When community groups send out appeals for help, convince local merchants to volunteer supplies and staff the tables providing coffee and donuts for the volunteers, we create the socialcapital which the political scientist Robert Putnam has identified as crucial to healthy societies. (His famous example was that of the choral societies of northern Italy).
Early this year he began to pour his politicalcapital into a plan to reform Social Security (pensions) by letting workers save some of their nest-eggs in personal accounts, rather than paying as they work for current pensioners.
Where economic issues have taken the forefront in political discussions, social issues like the legality of abortion or capital punishment appear to have been placed on the back burner of political debates.