Yale Law professor, Paul W. Kahn, poses a critical and increasingly uncomfortable question: “Are we to be a nation of aggrieved voters, or are we to be citizen volunteers seeking to create and maintain a self-governing community?” In his new book, Democracy in Our America, the answer is inconclusive. The political polarization in the United States seems more intractable than ever, and the possibility of self-government eludes even smaller communities. Kahn’s ostensibly Tocquevillian strategy to confront this question relies on an intimate portrait of his own town, Killingworth, Connecticut, and the way it exemplifies and responds to the pathologies of American politics. Can a town like Killingworth successfully resist the baser temptations of democracy and recover sorely needed citizenship?

Kahn’s wife, Catherine, was the town’s First Selectman, roughly corresponding to a mayor. This gave him an intimate vantage point from which to see Killingworth’s political landscape, though he supplemented this with formal interviews, attendance at meetings, interactions on social media, and more.

Though elegantly and lucidly written, the opening account of national politics could have been copied and pasted from The New York Times, the Washington Post, or any other major publication similarly committed to a left-wing narrative. To Kahn, Donald Trump and the populism he represents are self-evidently fueled by white nationalism, the rejection of science and expertise, and a capitulation to “misinformation” and right-wing conspiracy theories. He even refers to the Republican Party as the “home of mythical politics.” At times, the book reads like an unintended parody of left-wing academic rhetoric.

But Kahn’s own personal observations and reflections warrant closer attention across the social and political spectrum. There are moments where I wonder if Kahn and I live in the same country, and other times where he and I are of the exact same mind. This is due, in part, to Kahn’s genuine love for the local community and his appreciation for the role that culture and the humanities play in cultivating the political and legal imagination. We share similar concerns about the decline of self-government, social trust, civility, and volunteerism. But we ultimately diverge in what must be done in response and what our goals should be.

What, we may ask, would be “better” for Kahn? What is the ideal that Americans have so overwhelmingly eschewed under the influence of infotainment and widespread civic apathy? Kahn’s goal is the recovery of civil society. “Civil Society,” he explains, “pursues equality through citizen participation in countless associations that form and reform in the pursuit of projects and interests.” This equality further resembles John Rawls’ original position, but without a “veil of ignorance.” It is a society in which no “religion, class, guild, family, or tradition” is preferred over another. But this “equality” cannot be realized in a mob. It must be found in smaller associations.

This preference for, and strengthening of, intermediary associations cannot be realized through government policy. Kahn recognizes that it must emerge out of a social and cultural movement that resists mob rule, authoritarianism, and centralization. It’s also needed for the cultivation and transmission of values and practices to younger generations who are called to keep civil society alive.

The Rawlsian-flavor aside, conservatives and classical liberals may be sympathetic to a point, but the book seems more immediately inspired by the failure of Killingworth to live up to an idealized Tocquevillian dream. In a telling admission, Kahn confesses he seems to have imagined a small town being run like a faculty meeting:

Self-government in the law school means faculty, where we discuss endlessly but only occasionally take a vote. Mostly, we work things out through mutual and reciprocal efforts to persuade. We enjoy the debate as much as the resolution. We not only feel pride in running the school but experience ourselves as a community of mutual and reciprocal recognition. …But as I learned during my first few years in [Killingworth], municipal governance is not a faculty meeting. Residents have little patience for, or interest in, long discussions. They are uncomfortable debating their neighbors or defending their views in public. A few residents have a reputation for always speaking at town meetings. It is not a good reputation to have.

As we’ll see, it’s not clear he truly abandoned this ideal. The faculty-meeting metaphor may also not serve his purposes well. My experience of faculty meetings is that they are more of a meaningless formality for “playing” shared governance. And his description of the town meeting matches many faculty gatherings: a handful of people talk too much and those of us with heterodox views just play on our phones until the charade is over.

Therein lies the problem, though. I am exemplary of the jaded and cynical member of society Kahn blames for the decline in citizen participation. Like other faculty members, I tried to avoid committee and task force assignments, and the idea of volunteering in local politics and government seems laughable. Without a connection to major economic forces or followings in town, I would just be the curious nerd. I would, at best, aspire to be a mini-Cicero or Cato in a world that caters to Crassus and Caesar. I would, at worst, just be another part of the problem. There are also the simple logistical and economic challenges that prevent most of us from having the capacity to meaningfully participate even if we wanted to. Long commutes and a “gig economy” do not serve Killingworth or other towns’ needs well at all.

As Kahn, Robert Putnam, and others have observed, Americans no longer join associations or volunteer as much as previously. When we do, there is less of an effort to understand one another, find common ground, or make reasonable compromises. Bipartisanship has become synonymous with defeatism and betrayal. We snipe and shout down opponents, genuinely believing they are not merely of a different opinion but a mortal threat to our way of life. “This is Killingworth today,” Kahn observes, “a place of volunteers helping each other manage the town and deliver services, on the one hand, and of ideologically driven suspicions and attacks, on the other. …The two sides do not share enough of a common world to support an exchange of views.”

Kahn sees the American right as the primary culprit here, leading us to a world envisioned by Thrasymachus and Polemarchus in Plato’s Republic: rule by the stronger and, essentially, by tribal identity politics. There is less willingness to persuade or be persuaded resulting in localities that would like to be self-governing, but which end up being governed because they simply refuse to do the work or no longer believe institutions of civil society are worth the time and energy. At their core, Americans increasingly distrust each other and institutions. “Without trust,” Kahn writes, “democracy loses more than participant volunteers; it loses its very point. Politics becomes nothing more than a competition to take control to help friends and hurt enemies. These views can be self-fulfilling, if attacks grounded on suspicion drive away residents who might otherwise volunteer.” Self-governance moves beyond our reach due to an inability or unwillingness to identify a common ground. Instead, we retreat to our digital silos and homogenous neighborhoods abandoning hope of successful self-government.

Kahn seems to view distrust directed primarily at elites, experts, and bureaucrats as particularly problematic. This arguably violates the egalitarianism he wants to see, because in Kahn’s civil society, the educated elites, especially the scientists, are the experts to whom we all should defer, or at least be persuaded by. Indeed, at times I worry that Kahn’s “answer” to the problem of declining civil society suggests a kind of scientism—an ideology that accepts as truth only those claims that can be empirically tested and confirmed by the “hard sciences” and all other claims—like those of philosophy and religion—are subjective opinions at best. To be sure, an unthinking rejection of science as a way of knowing would be reckless, but an uncritical acceptance of claims simply because they’re made by those asserting scientific authority places considerable power in too few hands. Furthermore, it’s simply not the case that the scientist has a monopoly on empirical truth—an argument Kahn does not make. But one gets the impression that the bureaucrat and the educated elites are “more equal than others,” in his civil society. At the same time, it’s true that democracy requires leadership and standards. Such essentials of social and political life require a more interdisciplinary development, calling on the insights of historians and religious leaders as much as the scientist.

Kahn’s argument may also be a form of ideological democratism, in which the vaguely defined ideal of “democracy” can only be recovered by “more democracy.” Whatever this ideal democracy looks like, Kahn seems to view its realization as requiring more disinterested citizenship which may be hard to come by in the contemporary context. To his credit, Kahn recognizes the importance of this context and the way in which relationships and life together have been subordinated to the modern notion of the self. We no longer value civil associations, public responsibility, or town governance because it’s another distraction from the almighty, atomized individual. This is, in part, both a symptom and cause of the decline in families and churches. In our efforts to “manage the self,” he observes, “the roles once served by ministries and community leaders are now filled by life coaches. The past appears no longer as a source of authority to be augmented by as a source of injustice—personal and structural—to be eliminated.”

Kahn’s observations here and on media ecology in the U.S. are quite good, echoing much of what Neil Postman and Marshall McCluhan observed decades ago. He poignantly likens modern infotainment and what passes for civic participation as resembling pornography: “The political actions of ordinary citizens are often modeled on behavior learned from online pornography, beginning with spectator anonymity. This anonymity has a dual aspect: it is both voyeuristic and moblike.” We might add that, like pornography, it also results in the dehumanization and objectification of our fellow citizens.

His comments on the alienation of working-class Americans, the fact that neighbors barely know each other, and a diminishing respect for authority all sound familiar. Indeed, at times he writes like Robert Nisbet, Wendell Berry, or Jane Jacobs. Killingworth’s struggles, characters, and pathologies are immediately recognizable.

The final chapter asks what can be done to respond to this precipitous decline in self-government and civil society. Kahn’s hope is that improvement in public education and civil associations will allow local governments to be “schools of citizenship” aimed at two broad goals. First, Americans must learn to be persuaded by the “right reasons.” By this, he simply means that they must be convinced by reasons offered by educated elites committed to progressivism and science. He explicitly rejects, for example, any notion that climate change deniers or climate scientists should be treated as equals. He rejects the concept of a marketplace of ideas as “pernicious.” Yet, to his credit, he does not believe these problems can be addressed through regulations. He wishes for Americans—and especially the media—to mostly think and talk like Ivy League professors. That way, the “right” ideas and reasons will be elevated; that is, those ideas that correspond to progressivism and what amounts to moderate scientism.

The second goal is the cultivation of “better character.” Echoing George Washington’s farewell address, Kahn recognizes an urgent need for Americans to become the kind of people who can reason and govern well. Historically, religion and churches played a major role in this, which Washington, Tocqueville, and others realized. But civic education no longer happens in churches, so Kahn turns to something like a civil religion inculcated through public education and participation in local government. Public education for Kahn must aim at character formation where “students should aspire to be citizens who can be trusted.” And this civic education should infuse the entire curriculum, even in (or especially in) science classes.

Kahn rightly sees that the decline in civic participation has had a catastrophic impact on American politics. He is also right to call for refocusing on the development of character and the kinds of people capable of self-government. But he simply does not recognize that the kinds of characters he hopes to cultivate are exactly the kinds of people who brought us to this troubling moment. He still wants the town to be run by and for the faculty.

Throughout the book, it’s hard not to get the impression that Kahn’s ideal citizen is an Ivy League professor or administrator who religiously reads the New York Times and instinctively defers to bureaucrats, academic journals, and “The Science.” Such people sound far more like the unimaginative and spiritually desiccated adherents of the N.I.C.E. described in C. S. Lewis’ dystopian novel, That Hideous Strength. Lewis describes a world increasingly run, not by free people loving their community, but by cold, unfeeling Gnostics animated by abstract, ahistorical, and ideological scientism.

Politics and self-government are inherently messy, uncomfortable, confusing, and even unsettling. Passion often wrests the scepter from reason, but it seems unlikely Kahn’s recommendations would do anything to fix that. Indeed, his progressive view of education as character formation for democratic citizens is exactly the paradigm of schooling that has failed in spectacular fashion for the last century.

At the same time, Kahn is right to see a breakdown in the qualities that make for sober-minded political judgment, self-government, citizenship, and social trust. He is right to recognize that no government policy or election will solve the present crisis, and he is refreshingly attuned to the centrality of the humanities and imagination in diagnosing and responding to our moment.

Throughout the book, he often comes close to seeing what I and others believe is a more compelling answer: religious revival and renewal. No, this is not a call for theocracy, established churches, or any violation of the First Amendment. But the pathologies that threaten Killingworth and the United States must be addressed as matters of the heart. To be sure, as James M. Patterson has argued, the churches have not exactly held to their civic responsibility recently. They have too often been coopted for partisan ends at the expense of their moral authority and faithful witness. “Liberalism did not fail the church; the church failed liberalism,” Patterson writes.

Kahn would hardly disagree, but he sees no way for churches to reclaim their role or authority in forming the moral virtues conducive to self-government, community, and citizenship in a liberal democracy. But churches, and religious institutions generally, remain central to forming the full human person—heart, mind, and soul. Without genuine religious revival, Kahn’s paradigm of what is essentially soft-despotism and secular citizen education can at best change minds. But self-governing citizens must also have rightly ordered affections and wills. In sum, perhaps Kahn should move from reading Tocqueville and the New York Times to St. Augustine. Hope for the temporal City of Man rests in our recovery of what it means to be citizens of the eternal City of God.