Two kinds of people populated Europe back in the day, a German politician once told me. Most Europeans were dutiful citizens, rule followers, whose chief virtue was dependability. A smaller group were untamed, ambitious risk-takers, the politician said.
She concluded: “The second group all got on a boat and went to America.”
This European founding myth for the United States of America concisely captures our nature as self-starters and mavericks. It points towards the spirit of individualism.
But our most common founding myth — specifically the story of the folks who all got on a boat to flee Europe — carries a different lesson. The Thanksgiving story is not a tale of individualism, but of community. We celebrate the Pilgrims by breaking bread together at a large table, and we tell tales of how families working together overcame adversity and tamed this land.
As much as Little House on the Prairie paints a picture of the rugged frontiersman blazing his own path, Norman Rockwell paintings show an America made up of tight-knit small towns and little platoons.
If you can hold these two competing visions together, you can understand America as she turns 250 years old. American culture is one of individualism embedded in an extraordinary network of civil society.
When Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville visited in 1831 to study our 55-year-old democracy, he found the most important thing was not the makeup of our government or the details of our laws, but the sprawling organic web of our voluntary institutions.
“There is nothing, according to me, that deserves more to attract our regard than the intellectual and moral associations of America,” Tocqueville wrote.
“Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite,” he remarked with astonishment. “Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small.”
In cases where the French would rely on the government, and where the British would rely on the wealthy lord, we Americans relied on ourselves. This was not a solitary self-reliance, but a communal one. If there was a problem, Americans wouldn’t ask for permission; we would band together and solve it.
Today’s ideological divides make it easy to miss this fundamental truth about America.
Progressives rail against our overly individualistic culture, name capitalism as the root of all evil, and jump unthinkingly to the conclusion that government is the answer.
They divide life into the private sphere and the public sphere — and by “public” they mean government-run. If an individual or a family cannot handle something on its own, the state must be the solution.
Conservatives make the same mistake from the opposite angle. They understand the evils of socialism, and they value liberty. As a result, they deride “collectivism” and hold up the individual as the antidote.
But the enemy of the overbearing state is not the individual. It is the little platoon.
When we become too atomized, the proper prescription is not more government, it is more civil society.
And we have become too atomized. America’s strength is the strength of its communities: Our religious congregations, our neighborhoods, our Little Leagues, our bowling leagues. For 60 years, American civil society has been shriveling, as famously documented by Robert Putnam in his 2000 book Bowling Alone.
Without this scaffolding of intermediate institutions, American democracy doesn’t work as well. We become more isolated as individuals, and in response, we expect more from the central government.
If you wonder why socialism is so popular among Generation Z, blame our declining communitarianism.
It really is not good for man to be alone. It really does take a village to raise a child. When Americans don’t find that village in society, we are more likely to turn to Washington, D.C.
It turns out hyper-individualism and over-centralization are not opposite errors, but are two sides of the same coin.
At the same time that young people become more socialist, a lot of America — left and right — is becoming excessively individualistic. The pandemic made isolation more normal. Tech makes it easier to fulfill our needs without human interaction. Today’s liberal feminism rejects marriage and parenthood. Some parts of the Right, meanwhile, dig deeper into a leave-me-alone sort of conservatism.
AMERICA 250: AMERICA HAS BEEN BLESSED WITH GREAT LEADERS
Individualism needs community, and community needs individualism. Unchecked individualism leads us to Thomas Hobbes’ state of nature. All-enveloping community leads us to stagnation and repression. America’s strength has been blending these two forces.
Ours is the greatest country in the history of the world because we are pioneers and rugged individualists who rely on one another and lift up one another.