Time to get radical?

Host a BBQ this summer.

As Memorial Day closes and summer begins, something worth noticing happens across America. Neighbors meet over backyard fences. Churches and civic groups host summer camps. Flags appear in storefronts, on porches, in parades through small towns. None of this makes the news. It doesn't trend. But it matters more than most of what does.

This summer is different in scale for two unusual reasons:

• America turns 250 years old, and

• The World Cup will be hosted by 11 cities across our country.

Whether you view these as celebrations or spectacles, embedded within them is an invitation to remember something we have been quietly losing as a society for decades, and the opportunity to choose whether we rebuild it. And that something is fraternity.

The Third Leg

America’s political arguments, court battles, and even our national identity are dominated by the words (and let’s hope the ideals) of “liberty” and “equality.” But the French Revolution's third ideal, fraternité, rarely gets the same treatment. In liberal political philosophy, it has largely been reduced to sentiment: nice, but soft. Optional.

Aristotle wouldn’t agree. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he described philia as a distinct and essential bond among citizens. Not the deep friendship of close companions, and not the thin transactional relationship of strangers who share a legal system. He wrote of something in between: a relationship of reciprocal goodwill among people who share a common life, a common place, a common fate. He called it politike philia, political friendship, and he was clear that justice alone could not substitute for it. A city held together only by law is fragile. A city bound by civic friendship is resilient.

Tocqueville saw this clearly when he came to America in the 1830s. Yes, he admired the formal machinery of democracy, but he was truly astonished by the informal social machinery running beneath it. Americans joined things. They formed associations for every conceivable purpose: civic, religious, commercial, charitable, and beyond. This habit of association, Tocqueville argued, was the real foundation of American democracy. It kept individualism from collapsing into isolation.

He also issued a warning. Unbridled individualism could produce what he called "soft despotism," which is a society of atomized individuals, each isolated and equal in their smallness, presided over by a distant and paternalistic state. The citizens of such a society would not be oppressed in any dramatic sense. They would simply shrink. They would lose the habit of acting together, and with it, the capacity to govern themselves.

That warning reads as prophecy now.

What We’ve Lost

The data is startling, but won’t surprise you: Across every domain of American civic life,
from fraternal organizations to religious congregations to informal socializing, participation has been declining since roughly the 1960s. The trend has not reversed.

What has collapsed most severely is what sociologist Marc Dunkelman called the middle ring: the neighbors, colleagues, and fellow parishioners we knew well enough to argue with and still show up for. And while we have kept our inner circles of close friends and family, and expanded vast outer networks online, we’ve largely allowed the middle, where Aristotle's
civic friendship actually lives, to erode. Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, whose 2023 advisory declared loneliness a public health epidemic, argued that social disconnection makes us more susceptible to manipulation and more vulnerable to those who offer the warmth of belonging in exchange for the surrender of judgment.

Hannah Arendt, the influential German-born Jewish political philosopher and historian who fled Nazi Germany as a refugee, put it into even starker terms. Totalitarianism, she argued, is only possible in atomized societies, places where intermediate associations have been destroyed and citizens have fully retreated into private life. The private person, withdrawn from public life, is not a free person. She is simply an unorganized one. When public life contracts, the space that remains does not stay empty.

The Summer Ahead

This is the context in which I am approaching the summer of 2026.

We began with the conviction that rule of law alone will not save us from democratic decay. Courts and constitutions matter. The litigation work our strategic partner Campaign Legal Center does across the country to preserve our freedoms matters enormously. But legal infrastructure, at its most effective, requires civic infrastructure beneath it. An educated, engaged, connected citizenry cannot replace the rule of law, and vice versa. Ideally, in a healthy society, they’re complementary.

The ancient Greeks understood this. The original Olympic Games were civic events, moments when city-states set aside their conflicts, traveled together, competed together, and returned home with a refreshed sense of shared identity. The World Cup is one of the rare events large enough to create genuine shared experience across communities that rarely intersect. This summer, in the host cities, we have been working with civic partners to launch the Welcome Standard, which is a pledge by businesses to welcome ALL visitors, regardless of race, religion, or country of origin.

A business that takes the pledge makes a public declaration about who it is. It joins a community of businesses that have made the same declaration. It builds the kind of horizontal bond among local institutions that Tocqueville called the genius of American association. Good hospitality is good business. It is also an act of civic friendship, an extension of goodwill to strangers, and a recognition that visitors deserve to be treated as guests.

An Invitation

This summer is larger than any one event or program.

The 250th anniversary of American independence is a moment for honesty about what the experiment requires of us, not just the formal requirements of citizenship, but the relational ones. The Constitution can guarantee rights. It cannot guarantee the relationships that make
rights meaningful in practice.

Those relationships are built at a neighborhood barbecue. At a school play. At a church summer camp. At a block party where you meet the person three houses down who you have passed a hundred times without speaking. These are not small things. They are, as Aristotle insisted and Tocqueville confirmed and Putnam documented and Arendt understood, the bedrock of self-government.

Pope Leo XIV, in his recent reflections on artificial intelligence and human society, raised a concern that echoes across centuries of political philosophy. How does technology, which so often deepens our isolation and impacts our happiness, affect our capacity for the kind of shared life that free societies require?

The answer is not to reject modernity. It is to be deliberate about what we build alongside it.

This summer, consider how you build community that lasts. Host the barbecue. Go to the parade. Join something. Show up for something that is not optimized for your preferences. Sit next to a stranger at a World Cup watch party and find out where they are from. These gestures are not trivial. What we call “small talk” is only small if we don’t recognize its cumulative effect, which is rebuilding the third leg of the stool.

Because we really do need Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. It has been our superpower, and still can be.