Rooted in community: Tim Carney on the American dream
Tim Carney is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he works on civil society, family, localism, religion in America, economic competition, and electoral politics. He is concurrently a senior columnist at the Washington Examiner.
Mr. Carney’s latest book is Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be. He is also the author of Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, which was a Washington Post bestseller; Obamanomics; and The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money, which was awarded the 2008 Culture of Enterprise award by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
He recently spoke with American Habits editor Ray Nothstine about the importance of civil society and our understanding of the American dream.
Alienated America keys in on the decline of social capital and community institutions being a significant barrier to the American dream and human flourishing. Since its publication, have you seen any promising reversals or exacerbations of these trends, particularly in those regions that are struggling?
Tim Carney: I haven’t seen a significant shift in the trends, but what’s encouraging is that more organizations, people, and even government entities who try to help the downtrodden, try to help single moms, try to help these poor places, have come to realize that either throwing money or running government programs doesn’t solve the problems. As one social worker told me, “I realized that no program ever helped the person; relationships helped people.”
What I wrote in Alienated America is that all these crises we have—the opioid epidemic or political fracturing, less economic mobility, the reduction in marriage and birthrate—they’re all downstream from a cultural problem, which is a lack of connection and belonging. I’m finding that argument, which some people say, “Oh, no, you’re just denying the economic reality.” No, economics is part of it. The argument is sinking in with people across the ideological spectrum that what people need is connection, belonging, and community, and that you can’t replace that with any government program or with money.
You talk about Trump in the book and his rise. Going back to 2016, I was one of those people who initially thought Trump had no chance. Then driving across rural America, parts of southwest Virginia, and parts of rural North Carolina, I saw all the homemade signs. Having lived in Grand Rapids, I remember that big line into the DeVos Center the night before Election Day to see Trump. I used to walk that route to work.
I remember thinking, something’s going on and people are disaffected. That was my initial realization before it was actualized.
But taking a step back from the national focus, why is investing in local communities so essential? I think the fact so much of our news consumption focuses on national politics creates a perception that solutions must come from Washington. What practical steps can individuals take to resist this nationalized mindset and recognize the limits of federal answers to what are mostly cultural challenges?
Carney: It’s tough. You really must swim against the tide because if your local newspaper is disappearing, it’s harder to know about your local community. The conversation is more centralized now. To understand what’s going on in your community takes more work today than it used to. I was reading an old newspaper from 80 years ago from my neighborhood in northern Virginia, and there was a community association for a neighborhood that probably had about 400 people. That is less than a quarter square mile. They had a neighborhood association back then, in part because they felt they had to. The county government didn’t have as much capability.
The infrastructure really isn’t in place anymore. Individuals need to invest in existing institutions and try to make them more relevant. The example I use in Alienated America and Family Unfriendly is when my wife and I started a T-ball program at our Catholic parish. We leaned on an existing institution by modeling our efforts after another Catholic parish. The church was already there, and it had a grass field and a backstop. It had money. Plus, it had a pastor who could reach out to a parishioner who worked as a groundskeeper and ask, “Hey, could you turn this into an infield at cost?”
It had email lists from the school and from the parish that I could message and go, “Hey, send your kids over to play T-ball.” We had grills that belonged to the Knights of Columbus behind the shed that we could use to grill burgers. There wasn’t any kind of big money involved. I think the parish contributed $1,000. The institutions that existed were pushed into playing a bigger role in the family life of the surrounding people. We had to make something that didn’t already exist, but we didn’t do it from scratch.
I think most readers would agree that the trends toward secularization in America are bad. Are there good examples where this is being reversed? Where is that happening? How has a rapid rise in a more secular culture altered the American dream and then maybe even transformed it where there are strong faith community ties?
Carney: Yes. The trend in the United States is toward secularization and away from organized religion. Even people who are religious or spiritual are less likely to go to church today than 30 years ago. There’s some evidence that the secularization trend has peaked. Some religious scholars point to that on the national level. I haven’t seen that. You do see the more theologically orthodox colleges resisting. Of course, a lot of Catholic schools are Catholic in name only. The ones who have a stronger Christian identity are generally seeing an increase in enrollment, while colleges overall are experiencing enrollment decline.
A bright spot that I see is that an increasing number of 20-year-olds find that their faith is central to their life, and they’re attached to religious institutions. I would hope that means that 10 years from now, as they start forming families or building out religious institutions and filling in the pews, we will start to see that growth. The places I look at in Alienated America that have persisted as strong are the Latter-day Saints locations—Utah, Idaho, and you mentioned West Michigan—the Dutch Reformed, the Christian Reformed Church, and the Reformed Church in America—those places where everybody’s named Vander-something. They do seem to have tighter-knit, strong communities built around churches where people’s religiosity is strong, and it’s tied to these institutions.
You’re one of the few people that talk about this, Tim. Many progressive leaders have strong family lives and live in well-connected communities. I think we saw this a little with some of the hearings in Washington with Pete Hegseth. He was grilled on his marriages and family life by the left—and they made some good points—so you get where I’m going. Still, their policy preferences and cultural messages often seem to undermine the family unit.
Carney: Absolutely.
Why do you think this contradiction exists? It seems like there’s something important to highlight here.
Carney: I always say the secret weapon that our liberal elites have is community and family values that while they’re deriding the bad old days of the 1950s, they’re largely living in it. By that, I mean the way economists and sociologists put it today as the success sequence. You graduate from school, high school, or college; you get a job; and you get married before you have a kid. If you do those things, you are almost guaranteed you will not end up in poverty.
Now, when center-left or conservative scholars talk about that, you will get left-wing editorialists and left-wing people saying, “This is too preachy. This is too judgmental,” and on and on. Then if you call them over and you’re like, “Hey, is that a picture of your wife and kids on your desk and you’re their little league coach?” The problem is then the refusal to preach what they practice. Where does that come from? A lot of it just comes from a manifestation of our hyperindividualism—and a lot of hyperindividualism shows up on the right, libertarian and conservative.
On the left, it shows up in a “You may not say anything that could even sound like it’s judgmental.” Think about how bad of a parent you would be if you never said anything to your kid that sounded like it was judgmental. These people who are trying to help build a society that helps the people who are suffering are unwilling to say marriage, family, and investment in a community are beneficial, and these are all critical for human flourishing. You need to do these things, these are virtues, these are good for you, and they’re good for other people around you.
That idea of a lifelong monogamous marriage and having kids, “Oh, well, that’s just right for me.” No, if you’re going to have kids, you should have them within marriage. Frankly, most people are called to marriage and family, not everybody, but most people are. Men are made better for the most part by being married. Children certainly benefit from being raised by two married parents. Thankfully, there was a book published recently by Melissa Kearney that highlights these truths.
She’s a liberal economist who essentially got her liberal card pulled for demonstrating, purely through economic reasoning, why marriage is beneficial for society. That was seen as too judgy, in part because, in our hyperindividualistic age, we think, “Well, don’t say anything that might sound like telling other people how to live their lives.”
Interesting. She’s admonished for just having a materialistic worldview about marriage and family rearing. From a big-picture perspective, has the American dream fundamentally changed since the post–World War II era, or is it rather static? What do you see as the most significant shifts in how Americans define and pursue it today?
Carney: I do see an embrace of the individualistic over the communal and the rooted. These two things have always been part of the United States. We’ve always been individualistic. Our country was formed by the people who looked at Europe and said, “You guys are doing it wrong. We’re getting on a boat, bye.” We’ve always had that. We’ve also always had the Norman Rockwell, setting down roots, planting in a place, having traditions, and thriving small towns. Tension over those two dynamics is necessary.
Some people argue that before and during World War II, we had swung too far in the direction of community conformism. That’s the grand vision of 1950. By 1950, we were already swinging in the individualist direction. That pendulum swing, though, has somehow gone on for 75 years.
In America, [the message is], “Go West, young man, start your own journey. You’re not tethered. You’re not tied down. We have roads here, not just train tracks. You get to pick your road.” All those great individualistic behaviors have become absolute values. Autonomy has become almost an end, which if you think about it, makes no sense. It’s supposed to be a means to another end. The idea of being grounded, of inheriting stuff from your parents, what line of work you’re going to do, where you’re going to live, what your faith is, all of that is, “Oh, well, no, that’s imposing. That’s restrictive.”
The main point is that the American dream now doesn’t have any of the sort of Norman Rockwell or belonging or rootedness or tradition. It has only the “Go out on your own.” I think we’ve swung too far in the individualistic direction. We need more of the American dream to be, “I’m coaching Little League against the dad. The dad on the other sideline is the guy who was my baseball teammate 30 years ago.” That’s more of the direction we need to move toward.
