26 SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2020IN THIS GOOD-HEARTED and sweeping
book, the political scientist Robert D. Put-
nam (with Shaylyn Romney Garrett) of-
fers some hope in bleak times. “The Up-
swing” begins by invoking Tocqueville’s
admiring depiction of America in the 1830s
as a land where individualism was bal-
anced by mutual association and common
purpose. Yet half a century later came the
Gilded Age, a period like our own — of rob-
ber barons, widespread corruption, mutu-
al mistrust, political scandal, exploitation
of wageworkers and pillaging of the natu-
ral environment.
Then the wheel turned again. After 1900,
America embarked on a reform era that
extended through the 1960s, before we de-
scended into a second Gilded Age. Recent
history, Putnam argues, begins well before
the New Deal. In the entire period from
1901 (when Theodore Roosevelt succeeded
the assassinated William McKinley)
through Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society,
with only a short pause in the 1920s, Amer-
ica steadily became more community-
minded.
Many New Dealers learned their values
and craft in the Progressive Era of the first
Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. “By the
time we arrived at the middle of the 20th
century,” Putnam writes, “the Gilded Age
was a distant memory. America had been
transformed into a more egalitarian, co-
operative, cohesive and altruistic nation.”
These trends operated in the economic, po-
litical, social and cultural realms, re-
inforcing one another. Then they all re-
versed in tandem. “Between the mid-1960s
and today... we have been experiencing
declining economic equality, the deteriora-
tionof compromise in the public square, a
frayingsocial fabric and a descentinto cul-
tural narcissism.”
Putnam terms this pattern the “I-we-I”
cycle — from selfishness to common pur-
pose, and back to selfishness again.
Though his style is narrative, Putnam
backs his hypothesis with an encyclopedic
display of data, from social surveys, in-
come and wealth statistics, indexes of po-
litical participation, measures of trust and
much more.
Along the way, he offers superb, often
counterintuitive insights. For instance,
much racial and gender progress predated
the civil rights and feminist movements of
the 1960s. The great migration of Blacks
northward, beginning during World War I,
led to labor shortages in the South and
compelled Southern racists to actually de-
liver something of separate-but-equal.
Spending on Black schools soared well be-
fore Brown v. Board of Education.
Yet separate was far from equal. Putnam
notes in two nuanced chapters that race
and gender don’t quite fit his larger narra-
tive: Black Americans were never wel-
comed into the overall “we.” Women be-longed, mainly as appendages of men. As
demands escalated, backlash ensued.
However, for all of its prodigious re-
search coupled with careful qualifications,
the book sometimes overgeneralizes. In
Putnam’s recounting, the 1960s were the
inflection point when America retreated
from community to selfish individualism.
In the immediate postwar era, he says, cor-
porate moguls accepted responsibility for
their communities and workers. By the
1980s, they cared mainly about maximiz-
ing profits. Sixties radicals began by pur-
suing social justice and ended up as cultur-
ally insurgent hippies. Progressive goals
became more about rights, less about soli-
darity. Millennials and Gen Xers are far
more individualist than their boomer par-
ents.
True enough, but there’s more to the
story. Today, many younger people can be
described as individualistic — not because
they are latter-day Abbie Hoffmans or Mil-ton Friedmans, but because the altered
rules of the game leave them little choice.
Jared Bernstein, an economist who ad-
vises Joe Biden, calls it the “YOYO Econ-
omy.” YOYO stands for “You’re on Your
Own.” And as Jacob Hacker observed in
“The Great Risk Shift,” costs once borne by
government or by paternalistic corpora-
tions — health coverage, job security,
cheap higher education, retirement in-
come — have now been shifted back to in-
dividuals.
The message from Uber, Lyft and estab-
lished corporations that have converted
career jobs to gig work is precisely that youare on your own. A lot of what passes for
individualism as value preference is an in-
dividualism of desperation.
Putnam’s tendency to generalize some-
times suggests a misleading symmetry.
Organized worship is declining across the
board, Putnam reports, citing a blizzard of
data. But as a political fact, liberal denomi-
nations are near collapse while fundamen-
talists are ascendant.
Spend a day wandering around meet-
ings of business lobbyists in Washington
hotel ballrooms and you will see Tocque-
ville-style networking, on stilts. But this
remnant of Tocqueville’s America is lim-
ited to the top 1 or 2 percent. Meanwhile, as
many social scientists have demonstrated,
mass-membership associations that speak
for the nonrich have atrophied. The civic
decline that Putnam describes is anything
but symmetrical.
Today’s individualism empowers the
right but fragments the left. Cosmopolitanbillionaires, individualist in their prof-
iteering and gated communities, make
common cause with nativist social conser-
vatives who express their individualism by
toting assault weapons. Both are part of
the Trump base. But on the left, different
flavors of racial, gender, economic and cli-
mate progressives, not to mention animal
rights activists, often magnify disagree-
ments rather than emphasize coalition.
Political science is the study of prefer-
ence and power. Putnam tends to play
down the role of power in favor of values
and norms. Yet power can reinforce or
stymie value preferences. Theodore
Roosevelt’s leadership animated latent de-
mands for reform that had been stunted
politically before his accidental presiden-
cy. If postwar business leaders were com-
munity-minded, those norms reflected the
regulations of the New Deal period and the
temporary power of trade unions.IN HIS SUMMING UP,Putnam deliberately
sidesteps the question of whyAmerica be-
came less cohesive. “The various trends
we have identified are braided together by
reciprocal causality,” he writes, “so it is dif-
ficult and even misleading to identify
causes and effects.” But as Putnam notes
elsewhere in the book, one factor has to be
politics. The political events of the ’60s, es-
pecially the Vietnam War but also the peri-
od’s assassinations and civil rights pro-
tests, weakened trust in public institutions
and fragmented the New Deal coalition.
The resulting loss of faith in government
was a setback for the egalitarian left
(which relies heavily on public remedy)
and a gift to an increasingly militant right.
Putnam acknowledges that today’s gov-
ernment gridlock is far from symmetrical.
“Bipartisanship has disappeared from
American politics over the last half cen-
tury,” he writes, “largely because the Re-
publican Party has become steadily more
extreme.” Indeed, undermining govern-
ment is a core Republican strategy. Ronald
Reagan’s tactic of disparaging and starv-
ing government was all too effective. In the
1990s, House Speaker Newt Gingrich
sought to block any bipartisan collabora-
tion, a strategy intensified by the current
Senate leader Mitch McConnell. All this
was lethal to progressivism, community
and trust.
“The Upswing” is well worth reading for
its cornucopia of data and insightful social
history. Some of the generalizations should
be taken with a grain of salt. Putnam’s last
chapter, addressing lessons from the past
on how we might reclaim a more trusting,
community-minded America, is abbreviat-
ed, elevated and a little wishful. The deep
corruption of democracy does not get
much attention, nor does the alliance of
plutocracy with aspiring autocracy. Don-
ald Trump barely makes an appearance. At
this perilous moment, we need all the opti-
mism we can get, tempered with unflinch-
ing realism about the role of power. 0All for One
Too much individualism, Robert Putnam says, destroys the social fabric.
By ROBERT KUTTNER
THE UPSWING
How America Came Together a Century
Ago and How We Can Do It Again
By Robert D. Putnam with Shaylyn Romney
Garrett
480 pp. Simon & Schuster. $32.50.
HAYLEY WALLROBERT KUTTNERis the co-editor of The Ameri-
can Prospect and a professor at Brandeis
University’s Heller School. His latest book is
“The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of Ameri-
can Democracy.”