Without trying to hand working-class Americans a permanent victim card, we should allow ourselves to notice that following some of the bootstrapping advice that Williamson and Nichols offer as a substitute for political reflection is more difficult now than in the past. Why? The bootstrapping solution also requires resources — spiritual, social, habitual, familial, and cultural. These resources sometimes well forth from a man who has hit rock bottom in life; many callers into Dave Ramsey’s radio show will testify to that. But for others these resources are usually “loaned,” so to speak, from what conservatives used to treasure as the mediating institutions of our society — namely, families, churches, ethnic clubs, paternalistic employers, schools, and even unions. Collectively we might refer to these institutions as a kind of treasury of resources. My intuition, confirmed faintly by statistics on declining church attendance, rising divorce and cohabitation and illegitimacy, and the shortening terms of employment, suggest that these institutions have abandoned their paternalistic roles, or partly disintegrated, especially among working-class Americans. In other words, this treasury of resources is close to bankruptcy.

By their nature, the networking, emotional support, and loyalty traditionally delivered by these institutions to working people is almost invisible to policy wonks. These institutions push and pull. Men are much more urgent job-seekers and better job-keepers when they are living with a wife and children. Americans have slowed their pace of internal migration to find work, perhaps because moving to find work is more difficult when you are divorced and would leave children behind. Perhaps it is more difficult when you tried participating in George W. Bush’s ownership society and over-invested in an inflated home that you can no longer afford to sell. Or perhaps it is more difficult because the institutions that you would seek out for social stimulation and solidarity in new places, like your denomination’s local church or an Italian-America club, mean little to you now or have ceased to exist. That societal treasury, if it were full, could supply people with motivation, resources, and unofficial patronage networks to make difficult changes in life, like moving for work.

This state of affairs should be a frightening thing for any civic-minded American, particularly those who call themselves conservative.