Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse

314 Pages·2019·2.4 MB·English

by  Timothy P. Carney

Epigraph
Seek the well-being of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the
Lord for it, for in its well-being will be your well-being.
—JEREMIAH 29:7
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Preface
Chapter 1: It Takes a Village: Where the American Dream Lives
Chapter 2: Progress at a Price: The Changing American Dream, 1955–2018
Chapter 3: “They’ve Chosen Not to Keep Up”: Is It Economics or Culture?
Chapter 4: American Decay: Broken Places, Broken People
Chapter 5: “I Don’t”: The Dissolution of the Family
Chapter 6: Bowling Alone: The Dissolution of Civil Society
Chapter 7: It’s about Church: America’s Indispensable Institution
Chapter 8: Overcentralization: How Big Business and Big Government Erode
Civil Society
Chapter 9: Hyper-Individualism: How the Modern Economy and the Sexual
Revolution Erode Civil Society
Chapter 10: The Alienated: Trump Country
Chapter 11: The Elites: The Village of Man
Chapter 12: The Church People: The Village of God
Chapter 13: Overcoming Alienation: Problems and Solutions
Acknowledgments and Dedication
Notes
Index
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface
W
e could start a book about the death of the American Dream in a million
different places. We could start in Smitty’s Bar and Restaurant in a dead steel
town outside Pittsburgh, or we could start in the Bishops’ Storehouse in Salt
Lake City. We could go to Iowa and start in Glory Days Sports Bar in Council
Bluffs, or at a Christian college in Sioux Center. We could start at the shuttered
Methodist churches in rural Iowa or the bustling basement of the Islamic Center
of Greater Toledo. We could start standing in line at a Trump rally or camping
out at Occupy Wall Street.
We will get to all those places on this journey, but we will start the story in
the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit of Children’s National Hospital in Washington,
D.C.
It was about four a.m. I had just gotten two hours of decent sleep, relatively
speaking, sitting in a spartan armchair, my head leaning against the metal bars of
the PICU crib. My daughter Eve, eleven months old, was the patient, and she
slept soundly, despite the prongs of the nasal cannula up her nostrils, the pulse–
oxygen saturation monitor taped to her toe, the three electric wires stuck to her
chest and back, and the fact that she couldn’t really breathe.
The breathing was done by a machine next to her crib that slowly won my
awe.
Infected with a respiratory virus, Eve’s alveoli were too clogged with mucus
for her to get sufficient oxygen into her lungs. The local urgent care center I had
sprinted to (with her in a jogging stroller) couldn’t get her enough oxygen. My
wife rode in the ambulance with Eve to Holy Cross Hospital, where Eve had
been born and where our kids had made many emergency room visits. Holy
Cross’s oxygen pumps also couldn’t get enough into her lungs. She was getting
paler by the minute.
However, the PICU at Children’s had this magic high-powered machine,
which could pump up to five times as much oxygen into her lungs as the
ordinary “wall oxygen” hospitals normally rely on. That machine, along with an
unerringly excellent nursing staff, was saving my daughter’s life.
At four a.m., though, that machine and the PICU nurses had to share my
attention and gratitude. My thoughts were filled in that hour with the help we
were getting from friends and neighbors during our stay, which would stretch
from Sunday to Thursday.
My colleagues on the opinion page at the Washington Examiner had
barbecue (my favorite) delivered to me for lunch on Monday. One colleague
delivered beer and dark chocolate to the PICU to make the stay more bearable
for my wife, Katie, and me. One friend in Virginia had so much food delivered
to our house from the Corner Bakery—sandwiches, salads, chips, cold cuts—
that we ate dinner and lunch from the platter for more than a week. America’s
Future Foundation, an organization of young conservatives and libertarians on
whose board I had served for years, sent a gift card for ordering dinner from
GrubHub (a food delivery service) for our whole family.
My mother-in-law brought a chicken potpie to our house for dinner one
night. She also repeatedly came to watch the kids while my wife or I drove to the
hospital to trade off shifts with Eve. Katie’s younger sister and her husband also
sat a shift with our kids, as did other friends in our parish, and another neighbor.
With us unable to fulfill our carpool duties, the other parents took on extra
trips, and even went out of their way to pick up our son.
We got so many offers of help or food that I felt guilty about my inability to
field them all. “My cup runneth over,” was the Bible verse that crossed my
mind.
In the moment, waking up at four a.m. with a sore neck in the tiny curtained
booth of the PICU, I had an image of a swarm of friends, family, and neighbors
rallying to our aid. But as I considered it more during our stay, I saw in greater
detail the contours of this support we were enjoying.
As I thought about each person or couple who helped us, or wrote, or called,
I noticed these weren’t simple bilateral relationships. In almost every case, there
was an institution that linked us. Again, this wasn’t how we thought about our
friends generally—they were just our friends.
But whenever I described to others the help we got, I found myself speaking
of the couple from our parish, or the family from our pool. Some help came from
parents at the same boys’ school where our oldest sons go. Others were my
college classmates. Others were my work colleagues at the Examiner or the
American Enterprise Institute. Parents of the kids I had coached in baseball
helped. The woman who sent the Corner Bakery feast is in my wife’s book club
and attends the same Virginia parish as my wife’s parents. The GrubHub gift
card, again, came from an organization whose board I had sat on.
Our dense and broad network of friends, which had become a short-term
safety net, wasn’t merely a network of friends. It was a network of organizations,
companies, churches, schools, and clubs. The hubs that bound us to these friends
are what we call “institutions of civil society.” Sociologists might say that during
those five days, we were drawing on our deep reserves of “social capital.”
My favorite moment to reflect came on Sunday, as I was sprinting down
Georgia Avenue with a blue-lipped lethargic Eve in a jogging stroller. Katie had
gone to a late-morning Mass at our parish with our oldest daughter. When she
finally looked at her phone and ran out of Mass to meet me at the urgent care
center, she turned to Lucy and said, “Go sit with Dorrie,” pointing to the mother
of an old school friend. “She’ll give you a ride home after Mass. If not, someone
else will.”
Katie simply knew that we could count on our parish—on the people in that
community—to help. That knowledge, the certainty that someone can help you
when you need it, was always there, but we hadn’t noticed it until we needed it.
Like the health insurance that paid most of the bill, the “insurance” of the social
networks had provided great peace of mind without ever rising to the front of our
consciousness.
In short, we always took for granted the social capital we possessed, and the
dense, expansive networks of civil society in which we were entangled. Why?
Because this was how we both grew up.
If you belong to a church, you’ve probably experienced something like it, on
either the giving end or the receiving end, or both.
Alternatively, if you are college educated and married, even if you don’t
belong to a church, you probably have many ties to civil society institutions—
swim clubs, PTAs, workplaces, book clubs—that provide this sort of
infrastructure of friends and associates.
Dense social networks may not seem remarkable to you, the reader, for the
same reason water doesn’t seem remarkable to a fish. “[N]etworking power is
like the air we breathe—so pervasive it’s easy to miss,” author J. D. Vance wrote
when he finished law school and joined the elite.1
Vance noticed the networks, though, when he was at law school. It was a
shocking realization for him that personal connections, typically through
institutions of civil society, were central to the success of the elites. Growing up
in a broken family in a working-class suburb, Vance hadn’t had those networks.
It wasn’t so much that people in working-class towns had less powerful
connections; it was that every family was less connected—to anyone. His
Middletown, Ohio, was a place of alienation.
Hillbilly Elegy, Vance’s memoir, became a bestseller in 2016 because it
offered insight into a part of the country that the educated and affluent had
missed—the dark, broken places in working-class Middle America. What
generated the interest in working-class white Middle America?
Donald Trump.
So yes, as a book about the death of the American Dream, this is also a book
about how Donald Trump became president of the United States. But Trump
isn’t the subject of the book. How he has governed, how he has tweeted, and
how his mind works are far beyond the reaches of this book.
Rather than a book about Trump, this is a book about Trump voters. More
specifically, it’s about Trump’s core supporters, who voted for him in the
Republican primaries in 2016. The Republicans’ nomination of Trump is best
understood as a referendum on whether America is currently great, or in need of
great making again. If you wondered how places like Michigan and Wisconsin
could swing so rapidly from Trump to his opposition in 2016 and 2018, it’s
because the 2016 election wasn’t about the man or his party. It was a referendum
on whether or not the American Dream was still alive.
The election told us something about America that we didn’t see, and for that
reason, we use the election map as a path that we follow on our journey through
the country’s cities and towns, past and present.
This isn’t a book about Trump. It’s certainly not a book about Hillary
Clinton. Only indirectly do Trump’s policies and proposals play a role here,
because what Trump has done as president is largely immaterial to this story.
What candidate Trump said is mostly immaterial, except for his central message:
The American Dream is dead.
Everything Trump said during the campaign elicited an angry retort from
many quarters, including the media. On his claim that the American Dream was
dead, a thousand commentators came up with refutations that proved nothing
except the shallowness of our understanding of the good life.
They’d point to the stock market. They’d point out the decent wages of
Trump’s core voters. They’d point out the historical privilege enjoyed by these
old white Christian men. All of these points were supposed to pierce any claims
to sympathy and invalidate any gripes by the people who immediately and
strongly embraced Trump and his dire diagnosis.
The materialistic view of the American Dream, however, misses the point.
The worst analyses assume that wealth or the opportunity for wealth is the
American Dream. Slightly better, some analyses see wealth as the necessary
precondition of other goods, like intact families or strong public schools.
But maybe the things we think accompany the American Dream are the
things that really are the American Dream. What if the T-ball game, the
standing-room-only high school Christmas concert, the parish potluck, and
decorating the community hall for a wedding—what if those activities are not
the dressings around the American Dream, but what if they are the American
Dream?
In this book, I’m going to take you to the parts of America where the Dream
is clearly alive, as well as the places where the Dream seems dead. To really
learn from this tour through time and place, you, the reader, may need to
abandon your understanding of how to measure the good life. We will look at
many numbers, regarding marriage, suicide, income, employment, and so on.
But those numbers are epiphenomena—they are ripples out from what matters.
Hopefully, like any good tour, this book will open your eyes to things not
only far, but also near. If I succeed, things will look different when our trip is
done, when you return home and look around.
So we will study the American Dream in the coming chapters—where it’s
alive and where it’s dead. (And I use the word where intentionally.) This study
turns out to be a study of place, of social capital, of civil society, of community,
and of church. The things you may take for granted—the things that washed over
me, my wife, and our baby Eve in that ICU—they are the material of this book
because they are the material of the good life.