'Community' is Not Statism

Briefly put:

...George H. Nash has succinctly outlined Nisbet’s thesis: “The weakening or dissolution of such bonds as family, church, guild, and neighborhood had not, as many had hoped, liberated men. Instead, it produced alienation, isolation, spiritual desolation, and the growth of mass man.” With the weakening of alternative authorities, as Mark C. Henrie has noted, “the individual has nowhere to stand to articulate a perspective differing from that of the liberal polity and its culture.”...

Nisbet's book is available at TIC's bookstore.

This is a post-Middle Ages development, and the United States is not immune, as has been demonstrated since Lincoln.