To Rebuild Democracy in the Hearts of Americans, We Need a New National Service Initiative

This article was previously published as part of The Reconstruction Papers. The entire book is available in print and as a PDF.

Get the complete audio of The Reconstruction Papers now or subscribe to our public podcast feed on Spotify, on Apple, on Amazon, and elsewhere via its RSS feed.

Robert Putnam opened his coauthored 1994 book, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, with a question: “Why do some democratic governments succeed and others fail?”¹ The answer, as Putnam has come to argue over his long career, comes down to social capital. And America is experiencing a dangerous deficit of social capital.

Putnam is most famous for Bowling Alone, first a 1995 article and then a book in 2000.² The argument of Bowling Alone is that Americans are pulling back from a mid-20th-century height of civic participation. Putnam has spent the bulk of his professional life urging Americans to get back into their communities, join clubs, attend local events, and reenlist in the service organizations that helped build this country.

It is Putnam who weighs heaviest on my mind as I consider a post-Trump future for the United States, a deeply divided country riven by status anxiety, partisan hatreds, ethnic prejudices, economic inequality, and a cynical approach to media production and consumption. Our crisis is so severe that I no longer believe we can simply prod Americans to get up off their couches and get involved. We must build a massive national infrastructure to encourage and enable them to do so.

We need a reinvigoration of public service and civic life in this country not seen since the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And indeed, we need a federal programs and funding initiative comparable in ambition to the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to put Americans back into their communities, empower local organizations, and revitalize the small-r republican virtues that sustain a people tasked with popular government and a free society.

Some of what I’m describing already exists in the form of AmeriCorps, founded in 1993 under the Clinton administration.³ The program sends young people into schools as teachers and engages other vocational skills, develops service opportunities, and offers programs for seniors to work in their communities.

But AmeriCorps is too small and too circumscribed. A better option is a national-service initiative with the ambition of era-defining change, one that will enlist more Americans in public service than any time since the Great Depression and lay the foundations for a sense of shared purpose in the future of the country.

What America is lacking in the wake of our long, dark national nightmare is a service program aimed at mobilizing the greatest levels of civic participation in a century. We need service programs aimed not only at deploying legions of teachers, medical professionals, construction workers, and other laborers across the country but also at reframing our entire idea of what civic service means. This is not merely a call for a new initiative. It is a call for a renewal effort never before seen in the history of this country.

There should be no sector or aspect of American society that is not energized by this project, because the idea of national renewal is not limited to low-income or resource-stressed communities. Our challenge is not just to help impoverished areas or put bright young Americans to work in service roles. The crisis we face is one of loneliness, social dislocation, and general malaise that has left our republic in a death spiral of resentments and anxieties.

This is a crisis at the heart of every American life. This means that we should be investing in civic clubs, the arts, design, and industry as well as poverty relief, nature conservation, and community assistance.

Our herculean task is not simply to improve neighborhoods or beautify the country. It is one of Putnamesque revival. The goal is to make Americans see one another again, to bring them together and make fellow citizens out of them. This isn’t about chauvinistic nationalism but rather about the empathy, neighborliness, and social connectivity that sustain a healthy liberal democracy.

Lonely country

One of the most devastating effects of our declining civic participation is that many Americans now report record-high levels of loneliness. We are, despite all of our entertainment and technology, desperately in need of connection.

In 2025, the American Psychological Association found that 54 percent of American adults reported feeling isolated, with 50 percent saying they felt left out some of the time and 50 percent also saying they lacked companionship at different points.⁴ This is a national crisis, but it is felt and lived out at the scale of our own neighborhoods, streets, and blocks. According to survey data from the Pew Research Center, 74 percent of Americans reported knowing only some or even none of their neighbors.⁵ But the same data suggests people are hungry for connection and community. Only 52 percent said they believed their neighbors would bring in their mail or water their plants for them, but 76 percent said they would do this for their neighbors.

People in this country spend too much time alone. According to the AARP, American adults 45 and up are by themselves 5.6 hours each day.⁶ Those considered lonely spend 7.3 hours on their own.

Civic service is itself a crucial opportunity for fostering relationships and ameliorating loneliness. But we should also pour federal funding into building new community centers, sponsoring civic clubs, and helping upstanding community organizations across America. This is also something volunteers can be mobilized for, from construction projects to organizational and logistical assistance. What I see is not a country that wants to be isolated but rather one that is crying out for more ways to come together. Of course, not all of us feel kindly toward our fellow Americans. And that is another problem national service must face.

Overcoming hatreds

Americans are, we know, highly polarized. But disagreement is not the issue. Instead, it is affective polarization, or the degree of animosity we feel toward those with whom we disagree, that matters most.

On that front, we are also in crisis. Americans have plummeting opinions of the other side. Data from the American National Election Study shows Americans’ views of the opposite party have fallen from a relatively neutral 48 on a feelings scale of 0-100 in 1978 to a frigid 26 in 2024.⁷

As we become more polarized and hardened in our resentments of those with opposing opinions, Americans increasingly avoid engaging with views contrary to their own. The most recent Edelson Trust Barometer found only 35 percent of Americans agree with the statement “I get information from sources with a different political leaning than mine at least weekly.” This was down six points from the last survey.⁸

And we are increasingly wary of one another as a society. Americans distrust each other, even beyond partisan animosities. The US General Social Survey shows a drop in interpersonal trust from 46.3 percent in 1972 to 31.9 percent in 2018. Data from the Pew Research Center suggests things are even worse among young Americans, with only 26 percent of those ages eighteen to twenty-nine saying that “most people can be trusted.”⁹

In trying to overcome this, one of the most important things we can do is to simply put people in the same physical space. Hate and distrust—the general anomie of life in an extended republic beset by rapid technological changes, a virulent strain of nativist populism, and the uncertainties of a young but turbulent century—can only be eradicated when we come face-to-face with one another. The evidence we have is that positive in-person interactions do not necessarily change issue-position polarization, but they do curb affective polarization.¹⁰ On a more fundamental level, we know that empathy is a quality we can develop and grow.¹¹ And exposure to people unlike us is absolutely central to that process.

This is why new national-service programs should require that individuals be deployed to locations unlike their hometown and region. What’s more, regional rotations should be implemented for those serving for more than one or two years. What we want is a diffuse effect across the country—for example, a person from Boston is deployed to work in Alaska, then the southern Mississippi Delta, and then southern Florida over a two- or three-year service period. The goal should be to expose Americans to as many people of different backgrounds and walks of life as possible through the course of their service.

But we don’t have to only rely on the more passive effects of gathering people together. We can also proactively fund initiatives that address our divide. Here, I want to explain how the arts can help us feed the core virtues that make liberal democratic life possible.

Republican virtues

John Quincy Adams, one of my favorite American presidents, laid out in his 1825 address to Congress the truest and highest purpose of republican government:

The great object of civil government is the improvement of the condition of those who are parties to the social compact. Roads and canals are among the most important means of improvement, but moral, political, and intellectual improvement are duties assigned by the author of existence.¹²

How are we to accomplish this today? How are we to redirect the attention of a chronically distracted and dopamine-depleted nation? How are we to orient Americans toward those ennobling ideas that Adams knew were essential for the health of the people?

Performing arts are an especially promising means of bringing people together and extolling civic virtue. This is because they both fulfill the pro-social role of uniting neighbors for a shared experience and nurture the self-reflection and emotional intelligence that must be cultivated in democratic citizens. In short, the arts promote the exterior and interior improvement of the public.

From the mid- to late 1930s, the WPA undertook a great renaissance in American playhouses. The Federal Theatre Project funded artists and writers and linked theaters across the country to bring art to the American public. In The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War, author James Shapiro writes:

It was the product of a moment when the arts, no less than industry and agriculture, were thought to be vital to the health of the republic and deserving of its support. The Federal Theatre brought entertainment to the work camps where those hiking trails were being dug. It brought children’s plays on touring trucks to kids in crowded cities. It staged works in foreign languages to reach immigrants. It established what it called “Negro Units” from Hartford to Seattle to support Black actors and playwrights. It brought free theater to asylums, orphanages, hospitals, prisons, and veterans’ homes. It revived playgoing in rural states where the movies had all but ended it. Ten million listeners a week tuned in to its radio broadcasts. Its popularity, which contributed to its undoing, confirmed that there was a hunger for drama that spoke to the unsettling times.

Is our hunger any duller? Are our times any less troubling? I don’t really think so.

So part of any new national-service initiative should embrace the performing arts. We should revive the Federal Theatre Project and update it for the 21st century. We can and should fund the writing and production of plays across the country, bringing the arts into communities of all sizes. In the same vein, we ought to embrace massive funding for museum and living-history projects, creating new sites of preservation and backing the curation of historical and cultural knowledge. All this should include a focus on small and midsize cities, as well as towns that are remote from the urban centers, like those in the Arkansas Delta or the sparsely populated areas of the Great Plains and Rockies.

The single most important product of these initiatives is mutual recognition. Our ability to see one another, and to see ourselves in one another, is the very heart of liberal democratic life.

Incentivizing volunteers, cultivating cooperation

Service in this project need not be mandatory, but it should be incentivized so that it attracts a sufficient number of applicants. College and vocational-school tuition, along with professional and grad-school education, should therefore be heavily subsidized for any graduates of the program.

This initiative must also seek local partners and collaborators wherever possible. A significant amount of the funding should be allocated as grants to state and local projects. Some of this means vastly increasing the funding at both the NEA and the NEH, but it also means launching entirely new foundations and programs. Where national organizations step in, it is essential to work with local stakeholders to ensure that projects can be implemented with stability and longevity in mind. We want the effects of this initiative to dot the country like so many Roosevelt-era post offices and bridges. We want to create a great surge of national energy that permanently raises the level of civic participation and arts funding, and enriches public life for multiple generations.

Our task is not only to rebuild the institutions and laws of our republic; it is also to refashion the hearts of our citizenry, to make people worthy of a democracy again. That should be our greatest object. That will be our noblest aim.

1. Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton University Press, 1993).
2. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
3. “Serve | AmeriCorps.”
4. “APA Poll Reveals a Nation Suffering From Stress of Societal Division, Loneliness,” American Psychological Association, November 6, 2025.
5. Lauren Silver and Jenn Hatfield, “How Connected Do Americans Feel to Their Neighbors?”, Pew Research Center, May 8, 2025.
6. Lona Choi-Allum and Gerard “Chuck” Rainville, “Disconnected: The Escalating Challenge of Loneliness Among Adults 45-Plus,” AARP, December 3, 2025.
7. John Sides, “Americans’ Views of the Opposite Party Have Declined Even Further,” Good Authority, June 30, 2025.
8. 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, Edelman Trust Barometer Global Report, Edelman.
9. Janakee Chavda et al., “Americans’ Trust in One Another,” Pew Research Center, May 8, 2025.
10. Ximeng Fang, Sven Heuser, and Lasse S. Stötzer, “How In-Person Conversations Shape Political Polarization: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from a Nationwide Initiative,” Journal of Public Economics Vol. 242 (February 2025): 105309.
11. Abramson, Ashley, “Cultivating Empathy,” American Psychological Association, November 1, 2021.
12. John Quincy Adams, “First Annual Address to Congress,” American System Now, ed. Nancy Spannaus, December 3, 2019.