Authors Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett joined National Constitution Center President and CEO Jeffrey Rosen to discuss their book The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. The authors shared what they learned tracing more than a century of American history. They expand upon their thesis that the country went from an individualistic “I” society to a more community-oriented “we” society, then back again—remaining individualistic, unequal, and divided today—and how we can learn from that experience to become a stronger, more unified nation going forward.
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PARTICIPANTS
Shaylyn Romney Garrett is co-author with Robert Putnam of The Upswing: How America Came Together A Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. She is also the author of American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. Garrett is the founding contributor to David Brooks’s Aspen Institute initiative, Weave: The Social Fabric Project and co-founder of Think Unlimited. Her nonprofit work has been featured by the New York Times, FastCompany, LinkedIn, Harvard Business Review, and Arab Investor. She was twice awarded a membership to the Clinton Global Initiative and has been a speaker at TEDx.
Robert Putnam is the Malkin Research Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the British Academy, and past president of the American Political Science Association. Putnam has received the Skytte Prize, the world’s highest accolade for a political scientist, and in 2013 President Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal. Putnam has written 15 books, translated into 20 languages, including the best-selling Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community and The Upswing with Shaylyn Romney Garrett. He has received 16 honorary degrees from 8 countries.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
This episode was engineered by Greg Scheckler with editing by Jackie McDermott. It was produced by Jackie McDermott, Tanaya Tauber, and Lana Ulrich.
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TRANSCRIPT
This transcript may not be in its final form, accuracy may vary, and it may be updated or revised in the future.
Jackie McDermott: [00:00:00] Hi listeners. I'm Jackie McDermott, the show's producer. Each week, I ask you to rate, review and subscribe to the show. That's so important to us because positive ratings and reviews, help new listeners find out about the podcast and we want it to reach as many ears as possible. So please, if you're enjoying Live at the National Constitution Center, go to our page in Apple podcasts on your Apple device, click "write a review" and leave one there. And also click "subscribe", so that new episodes appear right in your feed.
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Welcome to Live at the National Constitution Center. The podcast sharing live constitutional conversations hosted by the National Constitution Center. I'm Jackie McDermott, the show's producer. Authors Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett joined NCC president Jeffrey Rosen to discussed their book, "The Upswing", earlier this month.
The book traces more than a century of American history, examining other times when America experienced division, polarization and inequality, but emerged to become a society on the upswing, and what those experiences can teach us today. Here's Jeff to get the conversation started.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:01:21] It is such a pleasure to see you both. Thank you for joining us, Bob Putnam and Shaylyn Romney.
Robert Putnam: [00:01:27] Thanks very much, Jeff. It's a great pleasure for us both to be here.
Shaylyn Romney Garrett: [00:01:30] Thank you.
Rosen: [00:01:31] Wonderful. Well, let's start by summing up the thesis of your important new book, "The Upswing", and you summarize it so clearly at several points that I'm just going to read one summary and then ask each of you to expand on it.
You say, broadly, that the Gilded Age brought great material advance to America, but also brought inequality, polarization, social disarray, and cultural self-centeredness. You begin with a description of all of those factors, which seem to be talking about today, but turn out to have been written in the Gilded Age. And then you say there was a big shift in the decade or two at the turn of the 20th century. The Progressive Movement came along and redirected the course of American politics and demographics and philosophy. And for more than half a century, these streams of events shaped an America that was less contentious, more equal, and more connected, but unexpectedly the diverse streams of I and We, of Equality and Liberty, diverged, and reversed themselves. And since the 1960s, America has become less equal, more polarized, more fragmented, and more individualistic; a second gilded age. Take it from there, and tell our audience about your important thesis.
Putnam: [00:02:46] Well, first of all, thanks very much for having us, Jeff. We're delighted to be here and have a chance to talk with. This audience, it's an audience that I have in fact had the pleasure of addressing in real life, not just virtually, for some of these other books that you mentioned, and it's great to be back, in this virtual setting. I think, if our technology is all working well, what your viewers should see in front of them right now is the cover of the book, but it has the added advantage that on the cover is a chart that sort of summarizes our basic thesis. And so, I'm going to just take a minute or two to describe that chart for your viewers. They can see it in front of them, but you can see, over on the left-hand side of the cover , looking down at the, at the curve, the red curve at the left-hand side, around 1890, 1900 America was very-- all of the, you said in your introduction, Jeff. America was very polarized, very unequaled, very socially isolated and very self centered. And then beginning, in about 1900, 1910, you can see the curve rises there. The curve here is based on real data. There's a bit of a pause in the twenties, but then coming out of the twenties and really going steadily forward up until about 1965, you can see the peak there.
America was becoming steadily more equal in terms of income and wealth more, politically cooperative, less and less polarization, more connected with other people with family and friends and neighbors, and more focused on what we had in common. And then you can see very clearly there, sometime around 1965, roughly speaking, all of those trends turned in the opposite direction.
And for the last half century, now, from about 1965, 1970, until today, America has got less... America has become less and less connected, more and more polarized, more and more socially isolated, more and more, and as I've said, much more polarized and finally, much more focused on "what's in it for us."
And so we call that curve, and it occurs repeatedly in our book, the "I, We, I" curve because over at the left-hand side, we were in a very much an "I" society focused on us, our own interests, our private interests. The middle of the century we became not a perfect society of course, but more "we" than we'd ever been as a country. And then the downhill slide to the progressive era-- I'm sorry-- to the current period. And we think that that "I, we, I" chart has real lessons for how we can do it again. And that's the part of the book that we actually think is in some sense, the most important. Shaylyn, you want to pick the story up from there?
Garrett: [00:05:46] Yeah. So one of the motivating questions of writing this book of course, is how did we get here? We're in this incredibly difficult moment in the history of our country. I think that there are very few people who would disagree with that right now. And so the question is, how did we get here? And most of the books that have been written on that to try and answer that question have focused really on that declension period, that sort of fall from grace over the last half, over the last half century. But this book seeks to of course zoom the lens out to the entire century and ask, not only how did we get here in terms of decline, but what happened before that decline?
And that's of course why the book is entitled "The Upswing", because we wanted to place some emphasis on, you know, the fact that if ever there were a historical moment whose lessons we needed to learn, it's the moment when the first American Gilded Age gave way to the progressive era, a moment that set in motion, this sort of sea change that rippled into almost every corner of American life.
And I think one of the amazing things is that the vast stores of data that of course, Bob, in his data analysis expertise brings to this book, shows how many different trends, how many very widely disparate trends follow this same pattern. But of course, the question is, what do we learn? How did those progressive era reformers, right the ship? And we focus on a handful of lessons. One of which is that those reformers were engaged very clearly in a moral awakening, what they saw as a sort of moment of moral indignation, not just directed outward, but also directed inward, asking themselves how they had become complicit in creating an America that was so vastly unequal, that was so vastly polarized. And beginning to question the primary conceptions, the value systems that had gotten us there.
And what we saw in the progressive era was a very clear shift away from a social Darwinist culture, into more of what historians have called the social gospel period, where we were really asking the question more, what we could do for one another and less, what we could do for ourselves. And another lesson from this era is that amazingly, the reformers that were really driving this shift were extraordinarily young. They were, you know, when we think of the Jane Adams', or even the Teddy Roosevelt's, we think of them sort of later on in their years.
But when they started doing their most energetic reform work, they were largely under the age of 30. This was an incredibly innovative movement. It was something that transcended a sort of gridlocked left-right framework. And one of the things to keep in mind about this era was that it was not progressive in the sense that we tend to think of that word today.
The progressive era was something that really was a bipartisan movement. It was, it was a movement that was almost so diverse as to be barely coherent, but it was really galvanized by this shared sense among its adherents that citizens could take control of history and right the ship. Previous to this era, America was in a drift, similar to what we're in today, and a concerned group of citizens began working to solve the problems that were occurring right in their own neighborhoods, right at their own doorstep, tinkering in what Louis Brandeis called the "laboratories of democracy", to find solutions that would then bubble up to the municipal level, to the state level, and ultimately become the signature national programs that the progressive era is famous for.
So this was a time of vast coalition building around issue-based, values-driven, organizing. It was youth led. And really what we see as the final lesson is that the political leadership of this movement came later. We think of Teddy Roosevelt when we think of the progressive era, but actually, those charismatic national leaders came on the tail end of this movement.
So, a lesson for today might be, you know, maybe it's not to a national charismatic leader that we should look to sort of save us from this moment. The last time we engineered an upswing, those charismatic leaders came later. And so, there's a lot that we can learn from this period, that's just a short overview and I'm sure we're going to get into some more details on those points going forward in the conversation.
Rosen: [00:10:01] Thank you for that wonderful foreshadowing of the discussion we'll have about what has to be done. Thanks also for the shout out to my hero, Louis, Brandeis, such a unifying figure in both for progressives and libertarians of that period. You have so much important data, and that is such a strength of this book, to support your arguments, that when it comes to economic inequality, political polarization, social cohesion and cultural cohesion, there was this U-shaped curve that you described. I want to jump right to the "why?" question. We're already getting questions in the Q & A box. Stacy Garber asks, wasn't much of the unity motivated by the two World Wars? Because you're impressively modest in your claims about causation, and Bob, I just want to start with the political polarization question, because it's one of several, and you say, first of all, it's wrong to just focus on post-1970 things like gerrymandering and the internet, because you're seeing a much broader arc, but you say that economic inequality is not necessarily the driver. In fact, it may follow. Social media might have something to do with it, but the trend proceeds social media, starting in the 1970s. So I didn't see a clear why answer. Did I miss something? Or are you agnostic about why polarization took the trend that it did?
Putnam: [00:11:25] Well, the question of causation, of course, is a really difficult one. And there's a technical reason why that's true. These curves are all so closely correlated that the usual way of distinguishing causes and effects is to see what came first. But these changes all almost perfectly mirror one another, and therefore you can't really tell, with maybe one or two exceptions, it's very hard to pick apart which came first. The one thing that was a shock to us actually, because we assumed, I assumed, that, you know, basically the economic inequality was the driver of everything else, that for some reason, we had this pattern of economic inequality and then that in turn drove the polarization and the cultural change and the social change.
The one thing we can say for sure, from the data, is that is not true. Because, if anything, economic inequality is a lagging variable. It changes a little bit after all the other variables and, I wouldn't want to stick my entire professional reputation on saying it's not... well, I guess I do want to stake my reputation on saying it's very hard to imagine how economics could be causing this if it's happening after everything else. Beyond that, and I'll get back to this question of the 70s that you raised, quite importantly, Jeff, but just to talk about causation over the whole of this period, one of the other things we notice is that the two World Wars--the first World War actually was not a big deal for America--I mean, of course it was a big deal, but in terms of its impact on American life, it was nothing like the second World War. The second World War you could make a good argument was a unifying, well, it was for sure a unifying factor in American life, in a way creating more intense "we". But the reason why I think it's not, this is not mainly a story about World War II is that you can see these trends going up, 20 or 30 or even 40 years before World War II.
And it's hard to imagine that people in the twenties wer, you know, cuddling up with one another because they knew that another 20 years later they'd need that solidarity in the war. That is, the trend up begins long before World War II is on the horizon and then it continues for another 20 years after World War II.
So the causation, it certainly is true that World War II had an accelerating effect up there as you know, in the high portion of our charts, but it doesn't really fit to say that World War II was the main cause because the trends were going up before, long before World War II and they continued long after World War II.
Now, the question you ask quite usefully, and by the way, the same thing is true for polarization. Polarization had been declining all during, I know there's people find this hard to believe, but the data are pretty clear that polarization, that is for example, the degree to which people were all Democrats against all Republicans, that had been, polarization had been declining in the twenties and even in the thirties and in the forties. And then it keeps going down, actually. Eisenhower is the least political, or at least partisan president, actually probably in our recent history. So the graphs, I mean the data don't fit the theory that it's all caused by World War II. But you asked another good question which was, well, then why the turn around? How come, what happened in the sixties that causes it to turn around? I'd like to joke actually, Jeff, that the key turning point is 1964. 1964 was the first year in which I personally voted. So I'm willing to take some blame that maybe I brought this catastrophe on American society, but of course that's, you know, a good sociologist wants to see what other explanations there might be.
Rosen: [00:15:08] It was also the year I was born. So, maybe it was all my fault.
Putnam: [00:15:12] I'm sorry, I didn't hear you.
Rosen: [00:15:13] It was also the year I was born, so perhaps it was all my fault.
Putnam: [00:15:16] Okay. It's one of us, one of the two of us, but let's explore other hypotheses. I think what we want to say is the sixties were a kind of a national nervous breakdown, in the sense that a lot of otherwise independent crises all coincided and the crises themselves were not necessarily all of the piece.
If you ask people about my age, people who were in their twenties and thirties at the time of this crisis, almost all of my generation say it was the assassinations. They say the crucial thing were the assassinations, the Kennedy assassination and the Martin Luther King assassination and the Bobby Kennedy assassination. That's when we sort of felt the thing was falling, the country was falling apart.
If you ask people a little older, many of them will talk about the Vietnam war and the Vietnam war having caused this crisis. And no doubt the Vietnam war is an important part of it, but it's hard to see how that would be related to, say, to the economic story. The economic story actually is mostly about the oil embargoes of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. So that there are many different possible causes, no one of which, with one exception, no one of which really I think can take the full blame. And therefore that's why we say it's kind of a concatenation of lots of independent crises. Now there is one, one exception to that, one case where we think we do know a large part of why it happened in the sixties. Shaylyn, do you want to pick up that story?
Rosen: [00:16:44] I'd love you to pick it up, and Shaylyn, I'm just so curious about whether the standard political science explanations that we at the Constitution Center often offer up, including the central role of race, some scholars...
Putnam: [00:16:59] Yes, that's where we were going.
Rosen: [00:17:01] Good. Well, I'll set it up that way. I mean, Rick Pildus at NYU has said that it was the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which caused a realignment of the flight of white Democrats to the Republican party. And that led to an ideological realignment of the parties. That was a crucial factor. So is that right? And then tell us about other factors that might've led to this polarization in the sixties.
Garrett: [00:17:24] Yeah. I mean, it's certainly difficult to say which happened first. Did America sort of make this shift from we to I? Or did we experience a backlash against the widening of the American "we" to include Black Americans in a more, you know, in the sense of dismantling the legal barriers to integration. But we definitely, you know, there's an interesting story that we discuss about race.
And I want to focus on that specifically just for a moment, if I may, just to give an overview of what w discuss in the book about race, which is that, you know, we tend to have this feeling or a common history that's told about race relations in American history during the 20th century, is that sort of, because those first two-thirds of the century were characterized by Jim Crow and Jim Crow being violently enforced, not only in the South, but often also in the North, that everything was sort of stagnation and depression in terms of the progress that Black Americans were making toward parity with whites. But as we zoomed again out and looked at the data around material wellbeing, when it comes to race, and we talk about material wellbeing, we mean things like, equality of outcomes in education, equality of outcomes in income and wealth distribution, health disparities, even voting, voter registration and voter participation.
The question we asked was, were Blacks moving toward parity with whites during the 20th century, and when, and how fast. And the surprising thing that emerged from the data was that actually much of the progress that Black Americans were making happened before the civil rights movement. You see this sort of slow, but steady improvement in equalization of outcomes for Black and white Americans that then actually stagnates, and in many cases, reverses following the civil rights movement. And so that, as a trend in and of itself, you know, begs for explanation. And I think as we sort of layered that, that data on top of the I, we, I data, what we came to see is that first of all, America's "we" decades were surprisingly more hospitable to racial progress than America's subsequent "I" decades were.
But it's also important to point out that, that the progress that Black Americans were making during that period was really driven by their own efforts, their own persistent efforts to stand up and claim their place in the American "we". Namely by engaging in the great migration, moving out of the less hospitable South and into the more hospitable North.
But then actually, as America makes this broader turn toward a more selfish orientation, we take our sort of foot off the gas, as a nation, in driving towards racial equality. Even despite the fact that we had achieved at the peak of this sort of "we" moment that had brought about a sort of fragile national consensus that allowed us to achieve great legal victories when it comes to civil rights. When you look at the survey data around support for the civil rights act, support in theory was really great, but then once the Johnson administration tried to take steps to really implement or redress those racial grievances or racial inequalities, there was a huge backlash in public opinion.
So the Kerner commission issued a report in which it said, you know, there's a very clear justification for the riots that took place in 1968. It's because of ghettoisation of Blacks and all of these things that this stagnation that Blacks were beginning to really feel. And yet, you know, Johnson refused then to implement the policies that the Kerner commission recommended.
So there we see that Johnson really was responding in a subtle way to this change, this sort of sea-change in white public opinion that he was sensing. So, you know, not only do we see a political polarization effect of the white backlash against the civil rights movement, we also see it in the data around material wellbeing. Parity was never reached. And in fact, just in the moment you thought, you know, we might accelerate towards parity, we stagnated. And we think that this is part of the broader story of America, shifting it toward a more "I" mindset. If that makes sense.
Rosen: [00:21:26] Absolutely fascinating. And this does help to answer, Carmen Delgado's question: how does race and identity politics fit into the story? Bob, understanding that you're very resistant to simplistic causal explanations, let me try this question out on you. If the Civil Rights Act and the political realignment of the parties over race was a major precipitant cause in the late sixties and early seventies, and if that is an explanation for what you call the sociological big sword, you say it's not proven whether there's a geographic big sword of the kind that's been described, where red and blue people live in different parts of the country, but there is a sociological one where the parties are increasingly ideologically homogeneous and citizens become more in filter bubbles and echo chambers consuming similar news and so forth. And that leads to changes in culture and in the social fabric. Then, how does that affect your thinking about the solutions? If race was the precipitant cause, how can we overcome the divisive effects of racial polarization as we think about coming back together?
Putnam: [00:22:36] Well, that's a great question, and one we spent a lot of time talking about actually in the book. In the concluding chapters of the book, we spent quite a bit of time talking about how this time around, one way to put it, is the progressive era provides lots of lessons, and then one big object lesson, one thing we should avoid. And the object lesson that it provides is exactly in this area of race and diversity because they were not... the progressive leaders themselves were, I wouldn't say they were all racist, I mean, W.B. Du Bois was an active member of the progressive movement, but by and large, the people who were active in the progressive movement had a lot of blind spots, or worse than blind spots, were actually active racists in their own views. And that hobbled what they were able to do. And we looked at that period as, in many respects, as a source of lessons, but also as a source of this one object lesson, which is, we've got to do it differently this time.
And we've got to do it in a way that in which we have a much more encompassing sense of "we" this time, and we've got to keep that issue high on our agenda. You know, Jeff, this is relevant a little bit to a part of the story that may be not so obvious to the readers, which is, if I can just step back a minute, we finished this book in January of 2020, and we sent it off to publishers.
And so we knew nothing, at the time that this book itself, in its four covers, knows nothing about what happened the rest of this year. But of course, lots did happen the rest of the year. And we think that it's worth reflecting now on our story and on what's happened the rest of the year to see how would we written the book differently if we'd written it after all this?
And there are a lot of ways to answer that question, but one really important way, and I'm going to take this issue, race, and say, well, what's happened with respect to race after we've finished our book? And the answer is the Black Lives Matter movement. And of course the Black Lives Matter movement you could start with at Ferguson three or four years ago, but I'm just going to hit for shorthand here, and just use the Black Lives Matter movement to mean what's happened, that we all know, everybody in America knows has happened over the last-- what is it? Five or six months?--What's happened would have astonished the people who lived through the first civil rights revolution. Astonished actually anybody who did live through it, because all the people of my generation who were in favor of race spent the whole summer here worrying about, well, okay, so we have the, you know, the Black Lives Matter movement and we're sure as heck that that was going to be followed by, you know, anti-Black riots and so on. The kind of things that at least one presidential candidate, I won't name which, has been trying to make happen.
But that is not what happened, actually. We're in, we are living now in a different world. In the little town that I live in much of the year in New Hampshire, a town of 5,000 people, 95% of them are white, and yet, just after George Floyd's murder, in this little town in New Hampshire, all white, and, there was a huge mile-long march, of about 20% of everybody in the town, all of them white, marched in support of Black Lives Matter. And that was shocking to those who lived through the first-- it was shocking actually to most of us who were doing it--because it just seemed so out of tune, but now we ask, well, how did that happen?
And that is actually the long... that's the shadow cast by the sixties on our period now. When we wrote the book, we didn't know that was going to happen, but it is exactly that shadow. It's now the Blacks and the whites were marching. They want this time to have a different ending than the ending that we knew about--all that we knew about when we wrote the book was the ending in which there's this backlash.
So, actually, I'm now much more hopeful than I was when we wrote the darn book, that we're going to be soon in a turn that will take us in a pivot, kind of, that will take us into a better America, sooner than we thought.
Rosen: [00:26:34] Thank you so much for that. Shaylyn let me ask you if you share Bob's optimism, perhaps drawing on your work with the Aspen Weave Initiative, where I know you've talked to people around the country. It's not obvious that the Black Lives Matter movement will provide the unifying force that it's so impressively doing in New Hampshire, in other parts of the country. So, if race really was a sort of original sin of the nation, as well as a precipitant cause of the polarization in the sixties and seventies. Do you think that the Black Lives Matter movement will provide a way out of it? Or do we need another unifying approach?
Garrett: [00:27:12] Well, I don't know that race itself can become a unifying issue. I mean, again, let's turn back to the lessons of the progressive era, which is really what we focus on in the book. I mean, again, that movement was so diverse.
There were so many issues that fell under the umbrella of progressivism. And so I think one important lesson is that, this is not going to be... if we're going to see another upswing, it's not going to be a one issue movement. And I think that as somebody who, stepped out of academia and into activism and into nonprofit work and into social entrepreneurship, one thing that I see, in the sort of social justice world and in the progressive activist world, is that we're often engaged in sort of this war of the "we's", right? Identity politics was brought up earlier. Today's progressives have a really hard time finding the unifying threads that bring them all together. They spend a lot of time jockeying between themselves, for which issue is going to take precedence over the rest.
Now we know, as Bob has said, that the fact that racial and ethnic inclusion was not a part of the original progressive movement meant that the upswing had knit into it the seeds of its own demise. Right? So we absolutely know that full inclusion has to be central to whatever upswing we're involved in. But I do think that there needs to be a zooming out on the part of today's activists to ask what are the unifying values that make this a movement that is bigger than any one issue?
Right? And that's what I am waiting to see. It's not that we don't see a lot of fantastic activism and a lot of inspiring activism it's that we don't see those things coming together into a single unified clarion call for a moral awakening, and a real reorientation of our society on many different levels and on many different issues.
Rosen: [00:29:06] That's a very good way to put it. And you're right, that it is hard to see that agreement about what the unifying ideals are, aside from a broad commitment to the ideals of the U S Constitution, which we at the National Constitution Center are so honored to be able to convene conversations where both sides debate its meaning, but agree on the framework.
Bob, let me pose the following observation. Last year, George Will came to the center to talk about his book, "The Conservative Sensibility", and it's the anti-narrative to yours. If you argue that America was too individualistic in the Gilded Age and too self-focused and put the"I" over the "we" and, because of the progressive era, began to recall the "we" and soften the excesses of the "I", and then the sixties were a fracturing and then we became more individualistic. George Will and other libertarians and conservatives say the opposite, that really, it was the progressive era that was the crucial fall from grace, where progressive presidents like Wilson and Roosevelt embraced a strong imperial presidency, abandoned limits on governments and checks and balances, started ruling by executive ordered and built up an administrative state that threatened liberty and privileged equality. They would see the sixties as you know, bad for another reason, that it led to an explosion of egalitarianism and they want to return to libertarian purity with the help of a Supreme Court that might strike down the administrative state. I'm just being descriptive there, but given the completely irreconcilable narratives, what would you say to libertarians and conservatives like George Will?
Putnam: [00:30:43] Well, there's a minor quibble and then, I'll address the question more head on. I, actually, I know George Will. He and I have debated. I would not myself have classified him as a classical libertarian. And I think he has a lot of respect for traditional forms of community, a lot of respect for traditional forms of community, but I'm not going to spend a lot of time debating whether you described George Will's position right or wrong.
Here's the broader point. There is not a single dimension here that is, you can be either left or right, or communitarian or individualistic, there are two cross-cutting dimensions. There are in America and, probably always have been, but this is America I know, there are in America today, people who are quite conservative ideologically, much more conservative ideologically than me, but are also communitarian.
I mean, there are a lot of examples of that. For example, David Brooks is an example of that. I mean, there are a lot of examples of conservatives, even religious conservatives, like--I'm blanking on his name, but the former speech writer for George W. Bush...
Rosen: [00:31:53] Mike Gerson.
Putnam: [00:31:54] Mike Gerson, right. Mike and David are both very conservative, much more conservative than me, but we share entirey this communitarian outlook, the idea that you can be conservative, but we worry about the connections among people. And then of course there are conservatives who are libertarian, whether George Will is one of them is a different matter, but certainly there are Libertarians who are also quite conservative.
There are also, however, I'm trying to describe two cross cutting dimensions here. There are also liberals or left-wingers in America who are quite communitarian. That's me, actually. I'm a left-winger, but I'm communitarian. And there are others I could name, quite a few other left-wing communitarians, but there are also lots of left-wing libertarians that is, are lots of left-wing people, who are by normal standards, you think of them as on the left, but they're also very libertarian. They want to, you know, think of the people that we were talking about a little bit earlier, that is the many of the people who are on the left in the democratic party today are actually quite in favor of liberty. No rules.
And so I'm trying to make a broader point here, not so much about where George Will stands, but that these are two cross-cutting dimensions. And there's a classic case. So on some issues, let's say, you know, on regulation, for example, I'm in favor of decent amount of regulation, but there are a lot of liberals who aren't and there are conservatives who are opposed to regulation and therefore libertarian. And there are other conservatives who kind of think regulation of business and so on is an important part of the story. I may be going on a little too long here, but the fundamental point I want to make is it's misleading actually to analyze our politics now, as if it had only one dimension, it's two cross-cutting dimensions. Does that make sense, Jeff?
Rosen: [00:33:39] It does. And it's very helpful to emphasize that the debate is not, as you just said, between liberals and conservatives and libertarians, but between communitarians and the individualists. And that leads me to ask, Shaylyn, you talked about the progressive era. There were precipitants that led to an explosion of communitarianism. What galvanized Louis Brandeis was the curse of bigness, the big trusts who took reckless risks with other people's money. It was those economic dangers that let all three presidential candidates in 1912--Taft, Roosevelt, and Wilso-- to oppose the money interests and to propose some form of trust-busting in different forms, although they disagreed about the scope of government.
So, if that's the case, back to solutions, what precipitant concrete need would it take today to inspire a grassroots communitarian revival?
Garrett: [00:34:31] I mean, that's taking us right back to that tricky question of causation, right. And this is what everybody wants to know. Well, if we had this great upswing, can we just identify the one thing that set it in motion so that we can focus on that one thing today?
The unsatisfying answer is that turns out to be difficult. And, Bob could speak a little bit more in detail to this, but I do think that there is, and you can tell me if you agree with this statement, Bob, there is some evidence in the data that a cultural shift might have been on the leading end of these indicators.
And so that, to me says that one thing we really need is cultural innovators, who are imagining ways to help us reevaluate our core values, if that makes sense. So I think, oftentimes we think that culture lags, but it appears that maybe culture might lead. And that certainly is true when you look at the intellectual history of the progressive era, I mean, it was the Edward Bellamy's who wrote"Looking Backward", which was this utopian text, who were writing in the 1890s.
And it was the Walter Lippmann's who were the more pragmatic and calling again for these sort of vast national programs that came 20 years later. Right? So I think one thing that we lack today is we lack imagination. We lack a robust ideal that we are moving toward. And I think what you brought up earlier, Jeffrey, is really important, that the place I think that we ought to turn for that ideal is again, back to our founding documents, but we also have to recognize that we live in a vastly different and changed America, which was true of the progressive era as well.
The progressives were living through the industrial revolution. You know, we are living through the information revolution. It's analogous in that sense. So we have to, again, go back to our founding documents for inspiration, but we also have to get really creative about what ideal we have imagined ourselves moving toward.
I don't think that we've achieved that yet, culturally. I don't think that we've achieved an ideal that is communitarian, that doesn't feel stifling to people, that doesn't feel stifling to diversity. And I hope that we can call upon a new generation of cultural innovators to sort of chart now utopian vision for where we might go. An ideal, I suppose.
Putnam: [00:36:46] Could I add just one more thing a little bit, really go back to your question here, Jeff, which is, well, how about all those policies? It certainly is true that the actual problems facing that period are different from our problems. They were worried about railroads; we're not worried about railroads, we're worried about, you know, Amazon or high-tech.
But actually the many of the policies that they were putting forward are directly relevant to--I mean, go through the list of things that the progressive in terms of policies they were most focused on. They were focused on campaign finance, for example. Well, does that sound relevant to us? They were focused on regulation of monopolies.
I mean, we're just having hearings, earlier this week in Congress, covering both Republicans and Democrats. It's so reminiscent of that earlier period, when both Republicans and Democrats, during the progressive era agreed we've got to have more control on these monopolies. Or a minimum wage!
I mean, minimum wage was one of the issues they were-- does that sound familiar now? I mean, a lot of the actual--it's quite striking because it was a different world in many respects, but actually the particular policies that they were concerned about, campaign finance reform... they were concerned about the environment.
And now in their case, it was not global warming cause we weren't there, but they were concerned about the state of America's parks and forest. That was a big issue for the original progressive. So the point I'm trying to make is, of course, Shaylyn is right. If you stepped back up to the 30,000 foot level and say what's causing what I think both Shaylyn and I agree that you'd be wrong to underplay the role of culture and values and religion. Religion was an important part then of the larger causation. But when you get down to the level of particular policies, it's actually quite striking how the very same policies--you can almost take Elizabeth Warren's proposals, for example, for regulation control could have been drawn from--and indeed, I think in her case were drawn from--exactly the antitrust policies of the 1910 period.
Rosen: [00:38:47] Shaylyn, I'd love you to chime in, but I want to ask you about religion because Bob mentioned it and of course you wrote that important book about American grace, how religion divides and unites us. In "The Upswing", you talk about the striking increase in numbers of Americans who consider themselves non-affiliated,and a decline in church-going. Can you imagine a sort of form of spirituality uniting us in the future and providing the cultural revival that you described or not?
Garrett: [00:39:17] Well, the amazing thing about religious participation is that it has in it both pieces, right? It has the moral formation piece that asks us to think about something beyond just ourselves, but it also has the mutual aid piece, right?
The picnics and the visiting and the taking care of the sick and that, you know, religion has that, that sort of magic combination of the two things that in many ways sort of drove this upswing. Because one thing we haven't mentioned that the progressive really did was that they had this galvanizing belief in the power of association. Association itself as an end and a means, right? And so they created all of these really innovative ways to bring people together. They had to create innovative ways to bring people together because a generation before they'd been living on the farm and now they were all living in Chicago and feeling this loneliness and atomization that comes with urban life.
Right? So they had to literally invent, like the rotary club was invented as a way to bring people together in a totally different setting than they had been in a generation before. So I think today we're facing that same challenge, where people--where sort of the traditional ways of organizing ourselves, those mainline religions that were a big part of American life, you know, half a century ago, they've just, they've gone away.
Can we invent, literally invent something that not only has the associationalism in it, but also the moral formation piece. I think that... I don't know that I know the answer to that question. I think it's definitely possible. I, when I look for inspiration on things like this, I look to people like Eric Liu, who is building Citizen University, he has this amazing program called Civic Saturdays, which he calls, a secular analog to church, where he's trying to bring people together in the same physical space to know each other and to support each other, but also to provide some moral or ethical formation for them. And, interestingly, the sermons that people hear at Civic Saturdays are sermons about the Constitution, about our founding documents, about the founding ideals that brought us together as a nation.
So if we can't agree about God, can we at least agree about the founding ideals of this nation? And can we come up with some really exciting, innovative ways to bring people together around that?
Rosen: [00:41:23] I want to go to questions, but I must ask you Bob, to pick up on that. How do we agree about the founding ideals of the nation? Libertarians and conservatives might be more likely to stress the second sentence of the Declaration about how, we hold these truths to be self-evident, all men and women are created equal and endowed by their creator with unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; progressives, perhaps, more focusing on the language of the Preamble, we, the people in order to form a more perfect union. But as you talk to citizens of all perspectives, how would you define the founding ideals that unite us?
Putnam: [00:42:01] Well, there is, of course the difference between the Declaration and the Preamble of the Constitution. Although I would have to add that both of them are rooted in the core idea that all men or, we would now say all men and women, are created equal.
And that seems to me, to me personally, that's as close as you can get to the core of our national project. And I think it's of course, a good fortune in the United States that there is this Constitution worship, in a way, that it's about the only thing that does the, both people in those hearings that we've been watching the last couple of days, all of them worship the Constitution.
They just have a different way of attributing. I'm not denying for a moment that there are great, important differences at stake, but you know, it could be worse. It could be that we didn't even agree on that there is a, there is a core constitution that we all share. And I think that is actually really important and it's important in periods of reform.
And it's not surprising, I think, that therefore in these turbulent periods, exactly the period of the previous pivot, I mean by that the pivot around around 1900, and now, there are great constitutional debates, actually, in those as there was actually earlier in the Civil War period. When a country is going through enormous fundamental crises, are the times that we have in a way, been the most creative in our debates about what the Constitution really entails.
So, I'm actually kind of optimistic. I do not think that that constitutional debate itself is a sign that something's going wrong actually, on the contrary. Now of course, I know I'm not denying that many, many people in America have a view about whether this current nominee for the Supreme Court should be confirmed or not.
And that turns on a lot of serious constitutional law, Jeff, that you are a lot more expert than certainly I, and probably, I would say Shaylyn. Neither of us is really in your league with respect to the constitutional law and constitution lawyers spend a lot of time arguing about those issues. I'm not saying that's unimportant. I'm just saying you would probably also agree that the fundamental agreement is pretty striking in comparison to almost every other country in the world.
Rosen: [00:44:12] I think so, does that seem right to you, Shaylyn? That both sides, despite their disagreement about how to apply the constitutional principles embrace the ideal that all men and women are created equal, and we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights?
Garrett: [00:44:26] I think we embrace the ideal. But again, as we saw in the 1960s, there's a difference between embracing an ideal and putting an ideal into practice, particularly when we've failed for so long to put that idea into practice. Right? And so that's, I think where a lot of the sticking points come from, not that we disagree about the ideal, but that we disagree about how to get there based upon the mistakes that we've made, not getting there yet.
So one thing that I would add, and one thing that came to mind as I was listening to Bob, is that, you know, again, we're going to bring out the patron saint of communitarians here, Alexis de Tocqueville, you know, what he saw when he came to America--and this is where we start our book--was citizens who had found this remarkable way to balance these two things, right? Liberty and equality. Liberty, individual rights, and communitarianism. And the brilliant way--and it's worth noting, actually, that Alexis de Tocqueville was the one who coined the term individualism--and yet we think of him, right, as this patron saint of communitarians is really interesting.
But what he saw was Americans living under an ideal of self-interest rightly understood. Which means that it is in our self-interest to take care of one another. It is in our self-interest to work together. And I think where we get it wrong today is assuming that those two things are diametrically opposed.
The scholar, the constitutional scholar, Danielle Allen, and has talked about how this is a false dichotomy. And the mistake that we're making is treating these things as if they are in competition with one another. What we really need to be doing is focusing our creative energies on figuring out how to make them work together.
Rosen: [00:46:04] Thank you so much for that. We have time for just a few more of the great questions from the audience. Loise Cote asks, what role does the labor movement play and its rise to empowerment at the beginning of the 20th century and the decline of its empowerment, early 1970s to the present?
Putnam: [00:46:19] That's a great question and the answer is that the labor movement perfectly mirrors the story we're telling. Indeed ,by some measures, the labor union movement was a leading indicator. It got its rise a little earlier than some of the other organizations back in that period. It began its downturn actually a little earlier than some of the other measures. The downturn in the labor movement movement, you can date it in different ways, but probably in the late 1950s. Now, of course, there are a lot of other explanations for any one of these curves. There are a lot of other explanations that are relevant too in the case of the labor movement. A lot of that was because of employer resistance. I mean, that's putting it mildly. A firm anti-union activity, political activity by management as in the Taft-Hartley labor act and so on.
So, there are specifics to the union movement that would need, if we had more time, would be worth discussing. But the basic point of the question is exactly right. The ups and downs of the labor union movement perfectly mirror the story that we're telling, this "I to we to I" movement, and especially with respect to the role of the unions in the progressive era then, and I think, now.
Rosen: [00:47:27] Wonderful. And Shaylyn, Suzanne Lo asks, how much did the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote, reflect the upswing?
Garrett: [00:47:34] Sure. I mean, I think some of the... that's one of the biggest victories of the progressive era. Absolutely. I mean, I know we're short on time, so I don't know how much detail you want me to go into there, but I think that, again, represented the greatest ideals of the progressive era, but it also introduced, you know, some difficulties with respect to race versus gender and, and those different things that again, were not resolved during that period.
And so that was a great victory, but it also excluded a lot of women as well. And that was something that wasn't addressed. And so, again, that is a great example of the wonderful things that the progressive era accomplished and the blind spots that had had were left on the table.
Putnam: [00:48:13] And we should just add quickly that, because it's so important, we devote an entire chapter in the book just to the issue of gender equality and the ups and downs of the women's movement.
Rosen: [00:48:24] I must ask Bev Taylor's wonderful question. You'll understand why I'm asking it, as soon as I finished reading it. Shaylyn noted or asked, can we invent something that has moral and ethical foundations as well as innovative ways to bring people together? Is it reasonable to ask if we already have these types of organizations in our museums, historical societies and groups, such as the National Constitution Center, which are by data, the most respected in our society. Second, only to grandparents. Bev, thanks for that great question. And, take it away, Bob and Shaylyn and maybe leave our audience with some closing thoughts.
Garrett: [00:48:56] I'll I guess I'll just start by saying, I do think that that's where we look for hope. But, I also think that there's a lot of unsung heroes working in neighborhoods and communities at the level of the street or the two neighbors on either side of them working to bring people together and to find common ground as well and having the pleasure of working with Weave the Social Fabric Project, the mission of that is really to bring those stories to light and help Americans see how many great initiatives are out there that are doing this work. We need to focus on those more in the media and in our national story and less on the polarization. We need again, cultural innovations that place emphasis on what's already going well, but we also have to multiply that effort. It's not enough. It's definitely not enough yet.
Rosen: [00:49:44] Bob, last words to you.
Putnam: [00:49:46] I guess, just quickly, probably the most important thing we should have said at the very outset is, we believe in agency. The history of the first progressive era teaches us that we're not the prisoners of history.
We don't just have to enact developments that are forced on us by the environment. The first I'm speaking, now, very seriously. If we as a country, if we, as individuals want to change history, we can do that. That's the lesson of history is that individual people and groups of people can change the direction of history. Agency and the importance of choices that we make is much more important than just understanding the iron laws of history, as if they ruled everything. And so I'm speaking now very specifically to the viewers watching this, you can, and especially their younger counterparts, you and we can change it. It doesn't have to be this way.
Bob Putnam, Shaylyn Romney, for
Rosen: [00:50:41] educating and inspiring our viewers and leaving them with that meaningful message. We can change history. On behalf of the National Constitution Center, thank you so much. And thanks for joining everyone. Have a good night.
McDermott: [00:50:56] This episode was engineered by Greg Sheckler and produced by me, Jackie McDermott, along with Tanaya Tabour and Lana Ulrich. Please rate, review, and subscribe to the show and join us back here next week. On behalf of the National Constitution Center, I'm Jackie McDermott.
