The real question is why wouldn't civic qualities decline.
You can look at this on an economic lens - people don't need to depend on familial relations as much because of money.
You can look at this with a racial/ethnic lens - more genetic variance reduces cooperative behaviours (see Charles Murray).
Then there's the libertarian version you've heard above.
Then there's the social lens - people have become atomized by individualism in their manners, social conditioning etc.
I like to think there's a non-relativistic way in which all of them are true, sometimes some of them more at certain times than others, but that they are models of the same phenomena.
Should we genetically manipulate ourselves to increase our pro-social behaviours? It seems clear that if society flies apart then all the critiques I've mentioned will be true simultaneously, I do not see how that can plausibly be positive. What about genetic intervention?