The Frank Forum

  How can we truly become, as the late Amitai Etzioni put it, a "community of communities?" Or, put differently, how can we reclaim a kind of patriotism that engenders feelings of togetherness and societal cohesion?  In an essay  for the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs , Walter Russell Mead extols the virtues of a Hamiltonian-inspired patriotism. "Then, as now," Mead writes, "Americans must embrace a duty of care toward one another... And just as individual Americans have duties and ties to their family members that they do not have to the public at large, they have obligations to their fellow citizens that do not extend to all humankind."  Conservatism today, in contrast to the kind of small-c conservatism embraced by Hamilton, is too often conflated with a obligation-free libertarianism. While the former puts emphasis on responsibility and duty, the latter jettisons all of that in favor of maximum autonomy and un-ordered liberty.  A country of

  Raj Chetty is an unsung hero.  When it comes to the area of social capital, his exhaustive and trailblazing research is unmatched.  My first article for National Review, Conservatives for Community , written in August of 2022, was inspired by Chetty's study on social capital and economic mobility in Nature.  To quote myself: The study, which breaks down social capital into three categories — economic connectedness, social cohesion, and civic engagement — found that children have a much greater chance of being upwardly mobile if they reside in communities with high levels of “economic connectedness.” Economic connectedness (EC) refers to the integration of people from different economic backgrounds. The study concludes that levels of EC vary depending on one’s geographical residence. Impoverished inner-city areas, for example, have remarkably low levels of EC, since most residents occupy the same socioeconomic stratum. Conversely, an area with a healthy combination of high-income

  Is Kamala Harris channeling her inner-Amatai Etzioni? Let's take a closer look... Harris is known for being a rather confounding orator. Often times, it does appear as if she is trying her hand at a sort of avant-garde slam poetry. Former President Donald Trump - whose name I don't believe I have written before for this blog - quipped in an interview with Tucker Carlson that Harris "speaks in rhyme." This, I think, is an apt descriptor of her unorthodox rhetorical style.  But perhaps we ought to give her some credit. Maybe she is actually saying something ? Andrew Day, a staff writer for Robert Wright's Nonzero Newsletter ,   has pioneered a new term that I think beautifully encapsulates Harris's elusive ideological disposition: Coconut Conservatism.  Day explained , rather convincingly, that Harris's now-viral remarks about falling from a coconut tree are oddly reminiscent of a Burkean, small-c conservatism, or, put another way, communitarianism.  Craz

To any casual observer of contemporary American politics, it is clear that the United States is at a serious cultural crossroads. In the figurative sense, America today is like a ship without a sail or a vessel without a destination. Historically founded upon Enlightenment-Era principles rooted in Judeo-Christian values, the country prospered socially and fiscally primarily due to the virtuous characteristics of many communities comprised of families and individuals who sacrificed and contributed for the greater good. While changes have been gradually occurring in American society over the last six or more decades, the realities of social decline within the nation are today arguably at their most glaring point in history. This deterioration is, at root, most visible at the "micro" level- in family units and individual households, communities and states. Make no mistake: these various "micro" spheres of social composition are not small in relevance or weight- in fact

  What do we miss out on when we fail to notice ? I recently re-read a brilliant piece by author Elizabeth Stice in Front Porch Republic: The Power of Place: Payphones.  Stice is a self-described "payphone flaneur." In other words, she traverses areas off the beaten path in search of old payphones. This new hobby, she explains, has significantly augmented her sense of place and spatial awareness.  Here are just a few payphones that Stice has photographed: You can find a plethora of such photographs on Stice's Instagram page, @phoningpalmbeach . She updates this account regularly, with her last post from just a day ago.  From Stice: The value in seeing payphones is the way it develops a practice of seeing. So often we are driving or walking down streets, unaware of what serves us no purpose or where we aren’t heading. Looking for things forces you to notice things. I'll admit: I shut off my peripheral vision when traveling to work, or even when going to meet a friend.

The societal salience of two-parent households used to be obvious. Today, however, this social structure has been labeled reactionary, an antiquated norm from a bygone era.  But there is no disputing the facts: children raised by both parents are far better equipped for the world than their counterparts from single-parent households.  While inconvenient for some to hear, this is an empirical reality.  Robert Putnam in his 2015 book, Our Kids: The American Dream In Crisis , takes this even further with his thesis that kids raised by a mother and father with college degrees have the best outcomes.  His rigorous research, both qualitative (interviews and anecdotes) and quantitative (graphs and regression models) makes his conclusions hard to challenge.  But, college education aside, we must concede the point: children from two-parent households are more likely to perform well in school and in their professional careers, and are less likely to become addicted to drugs and commit crime.  Wh

This quote from the late Amitai Etzioni has become my new mantra: "...we are not merely rights-bearing individuals, but also community members who are responsible for each other." While these words sound good on paper, are they realized in practice?  The answer to that is quite simply: no.  This, from Joseph Longley in  Governing : In 2023, for the third consecutive year, drug overdose deaths robbed more than 100,000 Americans of their lives, according to  recently released data . The scale of this loss — a fivefold increase from the early 2000s — is shocking: Overdose deaths today  outnumber fatalities from gun violence and car accidents combined. Would a nation of people who truly felt "responsible for each other" stand idly by as over 100,000 of their brothers and sisters suffered such miserable and premature deaths? I would think not.  Longley presents us with some disturbing data: Despite the crisis we are in,  85.1 percent of people with a substance use dis

Dale Carnegie - in his 1936 book, How to Win Friends and Influence People - wrote that "a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language."  Too often, though, I find myself forgetting people's names at various functions and gatherings. This is not only embarrassing for me, but insulting to the person on the receiving end of my lapsed memory.  Your name is your identity.  As Alan Ehrenhalt once told me, "At the pharmacy that I go to, I know the names of all of the technicians, and they know my name, and I actually find that rather comforting."  One thing that can help facilitate name-to-name, weak-tie relationships are name badges. This is something that Starbucks understands.  Sherry Turkle, in her book,  Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, writes: When Starbucks got into financial trouble, it rebuilt its brand with seemingly small changes, some of which highlighted the importance of conversations b

**The Following Post is Adapted from a X post made earlier in the day by the author, it's been edited slightly from its original version** In 2012 I was 9 months into my deployment overseas. I had a two week leave at the latest you possibly could have it. To coincide with my then-fiancé's law school graduation. By this point, time was moving excruciatingly slow. As an engineering company we mostly knew our hardest missions were behind us, and thankfully we were kept very busy still, but we were very much in the rear. At the time I was disappointed by this, which is something I look back on with shame. My personal disappointment was more relief for everyone who cared about me. But you don't think about these things when you're a young man. In this era Afghanistan was becoming more and more of a mess, and worse, an unreported-on mess. ISIS was a “JV team” and I knew the country back home was checked out. This fact frustrated me further. When I got to the last point

  Skateboarding was an integral part of my childhood.  Though I was never particularly good - with my specialty being the tic tac , a trick that one of those skateboarding pugs could probably do - I enjoyed it thoroughly.  While skateboarding for me was mostly a solitary activity, I did, on occasion, meet up with friends to ride the metaphorical concrete waves.  In fact, an old buddy and I used to spend hours on end playing SKATE using silly, made-up tricks.  Sort of like this  (but nowhere as good, obviously).  Samuel J. Abrams, in an article published earlier this year for AEIdeas , described skate parks as "critically important third places that drastically improve neighborhood social capital and community strength."  Before I go any further, I want to make sure we're all on the same page about what "third places" are, so I'll let Ray Oldenburg, the man who pioneered the term, explain it himself: The third place is a generic designation for a great varie

  In one of my more popular posts , I remarked on my late introduction to the wonders of literature. Some, having read it, were incredulous. Perhaps they were under the impression that anyone who wears the sort of thick-framed glasses that I do must, in fact, be an avid reader. But, alas, it was only a few years ago that I came to understand the unparalleled power of reading.  It's absolutely imperative to note, though, that to really  be a reader requires one, not just to read books by authors who are ideologically uniform, but rather, to read damn near everything. I have, thus far, read books by libertarians, Marxists, liberals, post-liberals, neoconservatives, paleo-conservatives, moral relativists, feminists, environmentalists, and on and on. You come to realize - if you are reading the right authors, that is - that all of these ideologies offer something interesting to digest.  Edward Said made me rethink my, and our, myopic and utterly reductionist understanding of the dynami

Many of us in conservative circles long for, what we envision as, those halcyon days of an American monoculture. There is, I will admit, good reason for this yearning. Robert Putnam, in  The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again,  characterizes the time after the Gilded Age and before the 1960s liberation movement as an era of we-ness, where social cohesion was strong and civic-engagement was blossoming.  Putnam illustrates this time with his famous inverted-U curve (otherwise known as the "I-we-I" curve): Many of us would like nothing more than to return to the mid-20th century, when we truly had a common culture and deep love of country.  But we must face the music: times they are a-changin'. Actually, they've already changed drastically. Troy Olson, whom I often have disagreements with regarding "turning the clock back," conceded in a recent piece for this blog that the period of the 1950s - characterized by a domina

The namesake of this great corner of cyberspace and I have been debating this topic in mostly agreeable fashion the last few weeks. We both agree that American life needs a civic and communitarian rebirth. It is the absence and need for civic nationalism that brings us to this issue but where we differ (or do we?) comes from whether we believe the project could be a success and how it could be a success.  One might think my proposal for an alternative would focus intently on America's demographic makeup, especially the pre and post-1965 immigration and naturalization act which for the first time opened up America to basically everywhere in the world through the same rule of law, specifically of federal immigration law. The 1980s brought us one round of amnesty which punted the issue of illegal vs. legal immigration down the road another few decades not unlike the compromises in the 19th century did for slavery and the southern states economic dependence on that system. Slavery was

Lately, I've been reading a lot of Amitai Etzioni, the late Israeli-American sociologist, sometimes referred to as "The Godfather of Communitarianism," and I've come to realize that he was not a man content with mere theoretical pontifications: he was a man of action.  Often, after describing a societal problem, he will offer readers some practical prescription. While coming up with answers to deep-seated problems may seem like a daunting task, it doesn't mean we shouldn't at least try. All of my pieces for National Review  conclude with at least a few sentences of prescriptive measures that we can take to improve our current situation. None of the measures I suggest for combating loneliness - like throwing dinner parties, joining softball leagues, or talking to people in the supermarket - are particularly novel, but they sure can't hurt.  For a few months now, I've considered compiling a short, comprehensive list of communitarian acts that we can all