Why America Must Not Turn into Southern Italy

When it comes to functioning democracies, trust is an integral ingredient; without it, communities cannot function, and citizens grow increasingly despondent and hopeless.

In 2026, America is celebrating its semiquincentennial. We have much to be proud of, including our rich, Tocquevillian tradition of forming civic associations and voluntary groups. Our ability, in other words, to come together – regardless of gender, class, or race – in pursuit of shared goals is unparalleled.

As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America: “The English often perform great things singly, whereas the Americans form associations for the smallest undertakings.”

Acting collaboratively used to be a uniquely American trait.

In a 2012 speech, William Schambra, a senior fellow emeritus at the Hudson Institute, recalled an inspiring story about a small group of Milwaukee-area parents who, upon learning that “the school superintendent had targeted their school for significant changes in curriculum,” decided, not to throw their hands up in defeat, but to band together to form their own school:

“For four hours that evening, these citizens discussed every aspect of what they wanted out of their own school—what was to be taught, how it was to be taught, who they were going to hire to teach it.”

The school, which came to be known as the IDEAL school, is still active today.

An undertaking of this magnitude, needless to say, requires significant levels of trust in your fellow neighbor. Without trust, these parents would never have been able to work together. Instead, they probably would have engaged in futile finger-pointing and bickering.

In 2026, we are trending towards the latter approach: distrust.

According to a Pew study released in May of last year, “fewer than half of Americans (44%) now say they can trust all or most of the people in their neighborhood, down from 52% a decade ago. And only around a third say most people can be trusted – also down around 10 points over the past 10 years.”

If Americans continue down this slippery slope of deep-seated distrust, we’re in danger of adopting the southern Italian ethos of “amoral familism,” a term coined by political scientist Edward Banfield in his seminal work, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Amoral familists’ radius of trust does not extend beyond the immediate family. They are dubious of their neighbors, clergymen, merchants, politicians, and just about anyone outside of the home. While some degree of skepticism is healthy – it would be, after all, naive to blindly trust anyone and everyone – southern Italians take it to an unhealthy level.

Banfield, along with his wife, spent years in a small, southern Italian town which he fictitiously refers to as “Montegrano.” It is here that he conducted much of his ethnography.

“It is not too much to say,” writes Banfield, “that most people of Montegrano have no morality except, perhaps, that which requires service to the family.”

Thus, public works go unfinished, as there is no conceptualization of the common good. In fact, to most southern Italians, to think of the welfare of the public is foolish and even irresponsible.

Banfield writes that “the large landowners of Basso will not join together to build a factory... even though it might be a good investment. It is the right and the duty of the state to build it.”

My father - a southern Italian immigrant from Calabria, who himself studied Banfield during his time as a graduate student at NYU – asked me a salient question when I told him that I’d be writing this article: “Is it possible that things have changed in southern Italy? Banfield wrote that book in the 1950s.” I quickly retorted that it was unlikely that the region has undergone any kind of fundamental change.

In fact, in 1993, Robert Putnam wrote Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, wherein he more or less reiterates Banfield’s arguments regarding the distrusting temperament of southern Italians. Putnam found that, while northern Italians were more adept at self-governance and displayed a willingness to trust their neighbors and act collaboratively, southern Italians had still not shaken off their millennium-old handicap of distrust, superstition, and an “everyone is against me, or is trying to take advantage of me” disposition.

In our semiquincentennial year, Americans must look to southern Italy as a blueprint for what not to do. That is not to say that southern Italy is not breathtakingly beautiful (just Google images of Roccella Ionica, where my father was born), or that its inhabitants aren’t a good and decent people. It is to say, however, that their lack of institutional and neighborly trust, if adopted here, would further erode our country’s civic fabric.

America need not look at other countries for what we ought to be doing; we need only to look at our past.

Frank Filocomo is the Advancement Coordinator at RealClearFoundation. His work has been published in National Review, the Federalist, University Bookman, and elsewhere.