America has a community problem. Here’s why it matters | Michael Tanner

Michael, two of the things you mentioned that have been on the decline, well, you mentioned volunteering is down, you mentioned church attendance is down, also sort of family formation.

There's been a lot of talk lately on the national level about the declining fertility rate, just the rate of folks getting married and having kids.

So let me ask you this, and this might ruffle some feathers, but kind of tell me if you think I'm wrong.

Part of my reaction to seeing all of this is, okay, the civil society is declining and eroding, and it's bad for all those reasons, which we can get into in a minute.

But part of me just wants to say, to tell everyone out there, go to church, get married, have kids, work hard, Is that the antidote to civil society decline? What's wrong with just saying the solution to civil society decline is to go to church and get married?

Well, those are things you can do as an individual to some degree.

The question is how much you're going to tie into other people to help do that.

And things that have to be sort of larger, there's people who can't necessarily do those things that are going to need help.

There are things that are outside of the purview of those type of organizations, outside the family or the individual organization.

How do you handle the park in your town that needs people to volunteer to clean it up, to go out there and pick up the trash and things of that nature? How do you deal with overseeing government, the sort of democracy movements, the people who are out there watching to preserve free speech and things of that nature? How do you deal with people with human services needs who are poor and need someone to go out and find them a house or a job or things of that nature? How do you deal with disease that are out there that need to have research? All these things can be done by us as a community on a voluntary basis, working with one another.

The more politicized it becomes, it actually begins to turn people off.

There's obviously that the government itself can get in and attacking these groups.

You're seeing, for example, the Trump administration within the last week, it was leaked to the New York Post that they're going to use the IRS to take away tax exempt status from the Soros Foundation and CARE and Southern Poverty Law Center and other groups that clash with the administration.

So the government can get directly involved in these sort of things.

And don't forget, we can go back to the Obama administration with Lois Lerner and not clearing through the C3 status, the tax-exempt status of conservative groups.

So it's not one party or the other.

It's not red or it's not blue.

It is just the nature of government to kind of hate competition.

And people on either side now begin more and more to use it to punish civil society.

It's also, I think, that just kind of a cynicism sets in.

If everything you do becomes a political statement, whether your child plays peewee football or little league baseball or youth soccer, there's a political statement, which one of those you've chosen somehow.

people tune out and just say, I don't want to get involved.

There's no neutral organizations.

Everything is that team or my team.

And people kind of run away from that.