The best government can do for the lonely is get out of their way.
From the moment an executive-branch agency identified the “epidemic of loneliness and isolation” plaguing the nation, it was probably inevitable that the party of government would articulate a taxpayer-funded solution to the problem.
Enter Senator Chris Murphy. The Connecticut Democrat announced on Tuesday his sponsorship of a bill that would create a federal office designed to develop “anti-loneliness strategies” and foster “best practices to promote social connection.” If you need a government-sponsored flowchart to figure out how to integrate yourself into your environment, even the most competent federal bureaucracy is unlikely to remedy your problem.
Murphy’s bill isn’t just a legislative attempt to subject Americans to a national therapy session. His bill would create an Office of Social Connection Policy — a new executive agency that would advise the president on how White House policy can augment “civic and community engagement” and engage in an interagency process to strengthen the connective tissue between individual Americans.
This new department would also create a set of “research-based” practices akin to “national guidelines on nutrition, sleep, and physical activity.” Presumably, this effort would have more to show for it than governmental efforts to promote best practices around nutrition, sleep, and physical activity. But it does sound like the only deliverable the office is tasked with producing seems to be a visually accessible medium designed to promote social cohesion in places such as public schools.
Lastly, the initiative would provide “consistent, sustainable funding” for the purpose of drafting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into the work of combating loneliness. It is difficult to put into words the level of perversity demanded of anyone who would entrust the agency most responsible for engineering an epidemic of loneliness with the work of combatting loneliness.
The only tool in Chris Murphy’s shed is governmental intervention into private affairs, so it’s not exactly surprising that he sees the government as the remedy for the social atomization afflicting Americans. The healthy, organic relationships the president and his enlightened federal agencies would be empowered to both define and encourage suggests that Murphy doesn’t comprehend either the limits of federal power or human nature itself.
Indeed, Murphy has the order of affairs reversed, as the author Patrick Garry observed when one-time Congressman Barney Frank posited a similar, government-backed solution to the problem of loneliness. “[N]ongovernmental institutions of civil society — the family, schools, religious organizations, civic groups, neighborhood associations, and the rest — provide the cultural glue that makes political self-government possible,” he wrote. Civil society, he added, precedes the formation of social covenants, which themselves produce government — not the other way around.
Indeed, Garry cites Yuval Levin’s essential work to explain why government is far more likely to crowd out the nongovernmental institutions that produce the ether in which strong communities congeal. “These two results — individual isolation and federal interventionism — are connected,” Garry continues. “The former occurs because the latter has weakened mediating institutions like churches and neighborhood organizations, which are powerful decentralizing forces that scatter economic, social, and political power too widely for any government to seize complete control of society.” Government cannot establish civil associations, but it can regulate them, tax them, and disaggregate them into impotence. Indeed, it often does.
Declining rates of social cohesion are not a fixation only of the government-obsessed left. Senator Mike Lee’s social-capital project is similarly invested in seeking solutions to the disintegration of the American social fabric. Last year, his initiative identified the connection between the “explosive growth of the U.S. government through the 1960s and 1970s” and declining individual social capital. “Governments distort the foundations for vibrant families, communities, congregations, and workplaces,” the project’s literature read.
A well-managed state devoted to doing the things that states know how to do can create the conditions in which social cohesion flourishes. Governments know how to fight crime, keep the streets clean and safe, and preserve the general welfare against the designs of malign actors abroad. All those conditions are prerequisites for thriving community life. Governments do not, however, know how to make people happy, and politicians who become besotted with their own power are only like to disrupt existing social structures in an attempt to engineer their preferred social compact.
The best government can do for the lonely is get out of their way. That would be an especially beneficial project for the poor souls laboring under the misapprehension that all that stands between them and a healthy community life is a CDC-sponsored poster.