Our "We": On Robert D. Putnam's "The Upswing"

Robert D. Putnam with Shaylyn Romney Garrett | The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again | Simon & Schuster | 2020 | 480 Pages

Robert Putnam, of Bowling Alone fame, is one of Harvard’s preeminent social scientists (and a former senior colleague and a kind and decent man). In his newest, extremely ambitious work he attempts a broad, meta-historical analysis of what ails American society and what has worked and not worked for us since the late nineteenth century. Like some of his colleagues at Harvard, his starting point is the loss of “community,” although (also like some of them) he does not ever define that term with any precision; I suppose, like pornography, we are supposed to know it when we see it.  

Instead he and his writing partner Shaylyn Romney Garrett are looking for the Holy Grail—the single event or crucial span of years that killed what they see as a half-century of American progress and prosperity (with a few blips) beginning in the Progressive era around 1910. 

What derailed us?

The Sixties! The Sixties, Putnam says, killed the “we” of American community and replaced it with the “I” of selfishness, and, in his view, we are so much poorer for it. Instead of a nation composed of citizens who believe “we’re all in this together,” a phrase the book uses repeatedly, we have become a nation of “supreme self-reliance” and “unfettered self-interest”—unequal, polarized, angry, and dysfunctional.  

Analyzing reams of data on everything from bipartisanship in Congress to economic trends to marriage rates, the book presents, over and over, a series of U-and Inverted-U-shaped graphs demonstrating that, lo and behold, things were generally fine once the Progressives got going in the early twentieth century, correcting the excesses of the Gilded Age. Then progressive, communitarian America reached a kind of nirvana in the 1940s and 1950s. . . but collapsed in the Sixties.  

Those damn hippies, women, gays, civil rights and peace activists. They ruined everything.  

I am caricaturing—but only a bit.  

For at the heart of Putnam’s analysis is not the economy, or even politics, such as the Republican party’s fetishization of the market (or their dirty tricks), or the Democrats’ Clinton-era triangulation. . . but morals. The Progressive era was “first and foremost,” he tells us, “a moral awakening.” Civic renewal followed. Today, instead of fellow-feeling, we find widespread atomization and “narcissism.”

Like others before him, especially Christopher Lasch, and like neoconservatives with whom he probably does not want to be compared, Putnam returns repeatedly to what he sees as the selfishness and narcissism unleashed by the Sixties. And, amidst all his graphs and data, all the word counts and discussions of demographic trends and even baby names, his analysis reads like a good old-fashioned, almost Puritan jeremiad against excess, against pushiness by those who feel left out or are in fact treated as second-class citizens. Things were slowly getting better in the Fifties for everyone, he assures us. Patience and selflessness should have been the order of the day.  

To use a familiar phrase, where you stand depends on where you sit. Where I sit—as a gay man born in the 1950s, coming of age in the 1960s—I say horse feathers.  

Were gay men and lesbians who were jailed, fired, and institutionalized in the 1950s part of the American “we”? In the 1940s, were Japanese-Americans, who were put into concentration camps (not one of whom was found to be guilty of a security risk)? Was a woman in the 1950s or 60s who felt stifled by child-rearing and the lack of meaningful professional opportunities, and then dared to raise her consciousness with other women to fight patriarchy, being “selfish”? Is a young African-American man today, whose odds of ending up dead or in jail are astronomical, who agitates against the police, being a “narcissist”?  

Putnam does admit that women and people of color had a few legitimate grievances in the 1950s, but he brackets their concerns in chapters separate from the rest of his analysis, neatly subtracting them from his overall (and, he says, overwhelming) evidence of triumphant progress and togetherness, pre-Sixties. He does not stop to consider whether patriarchy and racism were so deeply engrained in the society he admires in the 1940s and 50s that they call into question what he sees as the sunny and admirable nature of the American “we.” And he considers heteronormativity and gender rigidity not at all. He instead speaks disparagingly of “rights talk” and its negative impact on “unity, agreement, association, compromise, conformity.”

Conformity? Really? I suppose Gloria Steinem should have gotten married, had kids in the suburbs, and accepted low wages, writing the occasional article for male-focused, male-edited mainstream magazines. And gays and lesbians should have stayed in the closet (it would be interesting to know what Putnam considers a reasonable “compromise” for all the LGBT lives destroyed in his happy 1950s). And James Baldwin should have been. . . what? Less strident? Fannie Lou Hamer should have stayed in Mississippi instead of taking a bus to Atlantic City to give Democrats hell in 1964 for her state’s all-white delegation? Native Americans should have quietly stayed on their reservations, mostly in abject poverty, grateful for the land they had been given by the Great White Father?  

But, Putman assures us, his graphs speak. Individualism in the Sixties was the problem, the enemy. We were better off before. Sixties individualism is Colonel Mustard in the Library with the candlestick who murdered our “we.”  

Putnam mentions but does not really analyze the nature of the corporate capitalism and the stifling conformism upon which his admired “we” of the 1940s and 50s rested, nor does he have much to say about the current neoliberal economic order that has all but erased the middle class. And, perhaps most puzzling of all for a political scientist, he has not a lot to say about cynical politicians who have exploited the culture wars for their electoral benefit, or the fact that, at the moment, the entire political agenda of one of America’s two parties seems to be to fan the flames of those culture wars (and rig the rules to keep winning elections). Thus we are left to assume that a backlash against Sixties hippies and women’s liberation and Black and Gay Power are responsible for Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. And even if, in some attenuated sense, there is a tiny grain of truth in that conclusion, what was the alternative for Gloria and Fannie Lou and Marsha P. Johnson (one of the instigators of the Stonewall riots)? Patience? 

A deeper problem with Putnam’s analysis is that the American system, from the beginning, assumed that rational men (and of course only white men, not women or people of color at the beginning) would pursue self-interest; just read Federalist No. 10. The problem of contemporary economic inequality—which Putnam does discuss—is not a system based on self-interest; it is the complete failure of American regimes since the 1970s to regulate and control our current forms of economic exploitation, or construct a true safety net, or even provide for basic human needs (like healthcare and a living wage). And it should be obvious to a social scientist that a polyglot, immigrant nation of 330 million souls cannot be considered or become a “community.” I don’t have much in common with Texans who carry guns, aren’t wearing masks against COVID, and would tell me I will burn in hell for being a Sodomite (that is, after I’m left behind after the Second Coming). We may be citizens of the same huge polity, but there is no sense in which we could be members of the same “community.”

Well-cushioned professors who wax eloquent about lost values are living in an elite dream world, a world in which moral exhortation and moral reform can take the place of serious politics. . . so long as people listen to the Harvard version of what is moral.

Fannie Lou Hamer died recently. Putman, had they met, would presumably have told her, “calm down, be patient, work from within. Things are getting better. Don’t grandstand for the media. Don’t shout.” 

But Mississippi in 1964 was not a “community,” and could not become one without the basic equality Fannie Lou so fervently and eloquently sought (listen to her give the mainstream Democrats a piece of her mind; it’s riveting). Neither was New York City in 1969 a “community” for Marsha P. Johnson and thousands of others of (at the time) outlawed sexuality. 

So to Fannie Lou, and Marsha P., and others like them, I would not preach community nor insult them by extolling its virtues. Nor would I recommend patience; too many people die, waiting.  

I would say, “you go girl.” 

There can be no semblance of community without justice. It is the lack of justice, not the lack of morals, that explains why we are (in Putnam's words) "unequal, polarized, angry, and dysfunctional."