The Year Is 2016 and American Society Has Finally Become Civilized

This scenario, which takes place in the year 2016, is based on interviews with leading critics and proponents of the civil society model, including futurist Alvin Toffler; Don Eberly, director of the Harrisburg, Pa.,-based Civil Society Project; University of Maryland professor William Galston, a former advisor to President Clinton; poverty expert Isabel V. Sawhill of the Urban Institute; Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol; Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; Bradley Foundation President Michael S. Joyce; Adam Meyerson, editor of the Washington-based Policy Review: The Journal of American Citizenship; David Kuo and Arianna Huffington of Washington’s Center for Effective Compassion; Robert Woodson, president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise; Princeton social scientist John DiIulio; Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam; Marvin Olasky, author of “The Tragedy of American Compassion,” and Charles Murray, author of “Losing Ground.” Community activists--such as First AME pastor Cecil Murray; Valerie Lynne Shaw, a veteran of L.A.’s community development corporations, and Marsh Ward, who runs Clean and Sober Streets, a widely hailed drug rehabilitation program in Washington --also were consulted.

Once upon a time in America, cutting government spending was a simple matter of dollars and cents, a reaction to high taxes and a mounting national debt. Now, the drive for smaller government is taking on new meaning in American political discourse. Today, many influential political thinkers see it as a magic bullet that holds out the promise of putting America on a path toward rebuilding the nation’s character and sense of citizenship.

Here’s the logic: Over the last several decades, Americans have turned more and more of their personal responsibilities and social obligations over to Washington. A bloated welfare state, the argument goes, is merely the manifestation of a nanny government and the irresponsible citizenry it has spawned. Welfare checks to single mothers enable fathers to shirk their family obligations. Government-run poverty programs let us off the hook for helping the needy in our neighborhoods. Social Security undermines our resolve to save money for our own retirement. Just send the check to Washington, and let unseen bureaucrats do the rest.

Those who believe that this argument has just a grain of truth tend to cluster around New Democrat think tanks and journals, a breeding ground for new-wave liberals like President Clinton. Those who buy the argument lock, stock and barrel congregate inside conservative and libertarian think spots. These are the folks likely to be overheard quoting “The Book of Virtues” author William Bennett or that 19th century French aristocrat who chronicled America*s simpler years, Alexis de Tocqueville.

That brings us to the term of art that is all the rage in Washington today: “civil society.” When Tocqueville surveyed American society in the 1830s, he concluded that our democracy derived great strength from the tendency of its citizens to freely come together--outside the realm of government--to solve problems in associations, committees and clubs. He called this thriving segment of American life “civil society.” And whether coaching Little League, volunteering at an AIDS hospice, attending neighborhood watch meetings, raising funds for the local symphony, helping a church food drive or even organizing everyday life around the needs of children or aging parents, most Americans have a role in the civil society that Tocqueville described.

Michael S. Joyce, president of the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation, which promotes private solutions to social ills, describes America’s modern civil society this way: “Between the huge and impersonal national state and the isolated self there is a place where we come together as citizens in a manner that frees and enhances us in our humanity. We do it in our families, in our churches and synagogues, in our neighborhoods . . . . We join [in civic activity] for fulfillment of many of our noblest human urges--to help one another, to guide our children . . . .”

It’s a romantic image of America--too romantic, say critics such as Harvard professor Theda Skocpol, who argues that America’s voluntary sector has always worked in close tandem with the state. Liberal critics of the civil society movement also say that a strong federal safety net is the only viable redress for a capitalist economy that has produced widening class differences and the loss of decently paid jobs for low-skilled workers. Civil society proponents, in contrast, argue that America’s root problem is at least as much moral and cultural as it is economic.

A growing number of these thinkers argue that strengthening these institutionswhether its the two-parent family, religious organizations or volunteer groups--and returning to them functions taken over by the state will renew the spirit of citizenship and personal responsibility in America.

Economist and author Peter Drucker calls this “outsourcing” and favors turning over most of government’s social service functions to an autonomous new “social sector.” “The Megastate,” Drucker writes, “has all but destroyed citizenship. To restore it, the post-capitalist polity needs a ‘third sector.”’

Leading civil society thinkers, such as Don Eberly, author of “Restoring the Good Society,” point to evidence that civic renewal is already taking place--in a burgeoning fatherhood movement, in last year’s Million Man March, in scores of newly energized community groups. Eberly rejects any government role in promoting this resurgence, insisting that the idea that politics will make people virtuous sets back the debate.

Others, more impatient, want Washington to act as a catalyst. Legislative proposals before Congress would transfer resources from theBgovernment’s coffers to private social service groups through tax credits for charitable contributions. Far more generous than current charitable tax deduction, these would enable taxpayers to send money directly to, say, the Salvation Army, rather than to Washington.

What would a 21st Century civil society look like? A lot has happened since Tocqueville took his quill and papers up to the attic of his familys Parisian home to complete the classic study “Democracy in America.” The country is more diverse. Tolerance for cultural differences is an expressed, if not realized, value. Mobility is the norm, and rapid technological changes both push us apart and pull us together.

What follows is a fictional glimpse into a future in which Washington has passed many of its current social obligations to the disadvantaged back to its citizens. It is the year 2016, and taxpayers now have the option of sending up to 25% of their total federal tax bills directly to charity. Most states have similar provisions. Only those groups that provide direct services to the poor are eligible for the tax credit.

With offsetting budget cuts, government has receded as the primary social safety net. Unemployment insurance remains intact, as does limited medical insurance for the unemployed and working poor. But government welfareoperating under a two-year lifetime limithas become a last-resort option. Stripped-down welfare agencies serve mostly as referral centers, funneling people to the most compatible private programs. Federal housing subsidies were long ago abolished in favor of vouchers that can be used to obtain shelter from private sources.

A tax redistribution of this size, which has been proposed by Suffolk Universitys Beacon Hill Institute, is too radical an idea for the American public to even consider in 1996. But this scenario assumes that Congress enacts the idea incrementally over the next two decades, allowing the social sector to grow in size and sophistication.

In building this futuristic scenario, we will accept the proposition of many civil society thinkers that a renewed spirit of citizenship and a religious revival (which some are calling a Fourth Great Awakening) will take hold in America as the millennium approaches. We will even accept the proposition that a large, vibrant, well-funded and autonomous social sector is a possibility in modern America.

But we will throw into this mix other equally likely trends: An information economy with rapid changes that promise continued instability; further globalization that depresses wages; aging baby boomers and more ethnically diverse youth populations, and, of course, human nature--of the distinctly American brand.

Now, we download files from America, 2016 . . . .

Deep and resonant, the voices of hundreds of men rock the walls of the aging basement beneath the First Baptist Church that sits in the shadow of Los Angeles skyscrapers. Fingers pointed heavenward, the men stand to take the Oath of Fatherhood in unison, pledging allegiance to their families just as they do for their religious convictions.

When they have finished, their sons and daughters will join them in a daylong, church-funded session of computer and job skills training, play-acting in family conflict resolution and team sports. They will share a messy meal of barbecue and lemonade. And when they go home at the end of the day, each of these men will return from whence they came, to the wives who were on their minds when they took their pledges.

Scenes like this are so common in American churches and synagogues in 2016whether African American, Latino, Asian or Anglothat its easy to forget the dramatic change they represent: In the 21st century, fathers are returning to the family. Birth rates of the children of unwed mothers--ranging from 22% among whites to 70% among African Americans in the late 20th century--have plunged to an overall average of 12%. Fathers are marrying the mothers of their children and, with the intervention of church and fatherhood groups, learning how to parent.

Poverty rates haven’t changed much since the turn-of-the-century phase-down of government welfare programs. The numbers of Americans defined as “poor” ebbs and flows with the fortunes of an always unstable economy--fulfilling neither hopes that privatizing public aid would reduce poverty nor dire predictions that it would worsen.

But the nature of poverty in America has changed. And the reason can be traced to the fathers who congregate inside this and hundreds of other churches that are part of the fatherhood movement. Fatherless adolescent boys, whose numbers peaked around the turn of the century, always drove modern Americas high crime rates. Now, violent crime continues to decrease, drug abuse among teens is substantially down and high school dropout rates continue a decade-long descent.

In short, with more fathers around to discipline errant boys, poor neighborhoods are healthier. The rise of marriage can be attributed to a neat confluence of events that ushered in the 21st century. First came the moral pressure of the burgeoning and largely religion-driven fatherhood movement that took off in the 1990s, aided by a shift in sexual mores as AIDS and other diseases took their toll.

Second, as single young mothers tell researchers, when welfare checks became more difficult to obtain, a husband’s income--even if only the minimum wage rates provided by service-sector jobs--grew more appealing.

Undergirding both these trends was the flow of tax credit dollars into fatherhood programs under the 25% tax credit program. Fatherhood programs routinely top the list of popular charitable contributions; in the public relations campaign for tax credit dollars, even drug rehabilitation and job-training programs emphasize their role in producing responsible fathers.

This surging public interest in fatherhood had practical, as well as moral, roots. Poverty rates among children had climbed in the late 20th century because of a rise in mother-only households. Moreover, research began to show a causal link between absent fathers and wayward youth. Overlooked in previous debate over children’s rights was the potential benefits for fathers themselves: Studies now show that these married men, however poor, are better at holding down jobs, staying out of prison and steering clear of drugs than their single counterparts in the late 20th century.

Sixty miles east of that Baptist church, rising out of the California desert like a mirage, stand the marble steeples of the Church for Virtuous Compassion, a name that inelegantly combines the two watchwords of the civil society vocabulary. The gold-plated doors are bolted shut now, the church’s lavish interior closed off to the curious, many of them angry former donors to James Johansson’s far-flung fraudulent empire.

Johansson is in prison now, convicted of fleecing thousands of contributors, but his church stands as a gaudy and telling symbol for critics of the civil society movement. This, the detractors say, is what an unfettered faith in private effort has wrought.

After the spigot of tax credit dollars opened, churches and charities took to the airwaves and cyberspace with unregulated, weepy appeals to the public. For every dozen or so with noble intent, there was one crook--the poverty pimp, the cyberspace hustler, the savvy marketeer--that critics had accurately predicted.

Johansson went to the airwaves begging donations for a childrens hospital to treat poor youngsters with life-threatening diseases. In just three years, he collected nearly $60 million dollars. But doubts began to surface when health-care activists complained that only sick children whose parents joined his church could use the hospital facilities. His staff of physicians and nurses, whose credentials turned out to be questionable, were similarly drawn only from his huge, cult-like congregation.

Most of Johansson’s mail-in donors never bothered to visit his ‘hospital.’ But those who did were treated to elaborately staged tours of a state-of-the-art health center. It was only later that government investigators, acting on a tip from a disgruntled former church member, learned that this health center catered only to a couple dozen sick children. Up to a hundred more church kids were regularly brought in to fill the beds during donor tours and the filming of TV solicitations. The Johansson scandal unnerved the nation, not only with its sheer size but also because it came in the wake of several high-profile--though much smaller--embezzlement scandals: A Chicago soup kitchen chain, a Houston hospice, a Miami drug rehab center. Dozens of other social service groups have been charged with exaggerating their success rates to donors and the IRS.

Despite the scandals, Americans continue to resolutely defend the charities they give their time and money to. More than 70% still believe that private efforts work better than government programs at helping peoplea percentage that has remained steady since the late 1990s. Young people, raised in the glow of the new citizenship movement, are the systems most vigorous defenders. Retired baby boomers remain the major skeptics, but they are, at long last, outnumbered.

However, for the first time in more than 30 years, American voters are calling for more government supervision. The IRS branch formed to monitor the burgeoning social sector has proven to be woefully inadequate, barely able to make regular audits on the more than 1 million private groups that qualify for tax credit dollars. In this 2016 election year, candidates are dogged by demands for more aggressive federal oversight.

In all the fuss over isolated scandals, Americans have overlooked the most troublesome corruption of the social sectorthe corruption of purpose. With fierce competition for tax credit dollars, even the best charities have let public relations and advertising consume their operations. High-paid image consultants siphon off scarce dollars with the promise of big returns. Like many others, Catholic Charities nearly faced bankruptcy last year after the portion of its budget dedicated to public relations and advertising climbed to 60%.

Moreover, the tastes of American taxpayers proved to be more fickle than that of their ponderous federal government. Charity fads go in and out each year, forcing philanthropic causes to reinvent themselves like snack products to lure contributors. One year, the hot cause is day care for poor children; the next year funding for day-care centers drops as donors, worried about rising numbers of vagrants, rush to fund homeless shelters.

At the Saving Grace drug rehabilitation center just a few blocks shy of the Capitol in Washington, a harsh sign is the only greeting to new patients: “We can’t do for you what you won’t do for yourself.” Before drug addicts can get past the sign and into the rooms of this residential treatment program, they must attend three AA or NA meetings a day for a full weekthats 21 meetings without a single absence. Once inside, they must follow strict rules, completing designated chores and abiding by an early curfew. They must enter of their own will, not under court order. They must submit to random drug tests. They will hear much about religion as their savior. If they don’t like it, they are told they can go elsewhere.

What they get in return is an 85% chance of stepping out of those doors one day, clean and sober.

The philosophy of this center is typical of the tough-love and religious-oriented approach most private agencies have adopted since the turn of the century. Reaching back far into American history for its tradition, America’s thriving social sector demands a quid pro quo for assistance--whether self-improvement, work requirements or abiding by strict rules or religious beliefs.

Despite the abuses, America’s tax credit-financed social sector has spawned and nursed a range of innovative programs whose success is linked to the philosophy embodied in social activist Robert Woodson’s words: “Nobody should do for you more than you are willing to do for yourself.” Homeless groups involve families in building their own shelters; sporting leagues for youth teach motivation and self-discipline with early dawn practice; “job ladders” pay young people to find their own jobs through cold calls to potential employers, and on and on.

Inherent in the government welfare programs of the 20th century was an unspoken assumption that poverty was a permanent condition. Food stamps, housing, medical insurance and monthly support checks were offered as regular sustenance--a “safety net” of protection against starvation and homelessness that the public viewed as sacrosanct.

That came to an end in the 1990s when states, then the federal government, imposed increasingly strict time limits on welfare recipients. Just being poor no longer meant being entitled to support.

Private programs funded through generous tax credits took that philosophy a step further. Confident in their prospects for success, most private agencies viewed charity as a temporary bridge, not a way of life. At the Help-Yourself Shelter sponsored by Arco in downtown L.A., the homeless are treated to three square meals a day, medical and psychological treatment, classes in the job skills of their choice and help in job searches. But after nine months, they are on their own.

Southern California’s corporate-funded chain of Kiddie Korral Day Care centers offers free and reduced rates, but only to parents who can prove they are working or actively looking for jobs.

In many ways, the early civil society thinkers who argued that the welfare state destroyed skills and initiative by handing the poor their fish, rather than teaching them how to fish, were right. Privately run charities have successfully boot-strapped millions of poor onto the lowest rungs of a sinking middle class with no-nonsense job training and support, drug and alcohol rehab and educational programs. The problem is that for every family a private agency helps, another falls victim to economic instabilities.

After an initial drop in overall dollars devoted to the poor--as the tax deductions already accorded nonprofits converted to tax credits, further draining government support--social sector funding has rebounded. Part of the increased dollar flow can be attributed to the citizenship movement in the early part of the 21st century that influenced the schooling of children. But part can also be attributed to guilt. After the faces of struggling poor families were broadcast on the news night after night, the public responded with an outpouring of support that so far has not let up.

For now, there seems to be no shortage of available servicesat least for those willing to succumb to the whims of their benefactors.

Their haunting faces can be seen throughout America’s big cities. Under freeway passes. Inside vacant storefronts. Within the recesses of subway tunnels.

These are America’s “undeserving poor,” a long-dead term that came back into vogue in the early 21st century as scholars began distinguishing between “those who need a hand and those who need a push,” as author Marvin Olasky put it. The term might have been a useful distinction in scholarly circles, as researchers debated whether government welfare programs fostered dependency and passivity among families locked in poverty for generations. But in public discourse, labels like these let loose a wellspring of viciousness long kept under wraps.

The word “bum” has reentered even polite conversation, and the homeless often become unwitting victims of violent attacks by young thugs. Critics of these urban wanderers say they are on the streets by their own design. Their defenders say they are the victims of the harsh paternalism that imbues America’s social sector. Temporary facilities are available to house them--but these outcasts refuse to abide by the Christian observances most of the faith-based centers require or the strict rules that secular agencies impose. Whether by their refusal to say a prayer or to remove a symbolic body piercing, these poor reject the paternal authority of today’s public assistance.

A few fortunate among them have found strong allies in the ACLU or other civil rights groups that pound the courts with lawsuits attacking the strictures of private agencies. The rest wander the streets.

They aren’t the only ones who face public rebuke in the new world order. Single mothers and their children also are frequently the targets of derision. The church compassion circles that began as a way for middle-class couples to support pregnant unwed women now often exert pressure on mothers to marry the fathers of their children.

In some towns, the drive to restore the two-parent family leaves the children born to single mothers in a cloud of shame. At many schoolyards, these children are taunted by cries of “bastard” (or “she-bastard,” the new term for fatherless girls), and the cases of depression and suicide among these young people continually disturbs movement leaders.

Twenty years ago, the futurist Alvin Toffler predicted that the key to making a civil society work in America “is a toleration for diversity.” Indeed, even those who championed turning government’s social obligations back to its citizens now acknowledge that finding the right balance between restoring fundamental values and promoting democratic principles of tolerance has become one of Americas great unmet challenges.

*

The buzz-and-crash sound of modems connecting can barely be heard over the spirited chatter of the teenagers gathered inside this neighborhood Starbrew tea hut. These youngsters, computer literate since they started walking, gather here every afternoon to conduct online training sessions with less privileged children in schools many miles away.

Educators credit the growth of these kinds of efforts with accomplishing a goal that has eluded their improved but still-troubled school systems: producing a reliable, if small, corps of knowledge workers capable of succeeding in the 21st century.

In 1996, Toffler pointed to the proliferation of coffee houses as evidence that, People want involvement. People are hungering for it. Today, of course, those coffee houses have been transformed into tea huts serving up an array of hot brews that purportedly supply everything from extra energy to increased sex appeal to the young and hip.

These online tea huts draw in regular customers from the neighborhood who use the counter-top PCs for everything from computer lessons for children to organizing donor groups for grass-roots causes.

Technology has made social services more efficient and widespread. Immigrant groups combine technology and tax credit dollars from within their own ranks to provide housing and entrepreneurial training to their peers. And new generations of African American college graduateswho for years had felt locked out of the civil rights infrastructure built by their parents and grandparents--have used technology and tax credit dollars to revitalize large parts of the central city. Local efforts such as South-Central’s Save-Our-City campaign bypass slow-moving and turf-conscious urban bureaucracies.

But the reality inside the gated neighborhoods that distantly ring America’s cities remains a separate one. And technology shares the blame.

At midday, America’s suburbs flicker with energy. Large numbers of workers have shucked daily commutes in favor of home offices. Little League, parent-teacher groups, community groups thrive--just as the early civil society thinkers had dreamed. The hitch is that as technology enables the middle class and affluent to become more involved in their own neighborhoods, it disconnects them from the rest of the country. Lured by tax credits, suburbanites give generously to private charities, but they rarely see their dollars at work.

Volunteerism has increased nearly threefold since the 1990s, when less than a third of Americans told pollsters that they volunteered their time. But much of this is conducted in clubs and associations that dont typically qualify for tax credits. Most stay at home, sitting in front of their PCs, scanning menus to locate a charity that strikes their fancy. Given that passivity, critics say, it’s little wonder that donors are being bamboozled by dishonest operators.

Today’s suburbanites defend themselves by describing some very real hardships they face. The pace of life has not slowed down. In an age when workers are constantly having to reinvent themselves to keep up with the layoff-retrain-rehire cycle, two-income households remain a necessity.

And with government cutbacks, families are being forced to provide more and more care for their aging parents, even while they raise their children. Also, without generous government aid programs, troubled individualsthe drug-addicted uncle, the unwed pregnant sisterturn to their families.

Faced with all those extra demands, the haves simply choose to zap Visa and MasterCard payments across terminal lines to professionals who will care for the have-nots. It doesnt sound terribly different from the old days, when taxpayers sent their money to Washington bureaucrats to solve the problems of poverty. And many critics worry that it’s not.

When late-20th century thinkers urged a renewal of citizenship, a more direct shouldering of social responsibility, they were deeply worried about the moral health of the privileged as well as the poor. Loneliness, alienation, unease about the future--all were social diseases, but they could be controlled with a heavy dose of human interaction, the oxygen of civilization.

“There is good evidence that face-to-faceness is important in developing trust,” Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam said after sounding the alarm in 1995 that Americans were so disconnected that they were even bowling alone. “The idea of connection is not just a matter of dollars. It’s being there.”

In 2016, with the distance still widening between America’s haves and have-nots, being there has a long way to go--no matter who’s footing the bill.