had proved more than a few others wrong in their predictions of the imminent decline and fall of America as a creedal nation. Putnam was not the first to wield data to argue that various characteristics—once held up as proof of American "exceptionalism"—were fading away with modernity and soon to catch up with other liberal democracies in the West (i.e., rising secularism, income inequality, and support for social democratic welfare states).

I wanted to share Ladd's faith in the resilience of the ideology, but the data I had been studying—and that would help make Putnam's case—felt very real, not at all academic, to me. At the time, my feeling that Putnam's thesis was correct was only that—a feeling, as though it were hinting at a shameful truth we avoid rather than confront. It would be many years later until hindsight enabled me to see that throughout my youth, I had experienced firsthand, and in real-time, the active disengagement Bowling Alone described.

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Blaming your parents and their generation for the social ills we had to endure is too easy (especially when it's the Baby Boomer generation, which has been an especially useful punching bag). And yet, the generation that came of age in the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, while struggling to escape the long shadow of their legendary parents—a generation simply called "The Greatest"—accelerated so many of the trends we discovered.

As a young child, I still remember experiencing an American life that now sounds like nostalgic mythology. Big, raucous dinners almost every week with the whole family—grandparents, great-grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins and second cousins, the extension of families by marriage, and neighbors and friends who everyone treated like kin. The conversations and gossip at the dinner table would be about what we knew and experienced, not abstract and distant concerns. The conversation and vigorous debate at the table might be about the new subdivision with the ugly houses or the disrepair of Main Street. We would relay gossip as though it were the currency of the realm: who didn’t pitch in at the food bank last Sunday and who was the brave soul who would coach the state’s worst Little League team next year? I hated Little League, but I would endure that along with piano lessons, 4-H Club, helping Uncle Bob set up Bingo at the American Legion hall on Fridays, and of course, church every Sunday.

By the time I was in High School, it was all gone. Growing impatience of all the cooking and loud debates turned our weekly family dinners into a once-yearly event that they so closely resembled on the third Thursday of November. I loved going to church as a child, but our family would come to prefer sleeping in on Sunday and going to the mall. And the activities that were fodder for so much conversation at the dinner table, they too seemed to become more inconvenient, obstacles to more pleasurable pursuits—including more vacations, nicer meals at restaurants, and occasionally parents and children at the bowling alley to bowl alone.

Instead of encouraging a sense of obligation to participate in the fabric of social and community life, we were taught to prioritize those activities that maximized a value equation of minimal effort and maximal pleasure. Although we were spending as much, if not more, time together as a family, we were steadily withdrawing from everyone else. As I reflect upon the decisions that my parents made at the time, I realize nothing they did felt abnormal because it was in keeping with what was happening to so many others around us, including our friends and other family members. We never felt deprived through the process, but the cost would be significant.

The "habits of the heart" Tocqueville observed and Robert Bellah would write about in his 1985 book of the same title are how our ideals and values find expression in community and civic life. The real cost of withdrawing from those civic obligations is leaving future generations less equipped as citizens.

“The individualism that became dominant in the late twentieth century views all relationships as voluntary associations of autonomous individuals, freely negotiating their self-interest. What it does not see is that human beings are born into a world of relationships, stories, obligations, and shared meanings that shape their very sense of self. Without these ‘habits of the heart’—deeply ingrained moral and social commitments that link individuals to a larger community—democracy itself becomes fragile, for it depends not just on laws and institutions, but on a culture of mutual responsibility and civic virtue.” -Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart

Before heading to college—where I would discover Dr. Ladd and the American Ideology—Ronald Reagan delivered a farewell address that deepened my appreciation for this nation founded on a creed. No president of my lifetime understood the American Ideology better than Reagan. I recently rewatched that 1989 farewell address, in which he reflected on the emergence of what he called "the new patriotism." Much of that speech remains vivid in my memory, as though he had delivered it yesterday—except for the stark warning he ended on, which struck me anew.

Take a moment to listen…

His words remind us that a nation founded on an idea is uniquely vulnerable. Lose the rituals and behaviors that sustain the idea, and the idea fades. Those habits of the heart must be nurtured and passed on.

Ideologies, in many ways, resemble religions: both are defined by a combination of values, beliefs, and a blueprint for institutionalizing them. Both require catechesis—the intentional transmission of doctrine, values, and traditions. Civic virtues do not arise spontaneously; they must be instantiated through rituals and behaviors. The American Ideology is not merely an abstraction—it must be lived, practiced, and taught.

For decades, we assumed the habits that sustained our national character would persist without reinforcement. But ideologies—like faiths—do not survive by accident. Without constant renewal, without active participation in civic life, the principles of liberty, equality, and self-government that define America risk becoming mere relics of a past we failed to preserve. The question before us now is whether we have the will to teach these values anew before it is too late.