In his new book, “The Upswing,” Harvard’s Robert Putnam argues that today’s economic, social, cultural and political cleavages mirror the Gilded Age of the 1870s, whose divisions were only healed over time through progressive reforms that re-built national unity by the 1950s.

Harvard’s Robert Putnam is one of the most creative and persuasive voices of our times. He is author of the peerless 1995 research article, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” which documented the social and technological deterioration since the 1950s of civic participation in voluntary associations, religion, politics, bowling leagues, and even in families.

His present book (with Shaylyn Romney Garrett), The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, like his 2000 book Bowling Alone, takes us back a further 50 years to find a cause for the early-twentieth-century rise in sociability, the mid-century coming apart, and today’s collapse, with America now as divided as she was in the period following the Civil War.

Again utilizing large data sets, Mr. Putnam argues that today’s economic, social, cultural and political cleavages mirror the Gilded Age of the 1870s, whose divisions were only healed over time through progressive reforms that re-built national unity by the 1950s. This accord continued until the late 1960s counterculture divisiveness and a further downturn in the 1980s. This all collapsed under Donald Trump, resulting in the divided America we see today.

Mr. Putnam now interprets this empirical data as falling into an “I-to-We-to-I-to-We” historical pattern. He presents a “data-based portrait” of the time period as an inverted-U shaped curve starting with selfish Individualism at the curve’s bottom left in the Gilded Age, building upward to a cooperative We-oriented social unity at the top in the 1950-60s, and then a divisive turning down again towards today’s selfish Individualism. And, he hopes, a future Upswing with America united once more in supporting communal We-values and institutions.

United in what sense? One could argue that 1950s America and the Soviet Union were both united internally. But their unity was not quite the same. Like the competent social scientist he is, Mr. Putnam specifies his criteria for unity: greater or lesser economic equality, more or less comity in politics, lower or higher cohesion in social life, and more or less communal altruism. While he considers these as objective measures of social capital and its decline, he is clear from the outset that these also define his version of a broad and moderate modern Progressivism.

The massiveness of the data is the strength of the book. Yet much of it is not directly reported but instead utilizes “composite summary curves.” While purportedly beginning in the Gilded Age, the data analysis charts do not actually start in the 1870s, so we often do not know the pattern for the earlier period. The combined summary charts (on pp. 10, 285) specifically begin in the 1890s for three of the measures, but in 1910 for economic equality, complicating their concurrence with the rise of Progressivism.

Mr. Putnam was “surprised’ that not only do all four social and economic charts move together up and down his inverted-U curve, but more so that they in turn rise and fall with the degree of Progressive influence. Yet, he was professional enough to acknowledge that not all his enormous data sets align perfectly with this historical pattern. Regarding his central political measures of unity verses polarization, he specifically concedes that “one or two of our empirical indicators of depolarization crested before the other curves.” He resolves this by making Congressional voting “our best single measure of polarization,” selecting elite rather than popular differences as the deciding political measure of divisiveness, a preference Progressives like Woodrow Wilson and John Dewey would easily recognize.

He likewise measures economic inequality by the income and wealth earned by the top one percent at the expense of everyone else. But some of the tables do not follow the U pattern, and the widely-used academic GINI index (Figure 5) measuring the whole population does not show increasing inequality along the down-slope. Other data show that the bottom fifth received a much larger proportional increase in transfer payments on the downslope than used here, paid for by the middle class rather than the bottom. And, of course, the economy and much of the social order fail during the Great Depression, two decades before the Progressive period is said to end, presumably not halting the upward trend.

Social solidarity is measured by the degree of civic engagement and social trust in religious, union, family, and other social institutions. As the original Bowling Alone thesis demonstrated, there is little question that this sociability declined after the inverted-U 1960s downturn. But the cause is not so clear. The Roaring Twenties Individualism under Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge should have halted the upward slope of social solidarity, but it is merely called a “pause.” Mr. Putnam identifies countercultural 60s leftism as the Individualism that first bent the curve downward, but Individualism was said not to have dominated politics itself until after the moderate-progressive presidents: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter.

The decisive decline was said to have not occurred until Ronald Reagan took “the polarization that began with civil rights [and] spread [it] quickly across to other issues, as the parties took opposing stances on issues that had not previously been partisan, thus extending and reinforcing the basic polarization.” Reagan, of course, challenged Progressivism. But while he agreed with Mr. Putnam that social disruption rose in the 60s, he attributed its institutionalization to the immediately-following Progressive Great Society. Indeed, Reagan’s extended success politically can be attributed to targeting big government as the cause. And, of course, Reagan’s presumed “polarization” spot on the U-downslope did not appear until twenty years later (which the author acknowledges).

Mr. Putnam specifically rejects Reagan’s (and Yuval Levin in The Fractured Republic) explanation of the decline as centralized government crowding out private and local sociability. But his cited proof (p. 239) for that rejection was his own earlier data in Bowling Alone, where he compared national to state government spending to demonstrate that local spending had not declined (i.e., was not crowded out) relative to national government spending. Yet, his chart’s state spending data included greatly-increased national government grants to localities with Washington restrictions, which if deducted from state spending would in fact demonstrate “crowding out.” Moreover, it is the unmeasured cumulative effect of such matching-funds requirements, which are reinforced over time, that become the powerful tools that crowd out local initiative and responsibility.

In fact, Mr. Putnam’s large set of data and Progressive interpretations of it were not (and perhaps cannot be) separated from other market, cultural, and social forces set prior to and concurrent with these data. As Mr. Putnam is well aware from his expressed admiration for Alexis de Tocqueville, many of these social values were characteristic of America from the beginning, at least locally—well before Progressivism. There are no data presented disputing that after the Civil War historical private and local sociability returned as the source of the upswing—and that it was increasing centralized government expertise and enforcement that fettered localism and capitalism, whose promises provoked unrealistic popular expectations, as the French sage had predicted; or which provoked class and racial conflict and ended in ossified bureaucracy and political division rather than the equality, inclusion, comity, and altruism that Progressives desired.

The real problem from the beginning, however, is Mr. Putnam’s definition of Progressivism, which is mostly defined as desires and beliefs (p.319) rather than programs and results. While Progressivism is assumed to be the cause of increased equality and social improvement, in fact most of its programs continued through the 1960s decline; many were even enhanced through the downslope but unable to halt inequality, division, disunity and selfishness. Even more importantly, Mr. Putnam insists that Progressivism is “more bottom-up than top down (p. 438).

Walter Lippmann is relied upon for much of the heavy lifting to define Progressivism, even though he moved on from his early beliefs, influenced by the person most commentators consider the father of intellectual Progressivism: former Princeton University President Woodrow Wilson. We see why Lippmann was emphasized and Wilson underplayed near the end when Mr. Putnam labels the latter as “one of the most openly racist presidents.” He even goes further in regard to Progressivism itself, conceding that “most scholars agree that racism was the norm, not the exception among Progressive reformers.” Indeed, in separate chapters on race and gender, Mr. Putnam concedes that these attributes only very broadly followed the inverted U-shaped pattern of his thesis.

In the normal understanding, Progressivism emphasizes centralized, elite experts rather than Tocquevillian competent and cooperative neighbors whose independence is necessarily restricted by Progressive national programs. In Bowling Alone, Mr. Putnam himself had already recognized that including Upton Sinclair, W.E.B. DuBois, Robert Taft, and Franklin Roosevelt all as Progressives might be considered problematic, though he also justified keeping his broad definition. In The Upswing, the reach is even broader by making “I-to-We-to-I-to-We” the fundamental historical distinctions. Yet, by his conclusion, Mr. Putnam’s broad definition forces him to “reject a simplistic embrace of an I/We dualism” and rescue Individualism “rightly understood” (p.340) as also necessary if balanced by communal-We values. In his Levin note (p. 438), the author even accepts that a future social upturn should rise from the local level.

After three hundred pages, it is no longer I-verses-We but a conceded tension between them. We-centralization is necessary but it must rise from and respect the localized Individual, truly more Lippmann than the clearly progressive Wilson. As I argue in my The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order, tension is characteristic not of progressive expertise but of conservative pluralism, a “fusion” of individualism balanced by tradition. In its search for a Progressive Upswing, Putnam’s in many ways insightful book simply bends too far away from his 1995 masterpiece’s greater dependence upon Tocqueville’s local pluralist realism.

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