… As for the welfare state, there is certainly no widespread appetite for rolling back entitlements and leaving people to the sink-or-swim logic of the job market. Are there other possibilities? Putnam thinks the old workhorses of popular culture and public education will do the trick. More likely, then the breakdown of community and the demise of social cohesion will become just another unfortunate aspect of modernity we are going to have to learn to live with.

From my column in this week’s Maclean’s.