**3. An outline of a plan to build civil society as a public goods program**

The first step in building a program to enhance the growth of civil society is to understand the source of the anger found among those to whom populist messages are appealing. The anger that provides the fertile soil for populist demagoguery in declining communities is not the loss of economic viability per se, but how this loss is interpreted by their residents. The crucial connection here is the perception by those who live in these places that the primary cause of their discomfort and sense of existential loss is caused by elite outsiders from the city who do not understand them [4]. At root this sense of loss is what Arendt [24], Armstrong [25], Frankl [26] and Fromm [27] describe as longing for a "connectedness." Successful demagogues, such as Adolf Hitler, recognized this yearning for a spiritual connection to a lost community and built their mass movements on a "quasi-religious" appeal in which the leader occupies the role of prophet Burleigh [28]. Thus, a critical need is to somehow find *positive* ways in which an individual's connection to the local community can be reinforced by participation in activities that enhance both the individual's and the community's willingness to look at new ways of adapting to the challenges posed by increasing globalization. Specifically, this requires linking community-level institutions and organizations to macro-level institutions and organizations that can provide the resources to achieve that goal.

The US New Deal TVA "cooptation" strategy created an institutional structure for involvement of local Tennessee Valley residents in decision-making on a massive federal dam project. This Depression era structure has allowed the TVA to adapt its programing to engage local citizens in new challenges today, such as climate change [29, 30].

The European Union is relevant because the primary goal for establishing its forerunner was to create mechanisms that would reduce the underlying causes of inter-communal conflict, within and between nations, that had created the conditions for the two world wars which had devastated so much of the European continent. The EUs "Cohesion Programs," includes a money for research to more precisely understand how its programs might better fit with local social organization and cultures [31, 32].

A similar paradigmatic shift has occurred in approaches to overseas development programs supported by European and North American aid organizations. After witnessing failures of programs that focused exclusively on transferring technology and expertise in the immediate post-World War II period, donor organizations, including the World Bank, learned that the first step in developing effective programs is to identify, through on-the-ground research, the specific *incentive and social network structures that are embedded within local cultures that are a source of community support and/or resistance to change* [33, 34]*.*

The motivations for creating what until then were unique organizational designs for civil society development in the examples just cited were based on a larger political entity facing a very real crisis of survival; the Great Depression in the United States, the devastation of post-World War II Western Europe and the Rwandan genocide. Oftentimes the twenty first century challenges facing communities do not have the immediacy of total economic collapse or the human suffering experienced in international conflicts or intra-national genocide. Nonetheless, the rapidity of change generated by technological innovation, climate change and mass migrations of populations from one place to another, generate massive costs to the sustainability of large numbers of local communities, which, in turn, results in both immediateand long-term suffering for their residents as well as for the larger political entities in which they are a part.

Unfortunately, especially in the United States, substantive discussions about the underlying structural causes of community decline have been drowned out by the so-called "culture wars" on abortion, sexual orientation and so-called "identity politics." It is important to point out that this obstacle to serious policy discussions of negotiated i*ncremental* reforms to address these issues has been promoted by the increasingly ascendant extreme left and right. Thus, there is undoubtedly some validity to the claims of those in the "left behind" rural communities that liberal metropolitan "elites" do not listen to them. This is reinforced by elite college campuses where speakers with alternative views are sometimes not allowed to speak [35]. Understanding how local community residents perceive the world especially how it is embedded in their earlier historical experiences, helps to account for their resistance to something that would obviously benefit them. A recent research study explains why a substantial portion of African American Detroit neighborhood residents resisted an offer by an environmental group to provide them with free trees:

*The residents Carmichael [the researcher] surveyed understood the benefits of having trees in urban environments—they provide shade and cooling, absorb air pollution, especially from traffic, increase property values and improve health outcomes. But the reasons Detroit folks were submitting 'no tree requests' were rooted in how they have historically interpreted their lived experiences in the city, or what Carmichael calls "heritage narratives." …. It's not that they did not trust the trees; they did not trust the city…. A couple of the African American women Carmichael talked to, linked the treeplanting program to a painful racist moment in Detroit's history, right after the 1967 race rebellion, when the city suddenly began cutting down elm trees in bulk in their neighborhoods. The city did this, as the women understood it, so that law enforcement and intelligence agents could better surveil their neighborhoods from helicopters and other high places after the urban uprising [36].*
