What if people just prefer bowling alone? - Matt Pearce

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What if people just prefer bowling alone?<br>Civic renewal in the isolation of American democracy.

Matt Pearce<br>Jul 12, 2026

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“A Friendly Warning,” Thomas Hicks, 1881-1890 (Art Institute of Chicago)<br>Loneliness is one of the great challenges not just of our time but of our whole form of self-government. A new report from Columbia World Projects1 sums up America’s civic “supply problem,” in a litany reminiscent of Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone”:<br>[T]he institutions that once connected ordinary people to democratic life have hollowed out. Private-sector unions that once anchored working-class communities and provided year-round civic education, social life, and political connection have nearly disappeared. Local party organizations that once operated in neighborhoods, helped people with everyday problems, and gave citizens a real stake in politics have been replaced by national data operations that go quiet between election cycles. Civic education in schools has been cut. Religious congregations that have operated as sites of meaning making and anchored civic life are disappearing, with 100,000 churches projected to close over the next five years. The basic conditions that make democratic participation possible are in short supply for millions of Americans.

The report then identified a partisan asymmetry in the American system: “evangelical networks, conservative media, and organizations such as Turning Point USA” often “meet people where they are, offer genuine community, and make members feel like they matter. On the left: not much.”<br>Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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The report’s call was to rebuild civic life “from the bottom up,” with “organizations and parties that are physically present in communities year-round, which treat members as people with vision who develop their own ideas and strategies and articulate future goals, rather than as an audience for professionals.” Ads and emails need to get replaced by “slow, relational, place-based work.”<br>I agree. My own biases are toward wanting more community, and my day job involves promoting local media subsidies so that people feel better connected to where they live.<br>But I also have to constantly confront my own assumptions for why community is such a good thing, given how much Americans, as a people, persistently behave as if there is too much community or resist creating more of it, even now. Over and over again, Americans choose to sever bonds that connect us with each other: We move away from our hometowns, we leave our churches, we quit our unions, we quit our parties, we stay in instead of going out, we donate instead of volunteering, we let friendships fade away. Whenever faced with some unsatisfactory civic situation — to borrow Albert O. Hirschman’s formulation — Americans frequently choose “exit” over “voice” or “loyalty.”2<br>Problematically, the most powerful cultural centrifuge that flings Americans apart is American democracy itself.<br>In pre-Revolutionary America, social life would have been unrecognizable even just for the density of its civic webs, as I wrote about last week in a review of Gordon S. Wood’s “The Radicalism of the American Revolution.”3 Everybody was tied to somebody else:<br>Servility smothered everything: the slaves in the fields, the indentured servants in the homes, the wives treated like the children of their husbands, the yeomen who doffed their hats to the gentlemen, the gentlemen who answered to Crown appointees of whatever quality, all of them bowing under a faraway King. Life in the American colonies was simple, poor, stupid and subservient.

The Revolution — freedom — shattered American communal life as it was then known. Universal emancipation and suffrage would take longer to come along. But as early as 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville perceived democracy’s annihilating power:4<br>Aristocracy had made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king: democracy breaks that chain, and severs every link of it. As social conditions become more equal, the number of persons increases who, although they are neither rich enough nor powerful enough to exercise any great influence over their fellow-creatures, have nevertheless acquired or retained sufficient education and fortune to satisfy their own wants. They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants, and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

The coarseness and atomism of American democracy came as a shock to the...