In all these worries, there is, of course, a hint of nostalgia. We've had crime waves before. Americans have always been on the move and in search of new opportunities. But not all of these concerns are nostalgic, and each is in its way rational. As Theda Skocpol argues here, professional associations are not the same as wider forms of association.
Crime can destroy a neighborhood's capacity to function.
Parents are not crazy to disapprove of some, perhaps many, of the values transmitted by mass culture. The new division of work between men and women outside the home has not been matched by efforts to ease the impact of all this working on families and children. The authors gathered here, and the many others urging a concern for civil society, are not claiming that civil society is hopelessly broken and that decline and doom await us all. But they also assert that we are only at the beginning of this process and more social inventiveness is required. The antigovernment mood feeds the civil society debate in two ways.