Divided We Fall

O ur national politics is white hot. We live in a highly polarized context. Seventy-four percent of people in the U.S. say the country is “on the wrong track.” In the coming months such polarization will fixate on two candidates, and no doubt as anxiety about the American project continues to rise. The historic collapse of trust in government, the media, and one another means that many Americans imagine that a civil war is possible. At the same time, this nadir of trust comes as the price of our politics is at its highest in history: The last presidential election could have paid for the Revolutionary War five times over in 2020 dollars.

So how do we cool things down and get back on track? The Social Capital Campaign was launched in 2021 to check the evidence around the decline in society-wide trust and to generate fresh solutions to it. Scholars and advisers were drawn from a broad spectrum of political teams with staffers connected to Donald Trump, George W. Bush, Mike Pence, Carly Fiorina, Paul Ryan, and Rick Santorum. Over a two-year period, we developed a shopping list of societal ailments that essentially describe an ailing society.

The main finding confirms that Charles Murray’s Coming Apart thesis holds up 15 years later — there is a widening social-capital gap between the wealthy, who are accumulating both capital and social capital, and those on lower incomes who are not. Brad Wilcox, for example, highlighted a cleavage in marriage rates. Marriage, that great bellwether for relationship health, is increasingly a luxury lifestyle choice. Among prime-working-age adults, the share of those who are married fall, according to their income, into sharp camps: 77 percent for those earning over $111,000, and just 27 percent for those under $55,000.

The idea that low-income communities still have high stocks of social capital through extended, multigenerational families and faith communities is increasingly a romantic one. Among America’s diverse Hispanic population, for example, divorce and cohabitation rates are high and increasing, while church attendance is dropping the fastest, compared with demographic counterparts.

So what?

From the perspective of the 1970s, we see that nonprofit giving, volunteering, church attendance, the helping of neighbors, socializing with neighbors, the number of friends we have, and the venues in which to make them are all down. The wealthy have retreated into enclaves of their own. People lead increasingly isolated lives, with a rise in the share not just of older people living alone but also of middle-aged people living solo, as we see in the growth in the share of people who neither marry nor have children. All of this leads to a relational environment that is not as rich as in previous decades.

The big question is whether this decline in relationship networks and the associated decline in society-wide trust is going to get worse. If those on lowest incomes are experiencing a decline of social capital, does this mean a collapse of their ability to generate it, especially for the next generation? This should worry us. A social-capital gap risks creating a two-tier society fueling distrust — electorally, aggravating the gap between vulnerable populations increasingly at the mercy of demagogues, and the elite-adjacent at the risk of imagining themselves superior to their fellow Americans.

Relationship Capability
Critical to ending this gap is that policy-makers recognize the importance of relationships, and of the ability for individuals to build them. A technocratic approach to government is often based in numbers. Economists view largescale data. Yet this can often feel divorced from reality. For example, data can show that high rates of family breakdown are correlated with high rates of poor educational performance, crime, or health issues. But the data don’t allow you to say that one causes the other. While common sense and anecdote confirm this link as obvious, because the data used to measure one are not the same as the data used to measure the other, it is not possible to prove a causal link. This leads to economists who will say “correlation doesn’t mean causation.” However, many take this academic inch to take a misleading mile. There can be a tendency within the administrative state to deduce that the lack of conclusion either way means that we should take no interest in whether there is a causal effect between, say, family breakdown and poverty, or between relationships capability and the ability to trust more widely.

The disturbing feature about the marriage divide, though, is that it is a description of a deteriorating capacity especially among those on lower incomes to build deeply rich, stable networks based on a multiplicity of supportive relationships. In particular, a deterioration of the quality of relationships critical for successful child development: stably married parents. Children of wealthy parents receive, in general terms, both financial and social assets. By contrast, those on low incomes experience an increasing inability to create either. If we recognize a causal link between relationship capability that drives the building of social capital and life outcomes, all would rally much faster around defending our core, personal, local, and private institutions.

The American dream — its mechanics — entails getting an education, getting a job, building a stable family, and enjoying participation in a wider faith or neighborhood community. Yet this means we need families, churches, neighborhood groups, and nonprofit organizations that are alive and growing. Presently they are shrinking. This limits the sources from where we learn and practice relationship capability and trust.

For example, when we consider long-term unemployment among men disengaged from the workforce, we are really witnessing a crumbling in relationship capability. Disengagement from the labor force accompanies disconnect from family commitments, and from other civil contribution such as church attendance or volunteering. Addiction, debt, and a lack of education compound these effects.

When we describe a lack of marriageable material among young men, it is not just that they are not employed or in training. It is likely that we have identified a deterioration of relationship capability. The inability to turn up to a job on time, respect a customer, or respond to redirection from a boss all largely stem from relationship context. If you struggle to identify a goal and to set out on a path to achieve it, how likely are you to summon the internal resources to find a life partner and become a parent?

When we identify that a move to a federal child-care provision is a bad thing, it’s not just because it robs parents of choice, but because it further adds to relationship decline. Most mothers want to have stay-at-home options with part-time work, or for parents to be supported by a village as they raise their children: extended family, grandparents, local churches in their corner. Not an extended K–12 system. This is especially so for Hispanics. Local support networks are best supported by plural provision, with families supported in this part of the life-course with a child tax credit or paid family leave options.

We recommend vocational training for young people, though young people, and young men in particular, who have grown up with diminished relationship capability need more than just practical skills in a potential vocation. Exposure to other role models through participation in a revitalized civil society, or mentoring schemes from the nonprofit or private sector, can help to make the most of education services available.

Finally, we suggest the removal of marriage penalties because, when young men who grow up outside of intact, married families are more likely to go to jail than to graduate from college, we recognize that federal welfare should not be an impediment to marriage for couples on low incomes. Welfare should not keep families from forming lasting, stable bonds through marriage.

Rebuilding Social Capital
America’s quality of social fabric is measurably on the decline. As a result, our trust in one another and in our big institutions is also in decline. The decline of social capital feeds into polarization. It feeds a fixation with the nation, the federal, and who occupies the Oval Office.

But as Seth Kaplan reminds us in Fragile Neighborhoods, we have been here before:

The post-Civil War generation focused obsessively on the ballot box, yielding great polarization, partisanship, sensational political displays, and a belief that our democracy was broken . . . but by the 1890s reformers switched their attention to improving municipal government and physical conditions in specific places or spheres. The result was what Americans called a “great quieting,” marked by sharp declines in tribalism and in the demonization of political opponents, as well as a greater belief that the system worked.

If we can return our gaze toward the local: the family, civil society, our neighborhoods — we should see not only an increase in our overall relationship capability that would rebuild pathways for all of us to achieve the American dream. We should also see a greater confidence in the continued vitality of the American experiment itself, and a cooling down of our once hot politics.

Chris Bullivant is the former director and current senior fellow of the Social Capital Campaign. Mark Rodgers is the chairman of the Social Capital Campaign, principal of the Clapham Group.