How America lost the art of association
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How America lost the art of association You can help rebuild it
Group membership protects citizens from the State. Credit: Getty
Group membership protects citizens from the State. Credit: Getty
Alexis de TocquevilleAssociationsCivic lifeIndividual and the collectiveLuke BurgisThe One and the Ninety-NineVáclav Havel
Luke Burgis
Jun 17 2026 - 12:00am 6 mins
“In democratic countries the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville after touring Jacksonian America. The French writer had seen that Americans seemed particularly good at forming civic associations that incorporate both freedom and responsibility; in doing so, those associations formed citizens who were capable of governing themselves and flourishing in every domain of human life, without being consumed with the kind of political zero-sum games that threaten not only life and happiness, but progress, too.
Nearly two centuries later, do we Americans retain the talent for association? The signs aren’t promising. We belong to fewer congregations, clubs, unions, and lodges than our grandparents did. We report fewer close friends, and a rising share of us claim none at all. Time spent alone has reached record highs, and the Surgeon General has declared loneliness a public-health emergency. The genius for association that Tocqueville admired has not been abolished, so much as left to atrophy.
The breakdown in association results in what I call the problem of “the one and the 99” — the direct and unnatural relationship between a human person and a large group. It is a perennial problem, but current conditions have accentuated it dramatically because our technologies are built to connect the one directly to the millions, dissolving everything in between. The platforms that promised to bring us together did so by hollowing out the associations that once stood between the person and the mass. A man scrolling alone is plugged into a crowd of strangers — exposed to their moods, their fears, their judgments — with no friend group or congregation to mediate the encounter. We have never been connected to so many while accompanied by so few.
Its political manifestation is the self set against the state, with no intermediary institutions or forms of association between them — except a few good group chats, if you’re lucky.
That is not only a lonely and somewhat pathetic way to live. It is also dangerous. The human quest for community does not disappear in these atomized environments; it simply gravitates toward more totalitarian forms of government and belonging.
History has tried to warn us about this danger — and it also shows us the way out.
More from this authorThe scapegoating of Peter Thiel<br>By Luke Burgis
In the gray hush of 1970s Czechoslovakia, where even silence seemed state-issued, there was a band called The Plastic People of the Universe. Its music was raw, dissonant, and defiantly Western. The band didn’t shout slogans or call for revolution, but played loudly and boldly. For that, its members were arrested by the Communist government in 1976.
Among those watching was a playwright and dissident named Václav Havel, who would eventually become president of post-Communist Czechoslovakia. Galvanized by what he saw, Havel wrote a 1978 manifesto in samizdat (self-published) form that passed from hand to trembling hand across the country, under the title The Power of the Powerless.
“Everyone understood that an attack on the Czech musical underground was an attack on a most elementary and important thing,” he wrote, “something that in fact bound everyone together: it was an attack on the very notion of ‘living within the truth,’ on the real aims of life.”
Havel’s essay centers around a memorable image — a hypothetical greengrocer who places a sign in his shop window that reads “WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!” The greengrocer doesn’t really have a strong belief that the workers of the world should unite. He places the sign in the window because it is the easiest thing to do. “The poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots,” Havel wrote. It gets put up because it is the default thing to do, like unpacking the onions and carrots and putting them on the shelf.
Acts like that, Havel suggested, are the lifeblood of what he called post-totalitarianism, in which people aren’t coerced by force into doing things; they voluntarily do what they think is expected of them. They don’t want to cause any trouble, so they quietly and perhaps even...