The paradox of “muscular institutions”

Why organizations that set the strongest boundaries on community behavior are also the best at bridging

Jason Mangone

is a long-time mentor and friend who now serves as the Executive Director of More In Common’s U.S. team. Jay has a very impressive bio — serving in the Marines and as a volunteer firefighter, writing a book with General McChrystal, and being an awesome dad to four kids — but what I respect about him most is his continued commitment to self-deprecation. In this guest piece, he introduces a new report from More in Common, titled “The Connection Opportunity,” and shares his reflections on the type of “muscular” institutions we need to facilitate connection across difference. It’s a thought-provoking piece with the level of self-deprecation I would expect from Jay — please consider giving it a read! - Sam

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I’m forty years old. I remember the first 25 years of my life as a blur of doing stuff—rushing to Mass and then Sunday dinner with my big Italian family, going to school, playing sports, going on a few deployments in the Marines. I loved TV, but in the competition with doing stuff, the stuff usually won.

In the last 15 years, the competition has become more fierce. I can watch TV, or scroll through outdoor meat-cooking videos on YouTube (videos of other people doing stuff), while I’m doing stuff. The videos are so charming that I occasionally find myself forgetting I’m doing stuff. It’s no surprise that the four activities that are usually able to maintain my rapt attention even today—going to Mass, eating with my family, coaching baseball, and firefighting—are facilitated by a strong institutional setting (in my case, the Catholic Church, my family, Little League, and my local volunteer fire department).

Doing stuff together, especially with people from different backgrounds than our own, is going to be really important for the future of the country. And it’s going to take a set of “muscular institutions”—institutions that aren’t bashful about asserting their prerogatives—to get us there.

Perceived Community Norms Drive Bridging

Earlier this week, the organization I work for, More in Common, released a report titled “The Connection Opportunity.” The report is a long examination of bridging social capital—the type of social capital that involves establishing connections across lines of difference—as opposed to bonding social capital, which is about forming close relationships with other people with whom you share traits, values, or characteristics. Bridging is particularly important in a republic as big and diverse across as many dimensions as ours (e.g., religion, ethnicity, ideology, education level, socioeconomic status, and so on). Even at the level of the individual, it’s hard to have a happy life in the United States if you’re unable to connect with people who are different from you. To steal a metaphor I’ve seen used thousands of times, bridging is what allows us to forge an unum out of the pluribus.

In the report, we try to answer two questions: (1) Who is open to connecting across lines of difference in the US, and why?; and (2) What are the social, psychological, and environmental barriers that prevent people from connecting more across lines of difference? The investigation focuses on connecting across differences in four categories: race/ethnicity, political viewpoint, religion, and socioeconomic status.

I never read past the first paragraph of an article that just rehashes a study. With that in mind, I want to focus on one finding: “overall, in predicting interest in connecting across difference,” the strongest driver is “perceived community norms of connection, or the belief that connection across difference is both common and valued in one’s community.” To give an example, we find that “a majority of Americans agree that ‘people in [their] local community often spend time with’ people from backgrounds that differ from their own (56 percent), and that ‘if given the choice, people should spend time’ with people who differ from them ‘because it is the right thing to do’ (59 percent). People who have these strong perceived norms of connection are more than twice as likely to express interest in connecting across differences compared to those who have weak perceived community norms (68 percent vs. 32 percent).” These perceived community norms were far and away the strongest predictor of interest in connecting across difference (see Figure 3.2).

Source: “The Connection Opportunity”

I’m an upper middle class dude who went to an Ivy League graduate school, runs a nonprofit, drives an electric SUV, and is raising his kids in a really nice house. Yet, throughout the course of my life, I’ve often connected across all of the lines of difference that we studied. And, in part, this is because I have been reared in institutions that enforce the sorts of community norms that predict bridging behavior.

As I’ve intuited from my own experience, and as the academic literature theorizes, institutional signals are one of the primary ways that people come to understand norms. My sense of Connective Tissue’s readership is that it is filled with people who have the talent, power, commitment, and guts to try to build enduring community and lasting institutions. With this audience in mind, I’ll use this post to talk about the sorts of institutions—what I call “muscular institutions”—that might be powerful enough to shape a community’s perceived norms about connection.

The Importance of Muscular Institutions

Bridging is most effective when people from different backgrounds are doing anything other than just sitting around talking about their differences—ideally, they’re working together toward some common end. Our report finds that the bridging activity that Americans are most interested in is “working to achieve a mutual goal that improves your community” (74%). This is also the activity that Americans are least likely to have participated in in the last year (only 17%).

Source: “The Connection Opportunity”

The simplest way to tell the story of my life is as an ongoing formation through a series of very muscular institutions: family, the Church, an all-boys Catholic school, the Marine Corps, Little League, and my local Fire Department. Each of these institutions had strong norms that facilitated connecting across difference—and, in practice, each of these institutions forced me to connect across each of the lines we studied—but none of these institutions were about connecting across difference.

When I say “muscular institution,” I mean an institution that is unapologetic about its prerogatives. Many of the institutions that raised me have mission statements that sound oddly austere. For instance, the mission of my high school is to “Provide the opportunity to grow in Christian manhood…by offering an exceptional education to every young man willing to accept the challenge of studying here, regardless of background or means.” Infantry Marines are “ground forces trained to locate and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver or repel their assault by fire and close combat.” Every one of the institutions that have shaped me has made serious, occasionally sinful, errors. But, at their best, each reinforces accountability to their values—especially so among their leaders.

The author doing firefighter stuff with his oldest son. He joined the fire department so his kids would think he was cool. Also, despite the colors, that’s a Mets hat.

As Yuval Levin outlines in A Time to Build, the primary deformity of modern institutions is their transformation from vessels of moral formation to platforms for individual ambition. It is not surprising that this degradation of institutions has seen them retreat from the center of community life. That’s because institutions that don’t take their values seriously cease to be institutions for very long.

Counterintuitively, organizations that set the strongest boundaries on community behavior are also the best at bridging. That’s because bridging is really hard, and it can only be accomplished by strong institutions that endure. (There’s a great paper on this idea titled “Why Strict Churches are Strong”). Only strong institutions stick around for long enough to do the enduring, interpersonal work of building community across lines of difference. That four-hour bridging workshop might make participants feel good—especially the older, educated, liberal ones—but it’s not designed for the long-haul work of building relationships, trust, and solidarity.

I don’t know what the mechanism is here. But my intuition is that when the institutional mission is so overwhelming, and the enforcement of values so frustratingly consistent, mere demographic difference comes to feel utterly meaningless. When I was on a patrol in Iraq seventeen years ago, I didn't care about the color of my comrades’ skin; today when I’m teaching a kid on my son’s baseball team how to take a good secondary lead, I don’t wonder about how much money that kid’s parents make.

Of course, in the wrong hands, muscular institutions can use their power to justify setting boundaries that are at odds with bridging divides. When this threat comes from the left, as it did in the late 2010s and early 2020s, it can take the form of demands for ideological conformity that have nothing to do with an organization’s mission. When this threat comes from the right, as it does today, it often uses the institutional prerogative as a pretext for barring groups of individuals from entry.

But this misuse of power is not a reason to give up on muscular institutions in favor of weak ones (or no institutions at all). The structure is a tool—it can be wielded to exclude, or it can be wielded to bridge.

If I were trying to build institutions that were muscular enough to shape norms and enduring enough to build community across lines of difference, I’d start with two questions, each of which are leading indicators for understanding whether the institution might be durable enough to do the hard work of bridging:

1. Is the thing the institution is doing organically appealing to lots of different people for reasons that have nothing to do with bridging?

2. Is the leadership of the institution so zealous about its mission that they’d have no problem enforcing their institution’s codes of behavior?

I have four kids now. I want them to grow up in a world where it’s as easy for them to do stuff with people who are different from them as it has been for me. That will require a set of institutions that make it more appealing—and, perhaps, more demanding—to do stuff themselves than to watch other people on a screen.

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