“Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.” So said the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s. Tocqueville believed that voluntary organisations and groupings and municipal institutions were crucial in democratic societies, helping to preserve freedom by providing a bulwark for ordinary people against the potentially overweening power of government and the “tyranny” of majority opinion. 

Tocqueville believed that he had seen the fullest application of the power of association in the United States that he visited just fifty or so years into its life as a free country. As he wrote, “The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools.” 

Though Tocqueville thought that government power would inevitably increase as society became more complex, he said: 

The more it stands in the place of associations, the more will individuals, losing the notion of combining together, require its assistance: these are causes and effects which unceasingly create each other.

Like many of his observations, this passage is startling for its contemporary relevance, not just in America but in Britain and elsewhere. Everywhere, we can see a consumer’s attitude towards government — regarding it as something whose role is to give us what we need and want to live a decent life, without us having to do much in return. Rights but no responsibilities. Widespread welfare dependency, casual crime and what the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has called the “increasing propensity for fraud” certainly suggest a society of consumers and not producers, of takers rather than participants. In some senses what we have is not really a society at all; just a collection of individuals and interest groups trying to get as much as they can with the least effort.

The importance of associations is one of the things that jumps out from the earlier chapters of Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Robert A. Caro’s great biography of man and city. “Good Government” groups like the Citizens Union, Bureau of Municipal Research and New York State Association helped to raise New York out of the pit of Tammany Hall corruption and extreme poverty in the early 20th Century. Part of a wider national reform or “Progressive” movement, such groups helped keep opposition to government inefficiency and graft in the public eye. Later in Caro’s story, the Park Association of New York appears as a locus for campaigns to insert green spaces and playgrounds in the city and surrounds. Neither group was perfect, but it was better having them than not.

The age of technocracy and managerialism that we now live in … has been accompanied by a decline in the role and presence of associations as outlets for citizen participation

The age of technocracy and managerialism that we now live in — which Robert Moses himself helped to inaugurate — has been accompanied by a decline in the role and presence of associations as outlets for citizen participation. Robert Putnam, the American theorist of “social capital” and author of Bowling Alone, has put up a welter of evidence to show how civic and political engagement in the United States, along with more informal social bonds, collapsed in the last three decades of the 20th Century. Around a decade ago, I reflected on my own trip to the States that Americans seemed to have lost trust in each other and the physical spaces around them, seeing the outside world beyond their local communities as a hostile environment.

It feels like we’ve gone the same way in Britain, turbocharged more recently by “social” media and the paradoxical isolation it allows us. Local groups that meet to pursue common interests, like amateur dramatic societies and woodland preservation trusts, are dying off as their members die off. More mobile, consumerist and “busy” younger generations are not joining, not seeing what’s in it for them. The habits of participating in such groups, of caring for the things they do, especially of chairing meetings and minute-taking, seem arcane and irrelevant to many. And through thousands of such barely-noticed endings, the bonds of community and society fray and dissolve, leaving a vacuum for other, more cynical interests, to fill.

Our civil society now seems awfully thin and imbalanced. We see little beyond the ubiquitous left-wing charities, corporate lobbying groups and the Diversity Industrial Complex (with its range of characters from DEI commissars to deranged trans activists and local Muslim “community leaders”). Of the working class, there is virtually no sign at all, except from the odd middle class person trying to secure a few extra brownie points by claiming a connection. This imbalance has major consequences, leading elected representatives and local authorities to focus on the needs and wants of the sectional interests which press them relentlessly, emboldening them even further while alienating those who are not organised and feel themselves being ignored, pushed aside and not listened to.

This social and political deficit is also a deficit of democratic society. It should be clear to anyone reading this that democracy doesn’t just consist of voting. Indeed voting seems to achieve relatively little (just ask Conservative or Brexit voters of recent times). In the years between votes, civil society keeps up its own pressure on whoever happens to be in power through constant activity and intervention, amplified by 24-hour media and social media. Those who are not represented in this arena are easy to ignore or manage away: and their democratic participation will be markedly inferior as a result. 

In his great survey of the United States, Democracy in America, Tocqueville’s admiration for the role played by associations was tinged with pessimism. For he recognised that, without these institutions for citizens to gather together, individuals would be left isolated and prone to the tyranny of the state, sectional interests and this strange, seemingly spontaneous phenomenon, “public opinion”. 

There seems to be no other way to rebalance our unbalanced society except through associations. Certainly we could do with some decently representative working class institutions to provide a voice — and also an element of social and cultural leadership that is currently in such short supply. And I am thinking that we might even address the wider issue through an association: something like an Association for Democratic Society, to promote social groupings, advocate for the citizen and for equal participation in public life; also to advocate against government as a tool for powerful sectional interests (our modern versions of Tammany Hall).

Democratic society is fragile and won’t protect itself

Without a concerted effort to grow new institutions and revitalise old ones, the decline of civil society looks set to continue — and perhaps become irrevocable. Look at Britain today and you see a populace that is widely powerless, beaten down and unable to influence the world around it, with many giving up the belief that it is even possible. 

The social and psychological damage of this is immense. Democratic society is fragile and won’t protect itself. We all need to step up.