The Giving Review: Thinking small is a big idea

This article by Frank Filocomo originally appeared in the Giving Review.

Today’s Zoomers—on both the progressive left and the populist, or rather, new right—want to fundamentally change America. That is, today’s iteration of America, at least.

Their thinking is macro. It’s national.

Parochialism? Subsidiarity? That’s small potatoes. They can’t be bothered with such trivialities.

The fact of the matter, though, is that failure to effectuate change on the national level has made Americans feel like their participation in our democracy doesn’t really matter.

According to a new survey conducted by the Kettering Foundation and Gallup, nearly 33% of respondents say they have “very little or no” power to effectuate change nationally. Moreover, 18- to 29-year-olds volunteer less and pay the least attention to government matters than any other age cohort.

This obsession with bigness, and the neglect of parochial concerns, only breeds pessimism.

Leftists are big on bigness.

The progressive left, rooted in the warped tradition of Wilsonian technocracy, has never been all that into civil society. They want top-down, expert-driven solutions to modern-day problems.

When the Biden administration’s Surgeon General put out an advisory report in 2023 declaring a loneliness epidemic, Democrat Sen. Chris Murphy promptly introduced legislation that would create an “Office of Social Connection Policy within the White House.”

Leftists circumvent little platoonism, and go directly for the expertise of the federal government.

This is the stuff of Walter Lippmann’s Drift and Mastery.

But the right? The right has a rich tradition of bottom-up, civil society.

Whether it be Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Russell Kirk, or Marvin Olasky, conservatives have a deep bench of communitarian talent to tap into, should they get the itch to do so.

But, as Giving Review co-editors Michael Hartmann and William Schambra note in their piece on populist conservatism and civil society in HistPhil, today’s conservative movement seldom speaks of such things as compassionate conservatism or localism. Still too many conservatives, not that much unlike their progressive foes across the aisle, are laser-focused on the “big picture.”

What’s more, Gen-Z Americans are thirsty for a what and a why. That is, what is Americanism, and why is it worth defending?

The Baby Boomers, for much of their lives, have defined America using Enlightenment-adjacent language: freedom, liberty, rights, pluralism, and what have you.

For much of our history, we’ve been defined by what we’re not: illiberal, theocratic, Communist, and so on.

In other words, we’ve needed an “other” to define us.

But, as Samual Huntington wrote in his very under-read book, Who Are We?, “The end of the Cold War deprived America of the evil empire against which it could define itself.”

So, the old buzzwords that our parents used—freedom, liberty, and the like—have lost their potence with the younger generations.

We yearn for meaning. We yearn for belonging.

Is and ought

Recently, I attended a small roundtable event in Washington, D.C., that included young conservatives, many of them staffers on the Hill. They conjectured about what kind of a country America is and, furthermore, what kind of country America ought to be.

Some preferred a creedal understanding of America; others thought it more an experiment in liberty and pluralism. One had more of an Anglo-centric conceptualization. The latter, truth be told, has become less fringe over the years since Donald Trump’s surprise victory in 2016. Ethno-nationalism, while still taboo, is not nearly as taboo as it once was.

The way I see it, though, America is a nation of joiners. Period, end of sentence.

Time and again throughout our history, we’ve proven that, when Big Brother falls short, communities pick up the slack.

There are innumerable stories of communities that have effectuated real and meaningful change from the bottom up. The recently departed Bob Woodson has told—and, in fact, has been part of—many of them.

The problem, though, is that these stories are often unsexy. Communities aren’t “solving climate change,” ending government corruption, or healing the class divide. Rather, they’re making their streets safer and cleaner, and they’re transforming their localities into more livable places to raise families.

In Better Together, a book from which I quote often, Robert Putnam and Lewis Feldstein relate the story of the 1969 Riverfront for People demonstration in Portland:

[T]hree hundred or so Portlanders held a picnic/protest on the median strip of the four-lane Harbor Drive… They were demonstrating against a proposal to use the demolition of a large building between the Drive and Front Street as an opportunity to widen the riverside roadway… the Riverfront for People activists wanted less highway, not more. They wanted improved and not diminished pedestrian access to the river. And they won.

These Portlanders weren’t thinking big. They had no desire to revolutionize our federal government or end world hunger. No. They just wanted better pedestrian access to the river.

Again, these stories aren’t very sexy. It’s not the kind of thing that The New York Times will run on their front page.

But, unlike vacuous posturing about national problems—does anyone remember Greta Thunberg’s Gaza flotilla? —these seemingly small, local actions, make a huge difference in people’s lives.

What’s more, seeing real and immediate change effectuated before your eyes inspires optimism and engenders feelings of meaning, purpose, and belonging.

Conservatism—of the compassionate variety, that is—ought to return to this old tradition: the bigness of thinking small.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-giving-review-thinking-small-is-a-big-idea/