INTRODUCTION

Our modern democratic societies join individuals from a diverse range of backgrounds—including race, beliefs, sexual orientation, culture and language—into one society. No more so than in the United States, where over 330 million people from some of the most diverse backgrounds in the world, most of whom having never met of course, aim to live alongside each other.

This coexistence has not been achieved by the success of free markets and legal rights alone. Social capital—the rich network of relationships that exist in child development and in adulthood—plays a critical part too. Social capital is developed in private relationships and networks. Social capital does not, therefore, create society-wide

trust by eliminating tribe or clan. Rather, collectives of individuals—whether nuclear and extended families, communities, sports teams, political parties, nonprofits, private businesses—are essential to the creation of social capital’s principal dividend: society-wide trust.

If social capital creates society-wide trust, then the reverse is true. If social capital declines, society-wide trusts declines also.

Historically, as societies have evolved, society-wide trust allowed them to grow beyond tribe or clan into a wider association. Later, a society even transcends the cohesive effects of one permitted religious belief. When social capital is in decline, such society- wide transactions breakdown which results in fertile ground for polarization.

Groups that have long lived together are no longer able to co-exist, because the wider environment of confidence and trust has collapsed. This lack of trust can quickly become open hostility.

Exacerbating polarization is powerlessness. Social capital creates belonging, relationships, and meaning. Societies with high social capital see “greater levels of civic engagement and participation in politics.” A decline in belonging, meaning, and mediating institutions between individual and the state can make authority seem more arbitrary—and practically speaking reduce the resources that help an individual or community to find solutions or to engage with the democratic process.

Social capital is not about creating a compliant population, but rather a robust one. Social capital is, therefore, not only a vital ingredient to the development of trust between citizens, and between citizens and their governing institutions: social capital is a critical ingredient in the consent to be ruled required for successful participatory democracies.

In this paper, we consider in Part 1, the growth of power to the federal government and increase of wealth to the rich, which together we describe as “the center”. We look at how this is a run-away problem—an arms race in political and philanthropic funding, increasingly from the mega-wealthy, focused on the federal government.

In Part 2 we then survey the damage of this centralization with a tour of the decline in both society-wide trust and trust in national institutions. We describe the decline of social capital creating institutions and highlight the encouraging findings of positive levels of trust at the “small” and “local” level.

In Part 3 we consider polarization as the absence of society-wide trust, and why anti- polarization efforts can fail if they are simply another form of tribalism; specifically, current diversity movements that celebrate a diversity of backgrounds but not of opinions. This leads us to consider the purpose of the separation of church and state, intended to protect a diversity of opinion and beliefs, and to affirm the independence and vitality of civil society.

In Part 4 we offer policy solutions. Accepting both the large scale of the federal government, and the realistic limits federal government can play in the creation of social capital, we restrict these to proposals refining tax policy related to philanthropic giving and the pluralization of service providers—including faith-based groups—in delivery of welfare, health and human services, through an expanded voucher system.

In total the report will have described the decline of social capital, and explained why these declines must be reversed: a strong, vibrant civil society independent of the state and the elite is critical to the American project, let alone the enjoyment of life. We will have set out modest but effective policy proposals that would help in this effort. Social capital and a robust civil society is the primary antidote to polarization.

Societies with high levels of social capital have the confidence to celebrate not just a diversity of race, faith, and sexuality, but also a diversity of opinions too.