I, We, and Government

An unfortunate tendency among many scholars (particularly Robert Putnam, whose latest book I just finished) is to conflate government and community. In their view, more government control over our lives is “collective” and therefore “communal” while less government control is “individualistic” and therefore “anti-communal.” This is a category error that diminishes the value of sociological analysis. It’s also demonstrably false: we find that those states with the lowest levels of government control also have the highest levels of social capital and community bonds (e.g., Utah), we find that those demographics who are most suspicious of government also have the highest sense of belonging and “we” (e.g., actively religious Americans), and we also find that many of the decades that saw the greatest expansions of government power (e.g., the 1960s and 2000s) were also decades that saw the greatest declines in communalism. If more government means more community, why did we get the biggest declines in community in the years of largest government expansion? If we move beyond ideology and take a more granular look at society, we find that community (the sense of “we”) is independent of government power and trying to force “community” through greater government control would be both destructive and futile.