The Vanishing Neighbor straddles the line between pop and academic sociology to propose, but not quite prove, a grand theory of what's gone wrong in America since World War 2. Dunkelman's thesis is that the traditional organization of American life is the township, whether an actual rural small town, or an urban microneighborhood of a few blocks, and this 'middle ring' of frequent casual relationships and commitments is something which drives social cohesion and innovation.

What definitely feels true is that something has changed since the 1950s. Dunkelman describes growing up in Cleveland in a dense web of connections, which he hasn't experienced since. Personally, I know between 0 and 3 of my neighbors, and I live in a dense neighborhood. My parents know more, but they're both avid walkers, and even then they wouldn't rely on their neighbors for anything critical. This reduction in neighborliness comes even as American communities become more culturally homogenous as part of the Big Sort, where the vehicles parked on the street and flags on the windows tell you exactly who you'll be living next to, and if you'll fit in. As the middle rings have become the missing rings, in the book's terminology, we've focused more and more time on the inner rings of family and our closest friends, and the outer rings of commercial and mediated transactions.

Where this book falls short is it's assumption of the pre-war status quo, and an over-commitment to a diversity of casual mechanisms. Dunkelman draws heavily and uncritically on Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and forces his township model on to a diversity of lived experiences across regions, population density, and ethnic groups without solid support from the scholarly literature. A reading of an idyllic America glosses over real concerns around immigration driven cultural changes in the early 1900s, gangsterism during Prohibition, the very real crisis of the Great Depression, and of course racism, to begin with concerns in the 50s and 60s that the new generations were either overly conformist or too free-willed, unlike their properly 'gritty' elders.

There's a lot of techno-material reasons why neighborliness has disappeared. Automobile commutes make it impossible to interact with other people in a positive way. Television ate up social time, then exploded from a network monoculture to the dense garden of cable and the ultimate individualization of social media. Blue-collar middle class jobs vanished with out-shoring of industry, replaced by services and information technology. Culture has also changed. Relationships became increasingly segregated by education, with few marriages between people with college degrees and those without. General purpose fraternal groups are out of vogue, with mission driven NGOs acting on specific causes. And politics has become increasing harsh and part of a universal culture war.

About a decade on from when this book was published, I think the situation has only gotten worse. I didn't much care for Tea Party era Republicans, but the GQP is an actual existential threat. And conversely, I've probably gone from an annoying lib peacenik to a Pedo-Marxist Out to Groom America in their mind. There's no easy answer, but also given the Big Sort, we should feel more comfortable making casual connections in our own communities.