> The focus must be on the bringing together of disparate communities, secularly.

Except the 'United' states of America has never been about that kind of community. That's more of the fraternite of the French revolution than the spirit of America.

American unity has been due to the result of multiple different organizations and factions all participating in a common undertaking, rather than one centralized organization doing the planning and execution (as would be the case if we 'nationalized' education and did away with private schooling).

My view of America as one in which everyone can belong to different organizations, but still work together is the historical norm.

In de Tocqueville's 'Democracy in America', written at the founding of the USA, de Tocqueville (an outside french observer) writes:

> Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types—religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute.
>
> Americans combine to give fetes, found seminaries, build churches, distribute books, and send missionaries to the antipodes. Hospitals, prisons, and schools take shape in that way... In every case, at the head of any new undertaking, where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find an association.

By asking the government to 'fund public schools at the national level' you are making America like France or England rather than what it historically has been, which is highly decentralized and disjointed, but still unified.

This in my opinion is the great disconnect between 'progressives' and 'conservatives' (for lack of better terms). There's a certain type of person that, when they see a problem, immediately asks how government can be leveraged to solve it. Whereas, for me, personally, and others I know, my response would be ... how could I get my local church men's club to help out. Because I can't control the government, and by the time I lobby and campaign, the problem will still have affected a bunch of other people. Whereas it's pretty easy to gather a group of guys to fix it.

One obvious example of this is -- as you mentioned -- schools. Before public schools were a thing, catholic communities all across the country pooled together parish money to start affordable schools, with great academic results. In response, the government started the public school system so people wouldn't have to deal with the church. That's fine and dandy, but we need to accept the fact that private organizations worked better than the government to immediately provide the service of education.

The same is true of hospitals. Go to any US city of any import, and you'll be sure to find a Catholic hospital. Where is the government if it's so useful. Even in Europe, where the healthcare systems are nationalized, half the hospitals used to be ones run by the Church. It remains to be seen how these nationalized healthcare systems will play out over the long-term (thousands of years), but we know how it works when the Church runs them... they stay around for a long time.