When former President Donald Trump declared that the “American Dream is dead” during his campaign launch in June 2015, for many Americans, that was simply the case. Somehow, a multi-billionaire intuited a truth that the American elite had ignored for decades: certain places had flourished, giving their next generation ample opportunity to succeed and community life to flourish, while certain places had collapsed, leaving their next generation hollowed out neighborhoods, broken families, and despair. As civil society and community declined in the United States after a high in the mid-20th century, a new lower class began to form. This new lower class is deprived of the institutions of civil society which form people as self-governing creatures, leaving fewer and fewer mediating layers between man and state. This stratification of social capital along class lines and the social isolation it has wrought are among the chief threats to human flourishing in the United States in the twenty-first century, depriving people of authentic freedom and supplanting it with a base understanding of liberty-as-license. The alienation facing tens of millions of Americans, and impacting our entire society, was not caused by a singular economic, social, political, or technological innovation (though plenty of these changes have accelerated and accentuated this phenomena). At the base of community’s decline is a mismanaged individualism -- a term first coined by Alexis de Tocqueville -- which has warped our politics, and simultaneously empowered radical self-centeredness and government centralization. This thesis builds on a large body of work surrounding Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the role of civil society in America, and the stratification of community over the last half-century, drawing on the thought of Robert Putnam, Tim Carney, Yuval Levin, Patrick Deneen, Charles Murray, and Robert Nisbet -- among others -- to build an outline of the state of civil society and meaningful community in America today. It also charts a path forward for conceptualizing the American Dream in such a way that empowers rather than demotes the role of community in human life, arguing for a conscientious communitarianism. This revised definition of the American Dream relies upon a new concept -- authentic freedom -- that contradicts freedom-as-license. Analyzing diagnoses of our current situation and proposed solutions from the aforementioned thinkers, this thesis posits that Americans must organize and reinvigorate community on a local scale in order to confront these challenges. Ultimately, while community can only be formed productively at the local, human-scale, the long-term restoration of community and civil society in the United States will rely on political reform, framed after Yuval Levin’s modernized ethic of subsidiarity and Robert Nisbet’s conception of a new kind of state. The framework for renewal presented is not simply advocacy for a greater number of voluntary associations, but the formation and maintenance of particular sorts of associations: those which are purposeful about moral formation, the inculcation of the habits and mores necessary for a free people to flourish, and ultimately the proliferation of authentic freedom. While the conscientious communitarian advocates for a politics that prizes civil society broadly, they advocate for, create, and join institutions of this particular character. This is both an argument for a more robust and diverse civil society, and an affirmative case for particular institutions of civil society which form people towards authentic freedom.

Since the global financial crisis of 2007-8, interest in worker-cooperatives and alternative forms of organization has surged. Mondragon, located in the Basque region of Spain, represents the largest federation of worker-cooperatives around the world, consisting of 98 cooperatives and 143 subsidiaries, which earned a total revenue of $14.5 billion in 2019. While previous attempts to establish a similar model have historically reached limited success, Mondragon has achieved a unique balance of remaining economically viable, on the one hand, and staying true to its founding principles of democratic governance, on the other. This paper sets out to analyze the democratic structure and the cooperative culture at the heart of the Mondragon model, as well as the new type of human relationship that it fosters. In particular, this relationship is one in which individual well-being is bound up with communal well-being that avoids the antagonistic clash between the capital and labor.