We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emilie Rshinsky,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts into the premium version of our
website as well. Today we are joined by Seth Kaplan. He's a leading
expert on fragile states, a professional lecturer in the Paul H. Nitza School
of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He's a senior advisor for the
Institute for Integrated Transitions and a consultant to multilateral organizations like the World Bank,
the State Department, USAI D, the OECD, all kinds of NGOs.
Says that it's also the other the new book, Fragile Neighborhoods. It's out
on October seventeenth, the subheading I want to get into it's repairing American Society
one zip code at a time. Seth, thank you for joining the show
and congratulations on the new book. Thank you so much, and it's a
pleasure to be with you. Emily. You are a busy man all kinds
of advice to give to all kinds of people who need advice. Why was
this book an important place for you to put some of this research and some
of this argumentation into right now? Well, clearly, I spent a lot
of time on fragile societies. People in Washington, if you mentioned my name,
they'll say I'm the fragile states expert, or conflict prevention or political transition,
something like that. I'm using Nigeria, Libya, Middle East. But
as you know, and as I think our listeners know, over the last
many years, we've become much more worried about our own society. And people
started asking me twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, you can guess why people started
asking me over whenever I would meet them, is America another fragile state?
And I'm like, I just came back from Nigeria, I just came back
from Somali, and I'm saying it's not the same. I'm sorry, however
depressed you might be about the state of America. We're doing pretty well compared
to most places, Yet there is something wrong. We are very worried about
the health of our society, and yet and we have a lot of books.
You can find dozens of books Bob Putnam Onward with lots and lots of
books and not many answers. So I said, this is a challenge I
need to take on, but there's not an easy answer. So I spent
many years asking people questions, talking to people, running seminars, traveling around
the country, and this book is my answer to all those people who asked
me those questions. It's also very much an attempt to be practical. We
like to complain about what's wrong with America. We like to think that there's
a magic bullet, or there's change a politician, change of policy, and
we're going to be a better country. And I'm mostly skeptical. I live
in Washington, so of course I'm skeptical of politicians and policy. But my
attempt here is to be practical and to show what each person in the audience
can do to help their neighborhoods and their towns and their cities. There's a
part in the introduction that really struck me, and I wanted to ask you
about some of these experiences. You're talking about how you've long enjoyed working in
these places you write, and that's you know, places are in the world
because despite the difficult conditions that people are simply the people are simply much warmer.
The relationship's much thicker than what I've experienced in countless neighborhoods here in the
US. You go on in the paragraph to right. In Cairo, for
example, a family I barely knew once took me in for three days as
I recuperated from heat sickness. In northern Nigeria, after I traveled ten hours
from Lagos to Cano to visit a friend, only to discover that he was
away. This was before most people in the region had phones. His roommate,
whom I had never met, immediately offered me place to stay and help
getting around the city. And in Mumbai, a family let me stay with
them for a week, despite the scarcity of water, which flowed so irregularly
that the family conserved it in as many buckets as they could. What were
these over, you know, all of the years that you've that you've traveled,
these all really recent experiences, And was it just recently that you started
contrasting some of what you saw in those neighborhoods to what you've seen in the
US. Well, Well, first I would say to all of the all
of us who go around and can't cross the street without looking at our phone.
Imagine wandering the world without a map, without a phone and trying to
figure things out. What that does to your psyche? What is it?
I mean, you're open, you're curious, You're having to figure things out,
and you're forced to be eager to meet people. So I'll ask people
before I answer your question, just just try experiencing the world that way and
see how much it's different. But uh, these are experiences over many years
with many people I grew up. Let's say I was the one who wasn't
so socially apt. I was the one who was bullied. I was the
one who was forced to step aside and say what am I doing wrong in
terms of engaging with my classmates? And I was the one who had to
observe and study. And basically that meant that when I got when I got
older and I had a chance to go into the world out leaving college and
everything, my first reaction was to look for places where people made me feel
welcome, where I felt warmth, where I felt a certain security in the
relationships, and that it's very was surely very subconscious, but it completely changed
the direction of my life at many points. So, for one, when
I had a chance to travel, I didn't want to travel to Europe.
I didn't want to travel to the wealthy world because the wealthy world first,
everybody does that, and I like to do what everyone doesn't do. But
also I learned very early on at some conferences, the people that were warmest
to me, that were the most present, the most willing to sit down
and just have a conversation, the least judgmental, were often people from the
poorest countries, from Africa, from South Asia, from Middle East, from
Latin America. It's partly because their countries don't work well that did depend upon
each other, but it affects the culture in any way. So when I
had a chance to wander, and I literally spent years wandering before I actually
figured out what I was doing with my life. I was mostly trying to
figure out what is this world that we live in, What are all these
what are all these different countries societies all about? And I just took books.
We didn't have an iPhone or an iPad in those days, not that
I want to date myself, but I would carry books and I would go
to different places, and the places I went to most were the places where
the relationships were strongest. And then when I had when I had to pivot.
I was in business for several years. I worked in some countries,
and I decided that I really wanted to do something that was close to my
heart. You can imagine you get into your thirties, You're thinking really hard,
how do I turn all this wandering into something practical? And I wanted
you something that was passionate about the question that bothered me most was this question
about do some states? Why do some states work better than others? And
what I saw was most people were looking at that question very technically. And
I had studied the relationships, and I had studied social dynamics without without actually
consciously doing it, but I had done it every where. All those stories
you mentioned were my personal experiences, and they stayed with me, just the
way relationships on a day to day basis. Somehow I'm watching them, I'm
paying attention to them, and I'm feeling them, maybe in a way that
other people might not. Something about my childhood experience. So I focused.
When I focused on fragile states, it took all this knowledge to be practical.
I started with the idea that relationships matter most, and that was my
experience. Countries are very strong. Relationships are very strong social collesion. They
did very well. Think I lived in Japan, the most cohesive lards country.
I lived in Nigeria, probably the least cohesive lards countries, So partly
by coincidence, I had traveled between the least and most cohesive country, and
those relationships shaped everything else. The violence, the politics, economics, and
that sort of has led me on this trajectory all these years later. And
you start with the question of poverty, which the left talks about almost entirely
in a material context, and that's entirely understandable in fact, because it's a
poverty of material wealth. But that chapter, I think, really gets at
this question about the material versus if we want to stick with alliteration, the
metaphysical, that sort of question of chicken or egg. The Left says that
all of these social problems are downstream of the lack of material wealth. If
we sort of help people cover some of the basics, then all of these
downstream problems of social cohesion will be much easier to solve, and may in
fact solve themselves. You're right about how the right gets this question wrong too,
that if we just sort of patch everything up, we can get back
to these market solutions, etc. Etc. So, how does that question
of poverty in America, which depending on where you are, can be concentrated
in some really tragic ways, how does that affect this question of social cohesion
in the United States and the decline, especially of social cohesion in the United
States. I think I can answer your question on multiple levels. First,
clearly, if you're on the street and you have no family and you're a
child, there are some very clear material needs that that person simply requires to
get through the day. I can remember being in eastern Kentucky one of my
chapters, and the percentage of children in the worst of this is a ninety
seven ninety eight percent white area, very strong problems with drugs and then some
criminality connected to drugs, and huge problems with employment you have. I think
it was up to a quarter of the kids did not know where they were
going to sleep that night. So I don't want to say that the material
is not important. But what I do want to say very importantly is each
person, especially you, but the same for adults. We cannot thrive with
bread alone. I mean, I've heard that someplace having you, so,
I mean the whole point is we need to we need relationships, we need
love, We need social support. And that means in the home, that
means on the street, that means in the neighborhood. And I will say,
I know you focused on on poor poor, but I want to say,
in America a lot of people who are materially well off are also socially
poor. I think if you look at our talk about social cohesion, you
can think about social cohesion in the neighborhood. You can also talk about social
lesion. In America, I think the mistrust, the polarization, the anger,
the pure anger we have a government, the anger we have it at
leaders, the anger we have at each other almost in politics, is very
much because we don't have love, we don't have trust, we don't have
strong relationships locally. But clearly, if you're a poor person and you don't
have a family, and you don't have a strong support structure, you have
many, many disadvantages. And that is something that cannot be solved by housing
alone. Cannot be simply fixed in a school and any society is only as
strong as its relationships. That's something I've learned over and over and over again
in my work around the world. I think that that means something a little
bit differently in America than it lived than it means in Nigeria, where they
mostly have strong families, but they don't have any strong relationships a car across
parts of society. They don't have strong institutions. In America, we have
good institutions, but we don't have good relationships on a personal level. And
that is most glaring if you look at poor neighborhoods with weak family structure,
with a lot of trngient people come in in and out without strong local leaders
and strong models, and the market is not going to solve that, and
schools alone cannot solve that. It's something that you have to go back to
basics. We as a country have forgot the basics. I think that's true
in the poor neighborhoods, but I also think it's true that a lot of
people who are materially well off are socially poor, and it affects all of
us in many ways that we don't see day to day, but it just
makes us angrier more insecure, more vulnerable, more anxious, and I encourage
everyone to think about how your lives could be different in the way that you
would be less anxious. You can make a greater contribution to other people,
and you can make your neighborhoods stronger. Hey, y'all, this is Sarah
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And I don't at all mean to downplay the injustices of poverty in the
United States. But something I think about a lot is historically and Seth,
you've you've traveled widely, so you've seen that this even you know, in
contemporary times, Americans, middle class, lower middle class Americans are comparatively wealthy
in terms of very wealthy, very well, right, like the basics of
your talking, I wish I wish I could, Yes, I wish I
could take half the things in my house and give them away. And we
have too many things right right, And the issue of for instance, hunger.
Of course, there are some people who experience the difficulties obtaining food.
But food is incredibly cheap in America, and that is not the so of
the world. It was not the case historically. Is there something to learn
about? Uh the is there something that we can learn about? How having
you know the if you have all of your basic maslow needs met and still
there's something missing from the puzzle, that is, you know, dragging the
quality of life down. Is there something we can learn just from the United
States being such a wealthy country to the point where even the basic needs are
met from for some of our most poor, and yet it's still a very
painful time in the US. Well, I think we feel a lack of
love, we feel a lack of support, we feel very vulnerable. These
are things that cannot be solved by material goods. And I think the easiest
way to see that, I mean, we point to what I would call
distress neighborhoods where you have about a one third or above, a thirty percent
or above of the population is poor. In those neighborhoods, you tend to
have very few married families, You tend to have a lot of instability,
you tend to have more violence. You do not have a lot of supporting
institutions. Even churches often have people coming from outside the neighborhood. People are
using those churches. You don't have strong communities, and so it's very hard
to think of how one of those people can climb out of their situation without
those supporting structures. But I also think it's important to recognize for however materially
well off we are, we all will feel I mean, I look at
my neighborhood. My neighborhood gives me joy. My neighborhood is so unusual because
I walk down the street, I know my neighbors. I pass whatever a
park and I know the kids in the park. I go to the restaurant
nearby where I live, and I'll always bump it to someone and know,
I feel that this community, I have a stake in it, and I
feel that it supports me. And I would say that's so not true for
most people. Most people they on their phone, they're in their car,
they're in their neighborhood. So I think poor, but even those who are
materially well off, we are not going to get back to a country where
we all feel happy and we want to live lives of joy and happiness.
And that doesn't come about unless you're in strong relationships, and not if you're
strongly supported and cureinly. If you look at social mobility, social mobility won't
go up if poor people don't have stronger families, stronger neighborhoods, They can
support them. But I think death are the sphere and problems like that.
Those are not problems only of the poor. There are problems of community collapse,
isolation, people not having strong support structures, possibly not being married or
not being in strong relationships. There's a lot of things wrong with our relationships.
It's across the board. And I just think that these are not policy
questions. These are not political questions. They are questions of society. And
I think that if you want to fix our politics, and everybody wishes our
politics is less angry. Politics is downstream from society. Politics is downstream from
relationships, so we can have as much. When I bring a foreign person
to this country who's never been to America before, the thing you want to
shock them more than anything else. You take them to a supermarket and you
see three hundred boxes of cereal and you go to whatever part of the First
of all, the supermarket is like five times larger than any they've been in,
and then the aisles with the selections that are enormous. But you're not
getting love, and you're not getting support, and you're not feeling comforted by
the number of boxes of cerrial there are in the supermarket. Yeah, that's
a really interesting point. And I was thinking when you were talking about Nigeria,
reminded me of the title of the book because it's very specific fragile neighborhoods.
It could be you know, fragile families, fragile parenthood, fragile churches,
and of course a lot of that's in the book, but you specifically
say neighborhoods. And I wanted to ask Seth why neighborhoods is so important here,
even though there are other fragile relationships, those are all part of the
mosaic of a neighborhood, and a neighborhood is part of the mosaic of a
country. So why neighborhoods for the purpose of this book. Well, first,
I do have five chapters on what we can do. I mean five
chapters on organizations doing something. One of them is on weddings or marriage.
One of us on marriage, one of them is on family structures, which
is a little bit specific family but also in their family. One is on
school, one is on the community building, and one is on the physical
landscape. So I do think all of those are important, but I think
neighborhoods is the best entry point, because one, there's a lot of data
that tells you that the differences in how each of us are experiencing America today
depends upon where we live. That could be a rural versus city. That
could be one neighborhood in a city versus another. It could be one part
of the suburbs versus another. First of all, we are all experiencing a
different different daily level of support and happiness, and our social networks and our
social structures and our social institutions, they're all varying tremendously based upon where we
live. So we have to first make it clear that we have a great
inequality based upon place in this country. And that means that if you're talking
about the poor people who are growing up poor kids in these poor, distressed
neighborhoods, they have a great, great disadvantage over somebody else. And of
course the family and the street or the inter family networks, they matters a
lot, but actually ultimately it's the neighborhoods. And there's data that shows you
can grow up in an unstable family, but if your neighborhood is full of
stable, strong families, you will do fine. And then the reverses is
equally true that if your household is strong but your neighborhood is not, you
will not do fine. So even what happens in your household is not offset,
is completely offset by what is happening around you. So one is this
great experience, But I think two when we ask ourselves what can we do
about these problems? You know, social breakdown, social poverty, the problems
of social mobility and youth, these are things deaths of the sphere, mistrust,
alienation. If you list all of the social problems we have in this
country, they are ultimately a problem of relationships. And the one entry point
where we can think about what we actually can do about it and actually make
a difference is neighborhoods. We will not be a flourishing country unless we all
have and flourishing neighborhoods. I mean, you could try to go around and
fix each marriage, or fix each relationship between a father and a child,
or fix each try to fix each school, or try to go around and
fix each place with a lack of economic opportunity. You could try and do
that, but I think it's very self defeating. And even though most eight
ninety nine percent of nonprofits government work is this an attempt to fix each individual
one by one through some material means my argument, we will be much more
successful if we focus on neighborhood by neighborhood and think about what it requires to
make each neighborhood a more successful place. And a lot of that is not
policy. There is some policy. The biggest policy, I would say,
is a question of we need to focus our energy to ensure that everybody actually
lives in what we might call a neighborhood. A lot of our country we
live in places that are not actually neighborhoods, with no center, no institutions,
no way to connect people with each other. So we can talk about
that more. But an answer to your question, ultimately I focus on neighbors
because it's the natural entry point to address these problems, and it means that
we must focus on the society in each place and stop focusing on the individual
with material with material gifts or material policy or material philanthropy. That is not
a solution to our problems. Yes, your chapter on the sort of physical
landscape questions are fascinating. I don't know if I've mentioned this on the podcast
before, but I was in Kentucky for the first time recently and a pretty
well off area of Kentucky at a shopping center, and I looked around and
the shopping center had I mean, I assume it was built by the exact
same company that recently did one in Brookfield, Wisconsin, outside Milwaukee, not
from from where I'm from, and it just was the most depressing thing in
the world that had, you know, fancy new condos and all of these
upscale stores, Starbucks, but it looked exactly like you could be dropped in
one or the other and not know whether you were in Wisconsin or Kentucky.
And it just was incredibly depressing. And you write about how these these questions
of you know, affordable housing and housing policy that the left focus is really
intently on, and some people on the right are now starting to talk about
you know, that's that's all fine, but there's something missing in those conversations
too. Can you tell us a little bit more about that. Okay,
first, let's never forget that Emily is from Wisconsin, so we should we
should forget that so I find out more sometimes. But I think the key
point is, you know, if you drive around America and I'm using my
foreign eyes, I do have foreign eyes. Sometimes when I drive in this
country, I would just say the landscape. It's it's at times depressing because
so much is focused on on roads. It's amazing how much America is designed
to It's built to take you from point A to point B. It's designed
to help you get your material needs satisfied as efficiently as possible. That's why
I have boring shopping experiences and giant malls and what have you. And I
understand that's important. It's helped us raise our income levels. It's helped drive
down the cost of goods, and so we're all talking trade offs. We're
not talking absolutes this or that. But it is depressing that so much is
designed around highways, big roads, and so much of the country is designed
to isolate us. Did you ever notice how little of this country physically in
terms of the shopping, in terms of the design of government, in terms
of even when we go to go and worship, that my people drive to
a church, they hear a sermon for two hours, they have a couple
of consumer interactions with their churches, and they drive home. Where is the
community building in faith? And some reason I thought the most important aspect of
faith beyond, of course the beliefs and prayer is the relationship building and the
community building. And somehow when I see a lot of houses of worship today,
that part is missing. So it's the shopping experience, even the living
experience. I mean, I live in a pretty good community, a pretty
good neighbor community, but I can drive ten minutes and I see these beautiful
houses and there's one house after another, and the houses look great. I'm
sure the inside is great, but what is it that brings the people inside
these houses together? And we basically designed the country where each individual or each
household can thrive. But we've spent We've spent very little energy when we think
of the physical. And I would say also the institutional, because you know,
community building and strong relationships. Ultimately, it's about local institutions. It
used to be that nonprofits were local, They depend upon local money and they
would support the local. Now nonprofits tend to be regional, tend to be
national. They get funded by big philanthropy, big government, and they have
no connection to the local. They're doing for you, they're not doing with
you. And I live in a neighbor with a lot of local nonprofits.
And also a lot of interaction and social support that's not professionalized. And so
I would just say, if you want to deal with this bigger question of
the problems in our country, we have to think hard about designing the country
around neighborhoods. And that is physical, and that is also institutional. And
there's a lot of institutions, and I hope there's a lot of listeners who
work for institutions or live in neighborhoods where they can actually go out the door
and do something in their neighborhood, or they can go to their work and
think, how do we make this organization or neighborhood focused, How do we
make what we do to be more building about building relationships and community place by
place, because that's really the only way to address these problems. The watch
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podcasts. And you know, I've seen a lot of maybe post liberal conservatives
post pictures of you know, Budapest, a town square in rural France or
something, and I'm thinking, you know, if you show this to an
Americans, you know, we don't have a place to park our truck outside
this you know, little apartment, and I can't put a pool in the
backyard this tiny little place. Where do you think? But there are some
happy mediums, you know, there are some neighborhoods in the United States that
do this all right. What does it look like when a neighborhood and maybe
even in America or maybe somewhere else, but what does it look like when
a neighborhood really gets this right? Well, first, I think to get
it right, you need to have local institutions and the right landscape. I
mean, I live in the suburbs. I mean it easily could have been
that. I mean I searched. I literally searched for several years to find
a neighborhood. I mean, I happen to be religious and I ain't to
walk to a synagogue, so that affects my decision. But having said that
I was in New York, my wife and I wanted to leave the city.
We didn't know that I would be work working in Washingt, d C.
And we looked. We looked in places in New Jersey, we looked
in places near Philadelphia, we looked everywhere between New York City and here places
that we could go to. And eventually someone said, come to this neighborhood
and see what it's like. I had some neighbor back in Brooklyn, and
I literally came and stayed here a couple of times. I checked it out.
And so what my neighborhood has. I don't think it's perfect, but
think we have an identity. Our neighborhood has an identity. We have local
institutions. So we have three restaurants. We have a little mall. I
can't say it's beautiful. It's pretty, not beautiful, but it's got three
restaurants. I have a pharmacy, I have a supermarket. A couple of
other things. There a couple of stores and what have you, other things,
a little dentists and stuff like that. It's not huge, but those
are places to meet. We have an identity. We have places to meet.
We have local institutions. Besides synagogue, we have we have we have
a few civic associations specifically for this neighborhood. We have some not I don't
know if they're formal or informal, but there's non profit activities supporting each other.
Give you an example, my daughter's best friend, my oldest child is
sixth grade. Her best friend was diagnosed with a form of cancer again eleven
years old, undergoing chemo. And when you live in a neighborhood full of
strong relationships and strong institutions, and you also have schools. We have some
community schools. We have a few schools, so it's competitive. They're private
schools, so it's competitive. You could the equivalent. I wish they were
charter schools because then the government would pay for them. But you have these
competitive schools. So we have identity, We have local institutions, we have
places for kids to play. And then when we have a child like this,
this eleven or twelve year old who has a problem because she has she's
having chemo. She's here, and you could easily see her being in a
place where people did not come around and support her. But in my neighborhood
we have because we have community schools. The community schools are proactively involved,
the synagogues are proactively involved, the family network is proactively involved. There was
some some nonprofit that did something so she could go away for a week to
a special camp for people who have cancer or other of these very difficult so
she was able to so her her illness becomes not something that drags her down,
but almost something that I don't want to use the word celebration because it's
not a celebration, but there's joy coming out from all different institutions and all
different networks to support her in her family in this time. So a very
good neighborhood has those practical things, but most importantly, it has people who
are caring for each other, people who know each other. I mean,
when I walk down the street, I just I just feel secure. I
feel happy because I know I know the neighbors. I may not know them
very well. I tend to be in my cave, you know, writing
books for example. But I but I know how many kids they have,
I know where they kids go to school, a few schools. My wife
can even tell you what's wrong with their kitchen renovation. I mean, this
is basically what it's all about. And I'll give you one more example.
In fact, I'll give you I'll give you an example my Just last week,
there was maybe a six year old on a scooter on the street in
front of my house. So we live out again, we're in the suburbs.
We do have lawns, some people do have swimming pools, not a
lot, but it does happen. We have some community swimming clubs near here.
Mostly but we're our eyes are on the street like it used to be.
So she saw the six year old on a scooter on the street in
front of me, and it's mostly safe, but at the end of the
street cars turn in fro a more major throwaway, and he was doing stuff
that just didn't look very safe. And she happened to see this. My
daughter came up from school and mentioned something was odd with this kid, and
she bolted out of the front door. And immediately I have to say,
chase that kid back to his house. And we know the family. I
can't say we know them very well. I wouldn't call them friends. I
would call them acquainted. Just your neighborhood is mostly full of people you recognize,
you know, you trust. You could go over to their house if
you need something. Some of your neighbors will be good friends. But there's
a lot of people you just know and you trust that aren't best buddies.
But you all feel part of your You belong to each other, You're part
of your stakeholders in a common entity. She surely felt that she was a
stakeholder and had to keep that kid safe. And I asked our listeners,
how many of you would go out of your front yard to go and chase
that kid off the street before he got himself into trouble. That is the
behavior you see. And I'll give you one more story. When my daughter
dropped her brother once on the cement that wasn't very pretty or not. People
can't see me, but I'm feeling my right below my mouth here, and
he was all bloody. My wife picked up probably was about a three year
old boy at that point, and took off down the street without telling us
where she was going. You can you imagine a mother picking up this kid
who just fell on the cement because she knew where the closest nurse was,
so she immediately knew that if she needed help. In fact, we must
know for various reasons, we know all the doctors, all the nurses in
our neighborhood. She knew that she had to go three blocks to get to
that nurse, hopefully the nurse would be home, and she didn't even wait.
So this is what happens in a strong neighbor neighbor You have institutions,
you have the places, you have the relationships, and people are taking care
of each other in a way that I don't think we see in most of
this country today. I think it was common throughout human history. I think
it was common in a control sixty years seventy years ago. It is not
common today. And the question for everybody should be what can you do to
make your neighborhood more like this? You quote Mary Eberstatt in the book,
and we've had Mary on a couple of times. I absolutely love Primal Screams.
It's one of my favorite books. Yes, No, And I want
to ask, maybe from some international perspective, on the thesis that Mary advances
in primal screams, which is that the sexual revolution and all of its downstream
consequences that people might not associate in any way whatsoever with the sexual revolution,
but actually are as Mary argues, don't stream of the sexual revolution. That
is when for the United States social fabrics started to unravel, and much of
the West, social fabrics started to unravel. As you travel and you think
about some of these strong communities, these these non fragile neighborhoods and other parts
of the world, do you see that, do you Is that something that
can help explain neighborhood cohesion, not just the States, but in other parts
of the world. Is that something that's a part of this problem. I
think it's definitely a part of the problem. When I put everything onto that,
I mean, I think some of it is that is how we've designed
the country, I believe. I mean, if you look at the data,
forgive me for bringing up numbers a little bit, but if you look
at the data, you know there's a lot of we are wealthier than most
countries, but there are several dozen, let's say, thirty forty wealthy countries,
and there's a lot you can learn across the countries and the United States
is an outlier on problems with deaths of the spear and suicide. It's an
outlier and how it treats it children. I mean the data just comparing us
to the European Union, there's not a big gap on, for example,
marriage. When I looked at the data European universities of the United States,
there's a three percentage point gap on marriage, which is not a lot,
but in terms of five and under with two parents, there's something like an
eighteen percent gap with space. Means a lot of people in Europe, especially
in Northern Europe, are not getting married, but they're being responsible to their
kids. And in America you have a lot of people having kids and forget
the marriage equation. If we could just have people be responsible for their kids,
that would make a huge difference. I mean, the same way we
had people to have fewer teenage pregnancies. We need a national campaign for responsibility
for small children. So when you talk about what she says, I think
something about the decayed and compare it to countries. The countries that I work
in are some of the most fragile states in the world. You always have
some problem of political violence, some problems of instability, government breakdown, coups
in many cases. In the worst cases, you have wars. I mean,
I work in Columbia, which has had a they're mostly behind it,
not completely, but they've had a civil war for fifty years. I go
to Mexico. Mexico, one third of the country is not very safe because
of drug cartels. Of course, I work in Nigeria, Nigeria. If
you're in there, if you're taking highway, you better go in the daytime.
You won't want to go in the evening. When I lived in Nigeria
was much safer. But even then I had a car shot at once because
we were driving too close to dusk. And you've never seen a driver change
of flat tire faster in your life, because he had three three good,
three good wheels, and he wouldn't stop. He just kept going with three
good wheels until he got to a place with a light a few miles down
the road. And before you could you could have hauled your breath. And
the time it took him to change that tire, I still remember this twenty
some years later. But but what you don't have is you don't have problems
of family. You don't have problems of community for the most part. You
have it in some places. I can think of parts of Latin America where
there is significant family breakdown and community breakdown. But a place like Africa,
especially the Middle East, India, these are places where family is very strong,
community is very strong. You don't have these types of problems. You
have a you have a whole set of different problems that we don't have because
we're materially well off. But these types of relationship problems, I mean,
they're just shocking. It's shocking that you can live in a country that is
well off as we are, and yet we have such social problems, and
the problems are much worse than in Europe. I think. I think that
to me is the I mean, we don't want to be like Europe.
We're doing much better than Europe on many levels. But I do think something
about Europe being built around A lot of their cities are built around old neighborhoods.
Walk around in an Italian city and the neighborhoods are celebrated, celebrated in
the architecture, lebrated in the layout of the cities, because these are cities
that were built before there were cars, And I mean, I mean,
if we were to build our physical landscape and around neighborhoods, and then have
civic associations and schools and local associations and churches, and they were all place
based, all of these would be incubating relationships. All of them would be
helping each other build stronger community, and each of us whould feel that we
were in a much more joyful, supporting set of relationships. Even if we
didn't have friends, we would have things to participate in, things to join.
I mean, just to see what people do in my neighbor I have
a neighbor. I'm at nine ten on my street. I have a neighbor
in nine oh three. She must be the most giving person or neighborhood.
She goes around every week and she knows where elderly people live who live alone,
and she is knocking on those doors and she's just stopping buying talking for
thirty minutes, and no one's asked her to do that. She just feels
a steak in the neighborhood and a stake in people's lives. And I asked
people on this listening to us, who was doing that in your neighborhood and
how much the difference that makes in people's lives, and if your neighborhood is
like that, people will behave like that. Now I imagine a question on
a lot of people's minds at this point, and you do address this in
the book is what about COVID? How did COVID accelerate change this problem in
the United States and elsewhere? As you were writing this seth what was your
assessment on how the pandemic and the lockdowns affected some of these problems. Well,
I think what it did was it showed, first of all, it
showed everyone how important neighborhoods were. I think the parts of the country that
did better than others probably had strong local relations. So I remember my neighborhood
immediate activation people started, and you can see the evidence. You can go
around my neighbor today and you can see benches in front of houses or or
even sofas, and what we call car ports. Here. We're a little
bit strains. We don't have garages, yet we have something that goes over
our driveways to put the car in. I never saw this before I moved
to this neighborhood. I guess I'm I'm from New York, where everyone has
a garage mostly, but I don't know about Wisconsin. So the point is
they put sofas in their car ports because that would of course there be no
rain or no snow, and they would put heating units or whatever they are.
So our neighbor immediately got active. I mean WhatsApp groups formed. We
never had WhatsApp groups before amliated WhatsApp groups. We had people putting benches in
front of and and and people coming together groups for kids to play outdoors.
I mean all sorts of things were activated. And of course everyone fought for
the schools to open as soon as possible. We had to fight the county
executive who wanted to close the schools. I'm in Montgomery County and the publics
WO were closed an awful long time, and Governor Hogan ensure that our private
schools are open. So I can see how my neighborhood came together, helped
each other, brought food to people who needed to get food who couldn't go
shopping. A lot of things were active. I can easily imagine another neighbor
where people were much more isolated, much more alienated, did not have those
relations. Just maybe COVID enabled them to develop relationships or encourage them to develop
relationships. But I think a lot of people suffered COVID and a very isolating
problem. I'm going to hear about. I hear about, for example,
my sister and talks about his son still recovering from the because he's a very
social person and was isolated from his kids and his classmates for a long time.
And we, for the most part, had none of that, because
everybody fought to keep the community a community and did lots of substitute. But
I would say in terms of the big question, if you look at the
big question, it's very clear that countries that are more cohesive, that have
more trust the better in COVID. COVID was a test for the strength of
a society. We did not do very well for many reasons. One,
we didn't do well because a lot of our Americans aren't very healthy and they
were therefore more at risk than other countries. We didn't do very well because
we didn't have a lot of trust with each other, and therefore, whatever
we thought about particular policies and politicians, we did not come together. And
countries that come together, I mean I write about this, I work on
political transitions. What greater test of a country there can be when the government
falls and there's a vacuum. Well, COVID was like there was a vacuum.
We needed leadership. We needed leaders from opposite sides of the political spectrum
to bury their differences, bury their animosity, we come together and work together,
and we certainly didn't do that. And so I think, I mean
COVID exposed our vulnerabilities, our risks, and I think it showed that basically
we could have done better. We did well in some areas. Of course,
we were the masters of invention and technology development, and we did a
great job inventing a vaccine and then a great job of rolling out the vaccine
and power to our inventive, amazing business sector. But our leaders and our
communities showed what a lack of cohesion means when there is a challenge, a
risk, and you look at the world today, you look at China,
you look at Russia, you look at other threats to our freedom and our
democracy, and we need to be cohesive. We need to come together internationally,
but also for sure we should be making it a much higher priority to
the developed to develop approaches to strengthen our communities because I mean one hundred and
ten thousand Americans, one hundred and five hundred and ten thousand Americans are dying
every year. Where's the national plan? The national willpower, the National Couesian
to address our most vulnerable people who have a lack of connection in our communities.
Seth Kaplan is the author of Fragile Neighborhoods, Repairing American Society one zip
Code at a time. It is out on October seventeenth. Seth, thank
you so much for joining Federalist Radio Hour today. Thank you for hosting me.
Look forward to talking again. Absolutely, It's such an interesting book.
Folks should go get it when they can. I'm em Elidrishinsky, culture editor
here at the Federalist. We will be back soon with more. Until then,
be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray right. Goatran